Tongfei Chen
Publications
Kirchhoff-Inspired Neural Networks for Evolving High-Order Perception
Deep learning architectures are fundamentally inspired by neuroscience, particularly the structure of the brain's sensory pathways, and have achieved remarkable success in learning informative data representations. Although these architectures mimic the communication mechanisms of biological neurons, their strategies for information encoding and transmission are fundamentally distinct. Biological systems depend on dynamic fluctuations in membrane potential; by contrast, conventional deep networks optimize weights and biases by adjusting the strengths of inter-neural connections, lacking a systematic mechanism to jointly characterize the interplay among signal intensity, coupling structure, and state evolution. To tackle this limitation, we propose the Kirchhoff-Inspired Neural Network (KINN), a state-variable-based network architecture constructed based on Kirchhoff's current law. KINN derives numerically stable state updates from fundamental ordinary differential equations, enabling the explicit decoupling and encoding of higher-order evolutionary components within a single layer while preserving physical consistency, interpretability, and end-to-end trainability. Extensive experiments on partial differential equation (PDE) solving and ImageNet image classification validate that KINN outperforms state-of-the-art existing methods.
AMLRIS: Alignment-aware Masked Learning for Referring Image Segmentation
Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) aims to segment an object in an image identified by a natural language expression. The paper introduces Alignment-Aware Masked Learning (AML), a training strategy to enhance RIS by explicitly estimating pixel-level vision-language alignment, filtering out poorly aligned regions during optimization, and focusing on trustworthy cues. This approach results in state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO datasets and also enhances robustness to diverse descriptions and scenarios