Abstract:Natural language generation (NLG) metrics play a central role in evaluating generated texts, but are not well suited for the structural and legal characteristics of patent documents. Large language models (LLMs) offer strong potential in automating patent generation, yet research on evaluating LLM-generated patents remains limited, especially in evaluating the generation quality of patent claims, which are central to defining the scope of protection. Effective claim evaluation requires addressing legal validity, technical accuracy, and structural compliance. To address this gap, we introduce PatentScore, a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing LLM-generated patent claims. PatentScore incorporates: (1) hierarchical decomposition for claim analysis; (2) domain-specific validation patterns based on legal and technical standards; and (3) scoring across structural, semantic, and legal dimensions. Unlike general-purpose NLG metrics, PatentScore reflects patent-specific constraints and document structures, enabling evaluation beyond surface similarity. We evaluate 400 GPT-4o-mini generated Claim 1s and report a Pearson correlation of $r = 0.819$ with expert annotations, outperforming existing NLG metrics. Furthermore, we conduct additional evaluations using open models such as Claude-3.5-Haiku and Gemini-1.5-flash, all of which show strong correlations with expert judgments, confirming the robustness and generalizability of our framework.
Abstract:Patent similarity evaluation plays a critical role in intellectual property analysis. However, existing methods often overlook the intricate structure of patent documents, which integrate technical specifications, legal boundaries, and application contexts. We introduce PatentMind, a novel framework for patent similarity assessment based on a Multi-Aspect Reasoning Graph (MARG). PatentMind decomposes patents into three core dimensions: technical feature, application domain, and claim scope, to compute dimension-specific similarity scores. These scores are dynamically weighted through a four-stage reasoning process which integrates contextual signals to emulate expert-level judgment. To support evaluation, we construct PatentSimBench, a human-annotated benchmark comprising 500 patent pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that PatentMind achieves a strong correlation ($r=0.938$) with expert annotations, significantly outperforming embedding-based models and advanced prompt engineering methods.These results highlight the effectiveness of modular reasoning frameworks in overcoming key limitations of embedding-based methods for analyzing patent similarity.
Abstract:Current text-to-image diffusion generation typically employs complete-text conditioning. Due to the intricate syntax, diffusion transformers (DiTs) inherently suffer from a comprehension defect of complete-text captions. One-fly complete-text input either overlooks critical semantic details or causes semantic confusion by simultaneously modeling diverse semantic primitive types. To mitigate this defect of DiTs, we propose a novel split-text conditioning framework named DiT-ST. This framework converts a complete-text caption into a split-text caption, a collection of simplified sentences, to explicitly express various semantic primitives and their interconnections. The split-text caption is then injected into different denoising stages of DiT-ST in a hierarchical and incremental manner. Specifically, DiT-ST leverages Large Language Models to parse captions, extracting diverse primitives and hierarchically sorting out and constructing these primitives into a split-text input. Moreover, we partition the diffusion denoising process according to its differential sensitivities to diverse semantic primitive types and determine the appropriate timesteps to incrementally inject tokens of diverse semantic primitive types into input tokens via cross-attention. In this way, DiT-ST enhances the representation learning of specific semantic primitive types across different stages. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed DiT-ST in mitigating the complete-text comprehension defect.
Abstract:The ability to imitate realistic facial expressions is essential for humanoid robots engaged in affective human-robot communication. However, the lack of datasets containing diverse humanoid facial expressions with proper annotations hinders progress in realistic humanoid facial expression imitation. To address these challenges, we introduce X2C (Anything to Control), a dataset featuring nuanced facial expressions for realistic humanoid imitation. With X2C, we contribute: 1) a high-quality, high-diversity, large-scale dataset comprising 100,000 (image, control value) pairs. Each image depicts a humanoid robot displaying a diverse range of facial expressions, annotated with 30 control values representing the ground-truth expression configuration; 2) X2CNet, a novel human-to-humanoid facial expression imitation framework that learns the correspondence between nuanced humanoid expressions and their underlying control values from X2C. It enables facial expression imitation in the wild for different human performers, providing a baseline for the imitation task, showcasing the potential value of our dataset; 3) real-world demonstrations on a physical humanoid robot, highlighting its capability to advance realistic humanoid facial expression imitation. Code and Data: https://lipzh5.github.io/X2CNet/
Abstract:Bayesian optimization is a powerful technique for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions, consisting of two main components: a surrogate model and an acquisition function. In recent years, myopic acquisition functions have been widely adopted for their simplicity and effectiveness. However, their lack of look-ahead capability limits their performance. To address this limitation, we propose FigBO, a generalized acquisition function that incorporates the future impact of candidate points on global information gain. FigBO is a plug-and-play method that can integrate seamlessly with most existing myopic acquisition functions. Theoretically, we analyze the regret bound and convergence rate of FigBO when combined with the myopic base acquisition function expected improvement (EI), comparing them to those of standard EI. Empirically, extensive experimental results across diverse tasks demonstrate that FigBO achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly faster convergence compared to existing methods.
Abstract:Majorities of distillation methods on pre-trained diffusion models or on pre-trained rectified flow, focus on either the distillation outputs or the trajectories between random noises and clean images to speed up sample generations from pre-trained models. In those trajectory-based distillation methods, consistency distillation requires the self-consistent trajectory projection to regulate the trajectory, which might avoid the common ODE approximation error {while still be concerning about sampling efficiencies}. At the same time, rectified flow distillations enforce straight trajectory for fast sampling, although an ODE solver is still required. In this work, we propose a trajectory distillation method, \modelname, that enjoys the benefits of both and enables few-step generations. TraFlow adopts the settings of consistency trajectory models, and further enforces the properties of self-consistency and straightness throughout the entire trajectory. These two properties are pursued by reaching a balance with following three targets: (1) reconstruct the output from pre-trained models; (2) learn the amount of changes by pre-trained models; (3) satisfy the self-consistency over its trajectory. Extensive experimental results have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Abstract:Marked event data captures events by recording their continuous-valued occurrence timestamps along with their corresponding discrete-valued types. They have appeared in various real-world scenarios such as social media, financial transactions, and healthcare records, and have been effectively modeled through Marked Temporal Point Process (MTPP) models. Recently, developing generative models for these MTPP models have seen rapid development due to their powerful generative capability and less restrictive functional forms. However, existing generative MTPP models are usually challenged in jointly modeling events' timestamps and types since: (1) mainstream methods design the generative mechanisms for timestamps only and do not include event types; (2) the complex interdependence between the timestamps and event types are overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel generative MTPP model called BMTPP. Unlike existing generative MTPP models, BMTPP flexibly models marked temporal joint distributions using a parameter-based approach. Additionally, by adding joint noise to the marked temporal data space, BMTPP effectively captures and explicitly reveals the interdependence between timestamps and event types. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our approach over other state-of-the-art models and its ability to effectively capture marked-temporal interdependence.
Abstract:Equipping humanoid robots with the capability to understand emotional states of human interactants and express emotions appropriately according to situations is essential for affective human-robot interaction. However, enabling current vision-aware multimodal emotion recognition models for affective human-robot interaction in the real-world raises embodiment challenges: addressing the environmental noise issue and meeting real-time requirements. First, in multiparty conversation scenarios, the noises inherited in the visual observation of the robot, which may come from either 1) distracting objects in the scene or 2) inactive speakers appearing in the field of view of the robot, hinder the models from extracting emotional cues from vision inputs. Secondly, realtime response, a desired feature for an interactive system, is also challenging to achieve. To tackle both challenges, we introduce an affective human-robot interaction system called UGotMe designed specifically for multiparty conversations. Two denoising strategies are proposed and incorporated into the system to solve the first issue. Specifically, to filter out distracting objects in the scene, we propose extracting face images of the speakers from the raw images and introduce a customized active face extraction strategy to rule out inactive speakers. As for the second issue, we employ efficient data transmission from the robot to the local server to improve realtime response capability. We deploy UGotMe on a human robot named Ameca to validate its real-time inference capabilities in practical scenarios. Videos demonstrating real-world deployment are available at https://pi3-141592653.github.io/UGotMe/.
Abstract:Temporal point processes (TPPs) are effective for modeling event occurrences over time, but they struggle with sparse and uncertain events in federated systems, where privacy is a major concern. To address this, we propose \textit{FedPP}, a Federated neural nonparametric Point Process model. FedPP integrates neural embeddings into Sigmoidal Gaussian Cox Processes (SGCPs) on the client side, which is a flexible and expressive class of TPPs, allowing it to generate highly flexible intensity functions that capture client-specific event dynamics and uncertainties while efficiently summarizing historical records. For global aggregation, FedPP introduces a divergence-based mechanism that communicates the distributions of SGCPs' kernel hyperparameters between the server and clients, while keeping client-specific parameters local to ensure privacy and personalization. FedPP effectively captures event uncertainty and sparsity, and extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance in federated settings, particularly with KL divergence and Wasserstein distance-based global aggregation.
Abstract:Vision-language pretraining (VLP) with transformers has demonstrated exceptional performance across numerous multimodal tasks. However, the adversarial robustness of these models has not been thoroughly investigated. Existing multimodal attack methods have largely overlooked cross-modal interactions between visual and textual modalities, particularly in the context of cross-attention mechanisms. In this paper, we study the adversarial vulnerability of recent VLP transformers and design a novel Joint Multimodal Transformer Feature Attack (JMTFA) that concurrently introduces adversarial perturbations in both visual and textual modalities under white-box settings. JMTFA strategically targets attention relevance scores to disrupt important features within each modality, generating adversarial samples by fusing perturbations and leading to erroneous model predictions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach achieves high attack success rates on vision-language understanding and reasoning downstream tasks compared to existing baselines. Notably, our findings reveal that the textual modality significantly influences the complex fusion processes within VLP transformers. Moreover, we observe no apparent relationship between model size and adversarial robustness under our proposed attacks. These insights emphasize a new dimension of adversarial robustness and underscore potential risks in the reliable deployment of multimodal AI systems.