IMPA-HGAE:Intra-Meta-Path Augmented Heterogeneous Graph Autoencoder

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been increasingly applied to diverse downstream tasks due to their superior generalization capabilities and low annotation costs. However, most existing heterogeneous graph SSL models convert heterogeneous graphs into homogeneous ones via meta-paths for training, which only leverage information from nodes at both ends of meta-paths while underutilizing the heterogeneous node information along the meta-paths. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework named IMPA-HGAE to enhance target node embeddings by fully exploiting internal node information along meta-paths. Experimental results validate that IMPA-HGAE achieves superior performance on heterogeneous datasets. Furthermore, this paper introduce innovative masking strategies to strengthen the representational capacity of generative SSL models on heterogeneous graph data. Additionally, this paper discuss the interpretability of the proposed method and potential future directions for generative self-supervised learning in heterogeneous graphs. This work provides insights into leveraging meta-path-guided structural semantics for robust representation learning in complex graph scenarios.

Learning Robust Heterogeneous Graph Representations via Contrastive-Reconstruction under Sparse Semantics

In graph self-supervised learning, masked autoencoders (MAE) and contrastive learning (CL) are two prominent paradigms. MAE focuses on reconstructing masked elements, while CL maximizes similarity between augmented graph views. Recent studies highlight their complementarity: MAE excels at local feature capture, and CL at global information extraction. Hybrid frameworks for homogeneous graphs have been proposed, but face challenges in designing shared encoders to meet the semantic requirements of both tasks. In semantically sparse scenarios, CL struggles with view construction, and gradient imbalance between positive and negative samples persists. This paper introduces HetCRF, a novel dual-channel self-supervised learning framework for heterogeneous graphs. HetCRF uses a two-stage aggregation strategy to adapt embedding semantics, making it compatible with both MAE and CL. To address semantic sparsity, it enhances encoder output for view construction instead of relying on raw features, improving efficiency. Two positive sample augmentation strategies are also proposed to balance gradient contributions. Node classification experiments on four real-world heterogeneous graph datasets demonstrate that HetCRF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. On datasets with missing node features, such as Aminer and Freebase, at a 40% label rate in node classification, HetCRF improves the Macro-F1 score by 2.75% and 2.2% respectively compared to the second-best baseline, validating its effectiveness and superiority.

Light as Deception: GPT-driven Natural Relighting Against Vision-Language Pre-training Models

While adversarial attacks on vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) models have been explored, generating natural adversarial samples crafted through realistic and semantically meaningful perturbations remains an open challenge. Existing methods, primarily designed for classification tasks, struggle when adapted to VLP models due to their restricted optimization spaces, leading to ineffective attacks or unnatural artifacts. To address this, we propose \textbf{LightD}, a novel framework that generates natural adversarial samples for VLP models via semantically guided relighting. Specifically, LightD leverages ChatGPT to propose context-aware initial lighting parameters and integrates a pretrained relighting model (IC-light) to enable diverse lighting adjustments. LightD expands the optimization space while ensuring perturbations align with scene semantics. Additionally, gradient-based optimization is applied to the reference lighting image to further enhance attack effectiveness while maintaining visual naturalness. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed LightD have been demonstrated across various VLP models in tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering.

NoiseController: Towards Consistent Multi-view Video Generation via Noise Decomposition and Collaboration

High-quality video generation is crucial for many fields, including the film industry and autonomous driving. However, generating videos with spatiotemporal consistencies remains challenging. Current methods typically utilize attention mechanisms or modify noise to achieve consistent videos, neglecting global spatiotemporal information that could help ensure spatial and temporal consistency during video generation. In this paper, we propose the NoiseController, consisting of Multi-Level Noise Decomposition, Multi-Frame Noise Collaboration, and Joint Denoising, to enhance spatiotemporal consistencies in video generation. In multi-level noise decomposition, we first decompose initial noises into scene-level foreground/background noises, capturing distinct motion properties to model multi-view foreground/background variations. Furthermore, each scene-level noise is further decomposed into individual-level shared and residual components. The shared noise preserves consistency, while the residual component maintains diversity. In multi-frame noise collaboration, we introduce an inter-view spatiotemporal collaboration matrix and an intra-view impact collaboration matrix , which captures mutual cross-view effects and historical cross-frame impacts to enhance video quality. The joint denoising contains two parallel denoising U-Nets to remove each scene-level noise, mutually enhancing video generation. We evaluate our NoiseController on public datasets focusing on video generation and downstream tasks, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance.

Visibility-Uncertainty-guided 3D Gaussian Inpainting via Scene Conceptional Learning

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful and efficient 3D representation for novel view synthesis. This paper extends 3DGS capabilities to inpainting, where masked objects in a scene are replaced with new contents that blend seamlessly with the surroundings. Unlike 2D image inpainting, 3D Gaussian inpainting (3DGI) is challenging in effectively leveraging complementary visual and semantic cues from multiple input views, as occluded areas in one view may be visible in others. To address this, we propose a method that measures the visibility uncertainties of 3D points across different input views and uses them to guide 3DGI in utilizing complementary visual cues. We also employ uncertainties to learn a semantic concept of scene without the masked object and use a diffusion model to fill masked objects in input images based on the learned concept. Finally, we build a novel 3DGI framework, VISTA, by integrating VISibility-uncerTainty-guided 3DGI with scene conceptuAl learning. VISTA generates high-quality 3DGS models capable of synthesizing artifact-free and naturally inpainted novel views. Furthermore, our approach extends to handling dynamic distractors arising from temporal object changes, enhancing its versatility in diverse scene reconstruction scenarios. We demonstrate the superior performance of our method over state-of-the-art techniques using two challenging datasets: the SPIn-NeRF dataset, featuring 10 diverse static 3D inpainting scenes, and an underwater 3D inpainting dataset derived from UTB180, including fast-moving fish as inpainting targets.

Casual Inference via Style Bias Deconfounding for Domain Generalization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often struggle with out-of-distribution data, limiting their reliability in diverse realworld applications. To address this issue, domain generalization methods have been developed to learn domain-invariant features from single or multiple training domains, enabling generalization to unseen testing domains. However, existing approaches usually overlook the impact of style frequency within the training set. This oversight predisposes models to capture spurious visual correlations caused by style confounding factors, rather than learning truly causal representations, thereby undermining inference reliability. In this work, we introduce Style Deconfounding Causal Learning (SDCL), a novel causal inference-based framework designed to explicitly address style as a confounding factor. Our approaches begins with constructing a structural causal model (SCM) tailored to the domain generalization problem and applies a backdoor adjustment strategy to account for style influence. Building on this foundation, we design a style-guided expert module (SGEM) to adaptively clusters style distributions during training, capturing the global confounding style. Additionally, a back-door causal learning module (BDCL) performs causal interventions during feature extraction, ensuring fair integration of global confounding styles into sample predictions, effectively reducing style bias. The SDCL framework is highly versatile and can be seamlessly integrated with state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. Extensive experiments across diverse natural and medical image recognition tasks validate its efficacy, demonstrating superior performance in both multi-domain and the more challenging single-domain generalization scenarios.

SceneTAP: Scene-Coherent Typographic Adversarial Planner against Vision-Language Models in Real-World Environments

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual content. While existing works demonstrate these models' vulnerability to deliberately placed adversarial texts, such texts are often easily identifiable as anomalous. In this paper, we present the first approach to generate scene-coherent typographic adversarial attacks that mislead advanced LVLMs while maintaining visual naturalness through the capability of the LLM-based agent. Our approach addresses three critical questions: what adversarial text to generate, where to place it within the scene, and how to integrate it seamlessly. We propose a training-free, multi-modal LLM-driven scene-coherent typographic adversarial planning (SceneTAP) that employs a three-stage process: scene understanding, adversarial planning, and seamless integration. The SceneTAP utilizes chain-of-thought reasoning to comprehend the scene, formulate effective adversarial text, strategically plan its placement, and provide detailed instructions for natural integration within the image. This is followed by a scene-coherent TextDiffuser that executes the attack using a local diffusion mechanism. We extend our method to real-world scenarios by printing and placing generated patches in physical environments, demonstrating its practical implications. Extensive experiments show that our scene-coherent adversarial text successfully misleads state-of-the-art LVLMs, including ChatGPT-4o, even after capturing new images of physical setups. Our evaluations demonstrate a significant increase in attack success rates while maintaining visual naturalness and contextual appropriateness. This work highlights vulnerabilities in current vision-language models to sophisticated, scene-coherent adversarial attacks and provides insights into potential defense mechanisms.

Unleashing Generalization of End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Controllable Long Video Generation

Using generative models to synthesize new data has become a de-facto standard in autonomous driving to address the data scarcity issue. Though existing approaches are able to boost perception models, we discover that these approaches fail to improve the performance of planning of end-to-end autonomous driving models as the generated videos are usually less than 8 frames and the spatial and temporal inconsistencies are not negligible. To this end, we propose Delphi, a novel diffusion-based long video generation method with a shared noise modeling mechanism across the multi-views to increase spatial consistency, and a feature-aligned module to achieves both precise controllability and temporal consistency. Our method can generate up to 40 frames of video without loss of consistency which is about 5 times longer compared with state-of-the-art methods. Instead of randomly generating new data, we further design a sampling policy to let Delphi generate new data that are similar to those failure cases to improve the sample efficiency. This is achieved by building a failure-case driven framework with the help of pre-trained visual language models. Our extensive experiment demonstrates that our Delphi generates a higher quality of long videos surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods. Consequentially, with only generating 4% of the training dataset size, our framework is able to go beyond perception and prediction tasks, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, boost the planning performance of the end-to-end autonomous driving model by a margin of 25%.

LRR: Language-Driven Resamplable Continuous Representation against Adversarial Tracking Attacks

Visual object tracking plays a critical role in visual-based autonomous systems, as it aims to estimate the position and size of the object of interest within a live video. Despite significant progress made in this field, state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers often fail when faced with adversarial perturbations in the incoming frames. This can lead to significant robustness and security issues when these trackers are deployed in the real world. To achieve high accuracy on both clean and adversarial data, we propose building a spatial-temporal continuous representation using the semantic text guidance of the object of interest. This novel continuous representation enables us to reconstruct incoming frames to maintain semantic and appearance consistency with the object of interest and its clean counterparts. As a result, our proposed method successfully defends against different SOTA adversarial tracking attacks while maintaining high accuracy on clean data. In particular, our method significantly increases tracking accuracy under adversarial attacks with around 90% relative improvement on UAV123, which is even higher than the accuracy on clean data.

Natural-language-driven Simulation Benchmark and Copilot for Efficient Production of Object Interactions in Virtual Road Scenes

We advocate the idea of the natural-language-driven(NLD) simulation to efficiently produce the object interactions between multiple objects in the virtual road scenes, for teaching and testing the autonomous driving systems that should take quick action to avoid collision with obstacles with unpredictable motions. The NLD simulation allows the brief natural-language description to control the object interactions, significantly reducing the human efforts for creating a large amount of interaction data. To facilitate the research of NLD simulation, we collect the Language-to-Interaction(L2I) benchmark dataset with 120,000 natural-language descriptions of object interactions in 6 common types of road topologies. Each description is associated with the programming code, which the graphic render can use to visually reconstruct the object interactions in the virtual scenes. As a methodology contribution, we design SimCopilot to translate the interaction descriptions to the renderable code. We use the L2I dataset to evaluate SimCopilot's abilities to control the object motions, generate complex interactions, and generalize interactions across road topologies. The L2I dataset and the evaluation results motivate the relevant research of the NLD simulation.