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Bin Li

Publications and source records attributed to Bin Li.

At least 289 records · Page 16Linked to original sources

Measuring trade costs and analyzing the determinants of trade growth between Cambodia and major trading partners: 1993 to 2019

High trade costs pose substantial barriers to the process of trade liberalization. This study aims to measure trade costs and explore the driving forces behind the growth of bilateral trade between Cambodia and its top 30 trading partners from 1993 to 2019. Using a micro-founded measure of trade costs derived from the gravity model, we find that Cambodia's average trade costs decreased by 35.43 percent between 1993 and 2019. Fluctuations in average trade costs persisted until 2014, despite Cambodia's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2004. Since then, these costs have declined more rapidly. Cambodia's bilateral trade costs are lower with its major trading partners in Southeast Asia and East Asia than with those in South Asia, Oceania, Europe, and North America. Cambodia's average trade costs with developing and emerging economies are lower than those with developed economies. Between 2014 and 2019, Cambodia experienced a notable decline in average trade costs with trading partners along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) corridors by 34.78 percent, twice as fast as with non-BRI trading partners. Regarding the decomposition of trade growth, we find that the expansion of Cambodian trade over the period from 1993 to 2019 was driven by three factors: the rise in income (59.65 percent), the decline in trade costs (56.69 percent), and the decline in multilateral resistance (minus 16.34 percent). The findings of this study have significant implications for a better understanding of Cambodia's development process toward global trade integration over the past two decades. Our results suggest that Cambodia can optimize its trade expansion potential by focusing on its relations with trading partners exhibiting high economic growth potential and those showing substantial reductions in trade costs.

econ.GN↗

AURORA:Automated Training Framework of Universal Process Reward Models via Ensemble Prompting and Reverse Verification

The reasoning capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) like o1 have revolutionized artificial intelligence applications. Nevertheless, evaluating and optimizing complex reasoning processes remain significant challenges due to diverse policy distributions and the inherent limitations of human effort and accuracy. In this paper, we present AURORA, a novel automated framework for training universal process reward models (PRMs) using ensemble prompting and reverse verification. The framework employs a two-phase approach: First, it uses diverse prompting strategies and ensemble methods to perform automated annotation and evaluation of processes, ensuring robust assessments for reward learning. Second, it leverages practical reference answers for reverse verification, enhancing the model's ability to validate outputs and improving training accuracy. To assess the framework's performance, we extend beyond the existing ProcessBench benchmark by introducing UniversalBench, which evaluates reward predictions across full trajectories under diverse policy distribtion with long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that AURORA enhances process evaluation accuracy, improves PRMs' accuracy for diverse policy distributions and long-CoT responses. The project will be open-sourced at https://auroraprm.github.io/. The Universal-PRM-7B is available at https://huggingface.co/infly/Universal-PRM-7B.

cs.CL↗

Distribution Aligned Semantics Adaption for Lifelong Person Re-Identification

In real-world scenarios, person Re-IDentification (Re-ID) systems need to be adaptable to changes in space and time. Therefore, the adaptation of Re-ID models to new domains while preserving previously acquired knowledge is crucial, known as Lifelong person Re-IDentification (LReID). Advanced LReID methods rely on replaying exemplars from old domains and applying knowledge distillation in logits with old models. However, due to privacy concerns, retaining previous data is inappropriate. Additionally, the fine-grained and open-set characteristics of Re-ID limit the effectiveness of the distillation paradigm for accumulating knowledge. We argue that a Re-ID model trained on diverse and challenging pedestrian images at a large scale can acquire robust and general human semantic knowledge. These semantics can be readily utilized as shared knowledge for lifelong applications. In this paper, we identify the challenges and discrepancies associated with adapting a pre-trained model to each application domain and introduce the Distribution Aligned Semantics Adaption (DASA) framework. It efficiently adjusts Batch Normalization (BN) to mitigate interference from data distribution discrepancy and freezes the pre-trained convolutional layers to preserve shared knowledge. Additionally, we propose the lightweight Semantics Adaption (SA) module, which effectively adapts learned semantics to enhance pedestrian representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable superiority of our proposed framework over advanced LReID methods, and it exhibits significantly reduced storage consumption. DASA presents a novel and cost-effective perspective on effectively adapting pre-trained models for LReID. The code is available at https://github.com/QizaoWang/DASA-LReID.

cs.CV↗

A Systematic Literature Review on Explainability for Machine/Deep Learning-based Software Engineering Research

The remarkable achievements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, particularly in Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), have fueled their extensive deployment across multiple sectors, including Software Engineering (SE). However, due to their black-box nature, these promising AI-driven SE models are still far from being deployed in practice. This lack of explainability poses unwanted risks for their applications in critical tasks, such as vulnerability detection, where decision-making transparency is of paramount importance. This paper endeavors to elucidate this interdisciplinary domain by presenting a systematic literature review of approaches that aim to improve the explainability of AI models within the context of SE. The review canvasses work appearing in the most prominent SE & AI conferences and journals, and spans 108 papers across 23 unique SE tasks. Based on three key Research Questions (RQs), we aim to (1) summarize the SE tasks where XAI techniques have shown success to date; (2) classify and analyze different XAI techniques; and (3) investigate existing evaluation approaches. Based on our findings, we identified a set of challenges remaining to be addressed in existing studies, together with a set of guidelines highlighting potential opportunities we deemed appropriate and important for future work.

cs.SE↗

Lossless Privacy-Preserving Aggregation for Decentralized Federated Learning

Privacy concerns arise as sensitive data proliferate. Despite decentralized federated learning (DFL) aggregating gradients from neighbors to avoid direct data transmission, it still poses indirect data leaks from the transmitted gradients. Existing privacy-preserving methods for DFL add noise to gradients. They either diminish the model predictive accuracy or suffer from ineffective gradient protection. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless privacy-preserving aggregation rule named LPPA to enhance gradient protection as much as possible but without loss of DFL model predictive accuracy. LPPA subtly injects the noise difference between the sent and received noise into transmitted gradients for gradient protection. The noise difference incorporates neighbors' randomness for each client, effectively safeguarding against data leaks. LPPA employs the noise flow conservation theory to ensure that the noise impact can be globally eliminated. The global sum of all noise differences remains zero, ensuring that accurate gradient aggregation is unaffected and the model accuracy remains intact. We theoretically prove that the privacy-preserving capacity of LPPA is \sqrt{2} times greater than that of noise addition, while maintaining comparable model accuracy to the standard DFL aggregation without noise injection. Experimental results verify the theoretical findings and show that LPPA achieves a 14% mean improvement in accuracy over noise addition. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of LPPA in protecting raw data and guaranteeing lossless model accuracy.

cs.LG↗

LLMER: Crafting Interactive Extended Reality Worlds with JSON Data Generated by Large Language Models

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 with Extended Reality (XR) technologies offers the potential to build truly immersive XR environments that interact with human users through natural language, e.g., generating and animating 3D scenes from audio inputs. However, the complexity of XR environments makes it difficult to accurately extract relevant contextual data and scene/object parameters from an overwhelming volume of XR artifacts. It leads to not only increased costs with pay-per-use models, but also elevated levels of generation errors. Moreover, existing approaches focusing on coding script generation are often prone to generation errors, resulting in flawed or invalid scripts, application crashes, and ultimately a degraded user experience. To overcome these challenges, we introduce LLMER, a novel framework that creates interactive XR worlds using JSON data generated by LLMs. Unlike prior approaches focusing on coding script generation, LLMER translates natural language inputs into JSON data, significantly reducing the likelihood of application crashes and processing latency. It employs a multi-stage strategy to supply only the essential contextual information adapted to the user's request and features multiple modules designed for various XR tasks. Our preliminary user study reveals the effectiveness of the proposed system, with over 80% reduction in consumed tokens and around 60% reduction in task completion time compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The analysis of users' feedback also illuminates a series of directions for further optimization.

cs.MM↗

VQLTI: Long-Term Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting with Physical Constraints

Tropical cyclone (TC) intensity forecasting is crucial for early disaster warning and emergency decision-making. Numerous researchers have explored deep-learning methods to address computational and post-processing issues in operational forecasting. Regrettably, they exhibit subpar long-term forecasting capabilities. We use two strategies to enhance long-term forecasting. (1) By enhancing the matching between TC intensity and spatial information, we can improve long-term forecasting performance. (2) Incorporating physical knowledge and physical constraints can help mitigate the accumulation of forecasting errors. To achieve the above strategies, we propose the VQLTI framework. VQLTI transfers the TC intensity information to a discrete latent space while retaining the spatial information differences, using large-scale spatial meteorological data as conditions. Furthermore, we leverage the forecast from the weather prediction model FengWu to provide additional physical knowledge for VQLTI. Additionally, we calculate the potential intensity (PI) to impose physical constraints on the latent variables. In the global long-term TC intensity forecasting, VQLTI achieves state-of-the-art results for the 24h to 120h, with the MSW (Maximum Sustained Wind) forecast error reduced by 35.65%-42.51% compared to ECMWF-IFS.

cs.LG↗

A Heliocentric-orbiting Objects Processing System (HOPS) for the Wide Field Survey Telescope: Architecture, Processing Workflow, and Preliminary Results

Wide-field surveys have markedly enhanced the discovery and study of solar system objects (SSOs). The 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) represents the foremost facility dedicated to optical time-domain surveys in the northern hemisphere. To fully exploit WFST's capabilities for SSO detection, we have developed a heliocentric-orbiting objects processing system (HOPS) tailored for identifying these objects. This system integrates HelioLinC3D, an algorithm well suited for the WFST survey cadence, characterized by revisiting the same sky field twice on the majority of nights. In this paper, we outline the architecture and processing flow of our SSO processing system. The application of the system to the WFST pilot survey data collected between March and May 2024 demonstrates exceptional performance in terms of both temporal efficiency and completeness. A total of 658,489 observations encompassing 38,520 known asteroids have been documented, and 241 newly discovered asteroids have been assigned provisional designations. In particular, 27% of these new discoveries were achieved using merely two observations per night on three nights. The preliminary results not only illuminate the effectiveness of integrating HelioLinC3D within the SSO processing system, but also emphasize the considerable potential contributions of WFST to the field of solar system science.

astro-ph.IM↗

Exploratory Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization with Regime-Switching Market Dynamics

Considering the continuous-time Mean-Variance (MV) portfolio optimization problem, we study a regime-switching market setting and apply reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to assist informed exploration within the control space. We introduce and solve the Exploratory Mean Variance with Regime Switching (EMVRS) problem. We also present a Policy Improvement Theorem. Further, we recognize that the widely applied Temporal Difference (TD) learning is not adequate for the EMVRS context, hence we consider Orthogonality Condition (OC) learning, leveraging the martingale property of the induced optimal value function from the analytical solution to EMVRS. We design a RL algorithm that has more meaningful parameterization using the market parameters and propose an updating scheme for each parameter. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of OC learning over TD learning with a clear convergence of the market parameters towards their corresponding ``grounding true" values in a simulated market scenario. In a real market data study, EMVRS with OC learning outperforms its counterparts with the highest mean and reasonably low volatility of the annualized portfolio returns.

q-fin.PM↗

Global Semantic-Guided Sub-image Feature Weight Allocation in High-Resolution Large Vision-Language Models

As the demand for high-resolution image processing in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) grows, sub-image partitioning has become a popular approach for mitigating visual information loss associated with fixed-resolution processing. However, existing partitioning methods uniformly process sub-images, resulting in suboptimal image understanding. In this work, we reveal that the sub-images with higher semantic relevance to the entire image encapsulate richer visual information for preserving the model's visual understanding ability. Therefore, we propose the Global Semantic-guided Weight Allocator (GSWA) module, which dynamically allocates weights to sub-images based on their relative information density, emulating human visual attention mechanisms. This approach enables the model to focus on more informative regions, overcoming the limitations of uniform treatment. We integrate GSWA into the InternVL2-2B framework to create SleighVL, a lightweight yet high-performing model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SleighVL outperforms models with comparable parameters and remains competitive with larger models. Our work provides a promising direction for more efficient and contextually aware high-resolution image processing in LVLMs, advancing multimodal system development.

cs.CV↗

Impact of Nonreciprocal Hopping on Localization in Non-Hermitian Quasiperiodic Systems

We study the non-Hermitian Aubry-André-Harper model, incorporating complex phase modulation, unmodulated and modulated nonreciprocal hopping. Using Avila's global theory, we derive analytical phase boundaries and map out the phase diagrams, revealing extended, localized, critical, and skin phases unique to non-Hermitian systems. For complex phase modulation, we determine localization lengths through Lyapunov exponents and show that topological transitions align with localization transitions. In the nonreciprocal case, we use similarity transformations to confirm phase boundaries consistent with Avila's theory and uncover asymmetric localization behaviors. Importantly, modulated nonreciprocal hopping transforms both extended and critical phases into skin phases under open boundary conditions. These results highlight the interplay between topology, localization, and non-Hermitian effects, offering new perspectives on quasiperiodic systems.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

Instruction-Guided Fusion of Multi-Layer Visual Features in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of multimodal tasks by integrating pre-trained vision encoders and large language models. However, current LVLMs primarily rely on visual features extracted from the final layers of the vision encoder, overlooking the complementary information available in shallower layers. While recent approaches have explored the use of multilayer visual features in LVLMs, they tend to be task-agnostic and fail to examine the dependencies of hierarchical visual features on specific tasks. To address these gaps, we systematically investigate the contributions of visual features from different encoder layers using 18 benchmarks spanning 6 task categories. Our findings reveal that multilayer features provide complementary strengths with varying task dependencies, and uniform fusion leads to suboptimal performance. Building on these insights, we propose the instruction-guided vision aggregator, a module that dynamically integrates multi-layer visual features based on textual instructions, without increasing the number of visual tokens. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Additionally, an in-depth analysis of the aggregator's behavior highlights the dominance of mid-to-high-level features in semantic-rich tasks and the critical role of low-level features in fine-grained perception.

cs.CV↗

Pre-Trained Large Language Model Based Remaining Useful Life Transfer Prediction of Bearing

Accurately predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of rotating machinery, such as bearings, is essential for ensuring equipment reliability and minimizing unexpected industrial failures. Traditional data-driven deep learning methods face challenges in practical settings due to inconsistent training and testing data distributions and limited generalization for long-term predictions.

eess.SY↗

On the Low-Complexity of Fair Learning for Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit

Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit with fairness constraints is a framework where multiple arms form a super arm and can be pulled in each round under uncertainty to maximize cumulative rewards while ensuring the minimum average reward required by each arm. The existing pessimistic-optimistic algorithm linearly combines virtual queue-lengths (tracking the fairness violations) and Upper Confidence Bound estimates as a weight for each arm and selects a super arm with the maximum total weight. The number of super arms could be exponential to the number of arms in many scenarios. In wireless networks, interference constraints can cause the number of super arms to grow exponentially with the number of arms. Evaluating all the feasible super arms to find the one with the maximum total weight can incur extremely high computational complexity in the pessimistic-optimistic algorithm. To avoid this, we develop a low-complexity fair learning algorithm based on the so-called pick-and-compare approach that involves randomly picking $M$ feasible super arms to evaluate. By setting $M$ to a constant, the number of comparison steps in the pessimistic-optimistic algorithm can be reduced to a constant, thereby significantly reducing the computational complexity. Our theoretical proof shows this low-complexity design incurs only a slight sacrifice in fairness and regret performance. Finally, we validate the theoretical result by extensive simulations.

cs.LG↗

Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval via Prototypical Optimal Transport

Unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval (UCIR) aims to retrieve images sharing the same category across diverse domains without relying on labeled data. Prior approaches have typically decomposed the UCIR problem into two distinct tasks: intra-domain representation learning and cross-domain feature alignment. However, these segregated strategies overlook the potential synergies between these tasks. This paper introduces ProtoOT, a novel Optimal Transport formulation explicitly tailored for UCIR, which integrates intra-domain feature representation learning and cross-domain alignment into a unified framework. ProtoOT leverages the strengths of the K-means clustering method to effectively manage distribution imbalances inherent in UCIR. By utilizing K-means for generating initial prototypes and approximating class marginal distributions, we modify the constraints in Optimal Transport accordingly, significantly enhancing its performance in UCIR scenarios. Furthermore, we incorporate contrastive learning into the ProtoOT framework to further improve representation learning. This encourages local semantic consistency among features with similar semantics, while also explicitly enforcing separation between features and unmatched prototypes, thereby enhancing global discriminativeness. ProtoOT surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods by a notable margin across benchmark datasets. Notably, on DomainNet, ProtoOT achieves an average P@200 enhancement of 18.17%, and on Office-Home, it demonstrates a P@15 improvement of 3.83%.

cs.CV↗

CoF: Coarse to Fine-Grained Image Understanding for Multi-modal Large Language Models

The impressive performance of Large Language Model (LLM) has prompted researchers to develop Multi-modal LLM (MLLM), which has shown great potential for various multi-modal tasks. However, current MLLM often struggles to effectively address fine-grained multi-modal challenges. We argue that this limitation is closely linked to the models' visual grounding capabilities. The restricted spatial awareness and perceptual acuity of visual encoders frequently lead to interference from irrelevant background information in images, causing the models to overlook subtle but crucial details. As a result, achieving fine-grained regional visual comprehension becomes difficult. In this paper, we break down multi-modal understanding into two stages, from Coarse to Fine (CoF). In the first stage, we prompt the MLLM to locate the approximate area of the answer. In the second stage, we further enhance the model's focus on relevant areas within the image through visual prompt engineering, adjusting attention weights of pertinent regions. This, in turn, improves both visual grounding and overall performance in downstream tasks. Our experiments show that this approach significantly boosts the performance of baseline models, demonstrating notable generalization and effectiveness. Our CoF approach is available online at https://github.com/Gavin001201/CoF.

cs.CV↗

Vision Model Pre-training on Interleaved Image-Text Data via Latent Compression Learning

Recently, vision model pre-training has evolved from relying on manually annotated datasets to leveraging large-scale, web-crawled image-text data. Despite these advances, there is no pre-training method that effectively exploits the interleaved image-text data, which is very prevalent on the Internet. Inspired by the recent success of compression learning in natural language processing, we propose a novel vision model pre-training method called Latent Compression Learning (LCL) for interleaved image-text data. This method performs latent compression learning by maximizing the mutual information between the inputs and outputs of a causal attention model. The training objective can be decomposed into two basic tasks: 1) contrastive learning between visual representation and preceding context, and 2) generating subsequent text based on visual representation. Our experiments demonstrate that our method not only matches the performance of CLIP on paired pre-training datasets (e.g., LAION), but can also leverage interleaved pre-training data (e.g., MMC4) to learn robust visual representation from scratch, showcasing the potential of vision model pre-training with interleaved image-text data. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/LCL.

cs.CV↗

Theoretical Prediction of High-Temperature Superconductivity in SrAuH$_3$ at Ambient Pressure

We present a comprehensive computational investigation of electron-phonon interactions in MXH$_3$ hydride compounds, where $M$ represents alkali and post-transition metals, and $X$ denotes 3$d$, 4$d$, and 5$d$ transition metals. Our density functional theory calculations identify 17 dynamically stable compounds. Notably, SrAuH$_3$ and SrZnH$_3$ emerge as theoretical ambient-pressure superconductors with predicted critical temperatures ($T_c$) exceeding 100 K. Analysis of the electronic structure reveals that the $X$ component dominates the density of states at the Fermi level, playing a crucial role in determining electron-phonon coupling strength and superconducting properties. We elucidate the underlying mechanisms governing these properties through detailed examination of the electronic and vibrational spectra. Our findings may challenge the prevailing notion that high-$T_c$ superconductivity in hydrides requires extreme pressures, potentially paving the way for practical applications. This study also provides valuable insights to guide future experimental efforts in the synthesis of ambient-pressure hydride superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗