Yue Zhong

Peng Xu, Shengwu Xiong, Jiajun Zhang et al.

This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.

Jiawen Kang, Yongju Tong, Yue Zhong et al.

The rise of 6G-enable Vehicular Metaverses is transforming the automotive industry by integrating immersive, real-time vehicular services through ultra-low latency and high bandwidth connectivity. In 6G-enable Vehicular Metaverses, vehicles are represented by Vehicle Twins (VTs), which serve as digital replicas of physical vehicles to support real-time vehicular applications such as large Artificial Intelligence (AI) model-based Augmented Reality (AR) navigation, called VT tasks. VT tasks are resource-intensive and need to be offloaded to ground Base Stations (BSs) for fast processing. However, high demand for VT tasks and limited resources of ground BSs, pose significant resource allocation challenges, particularly in densely populated urban areas like intersections. As a promising solution, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) act as aerial edge servers to dynamically assist ground BSs in handling VT tasks, relieving resource pressure on ground BSs. However, due to high mobility of UAVs, there exists information asymmetry regarding VT task demands between UAVs and ground BSs, resulting in inefficient resource allocation of UAVs. To address these challenges, we propose a learning-based Modified Second-Bid (MSB) auction mechanism to optimize resource allocation between ground BSs and UAVs by accounting for VT task latency and accuracy. Moreover, we design a diffusion-based reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize the price scaling factor, maximizing the total surplus of resource providers and minimizing VT task latency. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed diffusion-based MSB auction outperforms traditional baselines, providing better resource distribution and enhanced service quality for vehicular users.

Yue Zhong, Jiawen Kang, Yongju Tong et al.

With the rapid expansion of the low-altitude economy, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) serve as pivotal aerial base stations supporting diverse services from users, ranging from latency-sensitive critical missions to bandwidth-intensive data streaming. However, the efficacy of such heterogeneous networks is often compromised by the conflict between limited onboard resources and stringent stability requirements. Moving beyond traditional throughput-centric designs, we propose a Sensing-Communication-Computing-Control closed-loop framework that explicitly models the impact of communication latency on physical control stability. To guarantee mission reliability, we leverage the Lyapunov stability theory to derive an intrinsic mapping between the state evolution of the control system and communication constraints, transforming abstract stability requirements into quantifiable resource boundaries. Then, we formulate the resource allocation problem as a Stackelberg game, where UAVs (as leaders) dynamically price resources to balance load and ensure stability, while users (as followers) optimize requests based on service urgency. Furthermore, addressing the prohibitive computational overhead of standard Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on energy-constrained edge platforms, we propose a novel and lightweight pruning-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. By integrating a dynamic structured pruning mechanism, the proposed algorithm significantly compresses the neural network scale during training, enabling the UAV to rapidly approximate the game equilibrium with minimal inference latency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively secures control loop stability while maximizing system utility in dynamic low-altitude environments.

Yue Zhong, Yongju Tong, Jiawen Kang et al.

The Internet of Agents (IoA) is rapidly gaining prominence as a foundational architecture for interconnected intelligent systems, designed to facilitate seamless discovery, communication, and collaborative reasoning among a vast network of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. Powered by Large Language and Vision-Language Models, IoA enables the development of interactive, rational agents capable of complex cooperation, moving far beyond traditional isolated models. IoA involves physical entities, i.e., Wireless Agents (WAs) with limited onboard resources, which need to offload their compute-intensive agentic AI services to nearby servers. Such servers can be Mobile Agents (MAs), e.g., vehicle agents, or Fixed Agents (FAs), e.g., end-side units agents. Given their fixed geographical locations and stable connectivity, FAs can serve as reliable communication gateways and task aggregation points. This stability allows them to effectively coordinate with and offload to an Aerial Agent (AA) tier, which has an advantage not affordable for highly mobile MAs with dynamic connectivity limitations. As such, we propose a two-tier optimization approach. The first tier employs a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game. In the game, MAs and FAs act as the leaders who set resource prices. WAs are the followers to determine task offloading ratios. However, when FAs become overloaded, they can further offload tasks to available aerial resources. Therefore, the second tier introduces a Double Dutch Auction model where overloaded FAs act as the buyers to request resources, and AAs serve as the sellers for resource provision. We then develop a diffusion-based Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm to solve the model. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme in facilitating task offloading.

Zhengyun Zhao, Huaiyuan Ying, Yue Zhong et al.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are pivotal in clinical practices, yet their retrieval remains a challenge mainly due to semantic gap issues. Recent advancements in dense retrieval offer promising solutions but existing models, both general-domain and biomedical-domain, fall short due to insufficient medical knowledge or mismatched training corpora. This paper introduces \texttt{DR.EHR}, a series of dense retrieval models specifically tailored for EHR retrieval. We propose a two-stage training pipeline utilizing MIMIC-IV discharge summaries to address the need for extensive medical knowledge and large-scale training data. The first stage involves medical entity extraction and knowledge injection from a biomedical knowledge graph, while the second stage employs large language models to generate diverse training data. We train two variants of \texttt{DR.EHR}, with 110M and 7B parameters, respectively. Evaluated on the CliniQ benchmark, our models significantly outperforms all existing dense retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art results. Detailed analyses confirm our models' superiority across various match and query types, particularly in challenging semantic matches like implication and abbreviation. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each pipeline component, and supplementary experiments on EHR QA datasets demonstrate the models' generalizability on natural language questions, including complex ones with multiple entities. This work significantly advances EHR retrieval, offering a robust solution for clinical applications.

Yuxiang Wei, Zhuoqi Zeng, Yue Zhong et al.

With the advancement of large language models and embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the intelligent transportation scenarios, the combination of them in intelligent transportation spawns the Vehicular Embodied AI Network (VEANs). In VEANs, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are typical agents whose local advanced AI applications are defined as vehicular embodied AI agents, enabling capabilities such as environment perception and multi-agent collaboration. Due to computation latency and resource constraints, the local AI applications and services running on vehicular embodied AI agents need to be migrated, and subsequently referred to as vehicular embodied AI agent twins, which drive the advancement of vehicular embodied AI networks to offload intensive tasks to Roadside Units (RSUs), mitigating latency problems while maintaining service quality. Recognizing workload imbalance among RSUs in traditional approaches, we model AV-RSU interactions as a Stackelberg game to optimize bandwidth resource allocation for efficient migration. A Tiny Multi-Agent Bidirectional LSTM Proximal Policy Optimization (TMABLPPO) algorithm is designed to approximate the Stackelberg equilibrium through decentralized coordination. Furthermore, a personalized neural network pruning algorithm based on Path eXclusion (PX) dynamically adapts to heterogeneous AV computation capabilities by identifying task-critical parameters in trained models, reducing model complexity with less performance degradation. Experimental validation confirms the algorithm's effectiveness in balancing system load and minimizing delays, demonstrating significant improvements in vehicular embodied AI agent deployment.

Zhengyun Zhao, Hongyi Yuan, Jingjing Liu et al.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) retrieval plays a pivotal role in various clinical tasks, but its development has been severely impeded by the lack of publicly available benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a novel public EHR retrieval benchmark, CliniQ, to address this gap. We consider two retrieval settings: Single-Patient Retrieval and Multi-Patient Retrieval, reflecting various real-world scenarios. Single-Patient Retrieval focuses on finding relevant parts within a patient note, while Multi-Patient Retrieval involves retrieving EHRs from multiple patients. We build our benchmark upon 1,000 discharge summary notes along with the ICD codes and prescription labels from MIMIC-III, and collect 1,246 unique queries with 77,206 relevance judgments by further leveraging powerful LLMs as annotators. Additionally, we include a novel assessment of the semantic gap issue in EHR retrieval by categorizing matching types into string match and four types of semantic matches. On our proposed benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various retrieval methods, ranging from conventional exact match to popular dense retrievers. Our experiments find that BM25 sets a strong baseline and performs competitively to the dense retrievers, and general domain dense retrievers surprisingly outperform those designed for the medical domain. In-depth analyses on various matching types reveal the strengths and drawbacks of different methods, enlightening the potential for targeted improvement. We believe that our benchmark will stimulate the research communities to advance EHR retrieval systems.

Jiawen Kang, Yue Zhong, Minrui Xu et al.

The synergy between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and metaverses is giving rise to an emerging paradigm named UAV metaverses, which create a unified ecosystem that blends physical and virtual spaces, transforming drone interaction and virtual exploration. UAV Twins (UTs), as the digital twins of UAVs that revolutionize UAV applications by making them more immersive, realistic, and informative, are deployed and updated on ground base stations, e.g., RoadSide Units (RSUs), to offer metaverse services for UAV Metaverse Users (UMUs). Due to the dynamic mobility of UAVs and limited communication coverages of RSUs, it is essential to perform real-time UT migration to ensure seamless immersive experiences for UMUs. However, selecting appropriate RSUs and optimizing the required bandwidth is challenging for achieving reliable and efficient UT migration. To address the challenges, we propose a tiny machine learning-based Stackelberg game framework based on pruning techniques for efficient UT migration in UAV metaverses. Specifically, we formulate a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg model considering a new immersion metric of UMUs in the utilities of UAVs. Then, we design a Tiny Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (Tiny MADRL) algorithm to obtain the tiny networks representing the optimal game solution. Specifically, the actor-critic network leverages the pruning techniques to reduce the number of network parameters and achieve model size and computation reduction, allowing for efficient implementation of Tiny MADRL. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed schemes have better performance than traditional schemes.

Yue Zhong, Yulia Gryaditskaya, Honggang Zhang et al.

Deep image-based modeling received lots of attention in recent years, yet the parallel problem of sketch-based modeling has only been briefly studied, often as a potential application. In this work, for the first time, we identify the main differences between sketch and image inputs: (i) style variance, (ii) imprecise perspective, and (iii) sparsity. We discuss why each of these differences can pose a challenge, and even make a certain class of image-based methods inapplicable. We study alternative solutions to address each of the difference. By doing so, we drive out a few important insights: (i) sparsity commonly results in an incorrect prediction of foreground versus background, (ii) diversity of human styles, if not taken into account, can lead to very poor generalization properties, and finally (iii) unless a dedicated sketching interface is used, one can not expect sketches to match a perspective of a fixed viewpoint. Finally, we compare a set of representative deep single-image modeling solutions and show how their performance can be improved to tackle sketch input by taking into consideration the identified critical differences.

Yin Cao, Turab Iqbal, Qiuqiang Kong et al.

Polyphonic sound event localization and detection is not only detecting what sound events are happening but localizing corresponding sound sources. This series of tasks was first introduced in DCASE 2019 Task 3. In 2020, the sound event localization and detection task introduces additional challenges in moving sound sources and overlapping-event cases, which include two events of the same type with two different direction-of-arrival (DoA) angles. In this paper, a novel event-independent network for polyphonic sound event localization and detection is proposed. Unlike the two-stage method we proposed in DCASE 2019 Task 3, this new network is fully end-to-end. Inputs to the network are first-order Ambisonics (FOA) time-domain signals, which are then fed into a 1-D convolutional layer to extract acoustic features. The network is then split into two parallel branches. The first branch is for sound event detection (SED), and the second branch is for DoA estimation. There are three types of predictions from the network, SED predictions, DoA predictions, and event activity detection (EAD) predictions that are used to combine the SED and DoA features for on-set and off-set estimation. All of these predictions have the format of two tracks indicating that there are at most two overlapping events. Within each track, there could be at most one event happening. This architecture introduces a problem of track permutation. To address this problem, a frame-level permutation invariant training method is used. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect polyphonic sound events and their corresponding DoAs. Its performance on the Task 3 dataset is greatly increased as compared with that of the baseline method.