Aming Wu

Tong Yang, Yemin Wang, Chaoning Zhang et al.

The effectiveness of LLM-based agents is often limited not by model capacity alone, but by how efficiently contextual information is utilized at runtime. Existing agent frameworks rely on rigid, syntax-heavy state representations such as nested JSON, which require models to devote a substantial portion of their limited attention to syntactic processing rather than semantic reasoning. In this paper, we propose Fat-Cat, a document-driven agent architecture that improves the signal-to-noise ratio of state management. By integrating three key components: (1) a Semantic File System that represents agent state as Markdown documents aligned with common pre-training corpora, (2) a Textual Strategy Evolution module that accumulates task-solving knowledge without parameter updates, and (3) a Closed-Loop Watcher that monitors reasoning trajectories to reduce hallucinations. Extensive reasoning, retrieval, and coding benchmarks, Fat-Cat consistently improves agent performance. It enables the Kimi-k2 model to outperform the proprietary GPT-4o baseline on HotPotQA. Replacing the document-based state with JSON leads to performance drop, while empirically validating the critical necessity of document-driven state modeling over rigid syntax. The code is available at https://github.com/answeryt/Fat-Cat.

Zihao Zhang, Yang Li, Aming Wu et al.

In this paper, we focus on Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (Single-DGOD), aiming to transfer a detector trained on one source domain to multiple unknown domains. Existing methods for Single-DGOD typically rely on discrete data augmentation or static perturbation methods to expand data diversity, thereby mitigating the lack of access to target domain data. However, in real-world scenarios such as changes in weather or lighting conditions, domain shifts often occur continuously and gradually. Discrete augmentations and static perturbations fail to effectively capture the dynamic variation of feature distributions, thereby limiting the model's ability to perceive fine-grained cross-domain differences. To this end, we propose a new method, Liquid Temporal Feature Evolution, which simulates the progressive evolution of features from the source domain to simulated latent distributions by incorporating temporal modeling and liquid neural network-driven parameter adjustment. Specifically, we introduce controllable Gaussian noise injection and multi-scale Gaussian blurring to simulate initial feature perturbations, followed by temporal modeling and a liquid parameter adjustment mechanism to generate adaptive modulation parameters, enabling a smooth and continuous adaptation across domains. By capturing progressive cross-domain feature evolution and dynamically regulating adaptation paths, our method bridges the source-unknown domain distribution gap, significantly boosting generalization and robustness to unseen shifts. Significant performance improvements on the Diverse Weather dataset and Real-to-Art benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/2490o/LTFE.

Deng Li, Aming Wu, Yahong Han et al.

Recently, large-scale pre-trained models have shown their advantages in many tasks. However, due to the huge computational complexity and storage requirements, it is challenging to apply the large-scale model to real scenes. A common solution is knowledge distillation which regards the large-scale model as a teacher model and helps to train a small student model to obtain a competitive performance. Cross-task Knowledge distillation expands the application scenarios of the large-scale pre-trained model. Existing knowledge distillation works focus on directly mimicking the final prediction or the intermediate layers of the teacher model, which represent the global-level characteristics and are task-specific. To alleviate the constraint of different label spaces, capturing invariant intrinsic local object characteristics (such as the shape characteristics of the leg and tail of the cattle and horse) plays a key role. Considering the complexity and variability of real scene tasks, we propose a Prototype-guided Cross-task Knowledge Distillation (ProC-KD) approach to transfer the intrinsic local-level object knowledge of a large-scale teacher network to various task scenarios. First, to better transfer the generalized knowledge in the teacher model in cross-task scenarios, we propose a prototype learning module to learn from the essential feature representation of objects in the teacher model. Secondly, for diverse downstream tasks, we propose a task-adaptive feature augmentation module to enhance the features of the student model with the learned generalization prototype features and guide the training of the student model to improve its generalization ability. The experimental results on various visual tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for large-scale model cross-task knowledge distillation scenes.

Yukuan Min, Aming Wu, Cheng Deng

The scene graph generation (SGG) task is designed to identify the predicates based on the subject-object pairs.However,existing datasets generally include two imbalance cases: one is the class imbalance from the predicted predicates and another is the context imbalance from the given subject-object pairs, which presents significant challenges for SGG. Most existing methods focus on the imbalance of the predicted predicate while ignoring the imbalance of the subject-object pairs, which could not achieve satisfactory results. To address the two imbalance cases, we propose a novel Environment Invariant Curriculum Relation learning (EICR) method, which can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to existing SGG methods. Concretely, to remove the imbalance of the subject-object pairs, we first construct different distribution environments for the subject-object pairs and learn a model invariant to the environment changes. Then, we construct a class-balanced curriculum learning strategy to balance the different environments to remove the predicate imbalance. Comprehensive experiments conducted on VG and GQA datasets demonstrate that our EICR framework can be taken as a general strategy for various SGG models, and achieve significant improvements.

Yang Li, Aming Wu, Zihao Zhang et al.

Vision-Language Navigation aims to enable agents to navigate to a target location based on language instructions. Traditional VLN often follows a close-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same style of the input images and instructions. However, the real world is open and filled with various unseen environments, posing enormous difficulties for close-set methods. To this end, we focus on the General Scene Adaptation (GSA-VLN) task, aiming to learn generalized navigation ability by introducing diverse environments and inconsistent intructions.Towards this task, when facing unseen environments and instructions, the challenge mainly lies in how to enable the agent to dynamically produce generalized strategies during the navigation process. Recent research indicates that by means of fast and slow cognition systems, human beings could generate stable policies, which strengthen their adaptation for open world. Inspired by this idea, we propose the slow4fast-VLN, establishing a dynamic interactive fast-slow reasoning framework. The fast-reasoning module, an end-to-end strategy network, outputs actions via real-time input. It accumulates execution records in a history repository to build memory. The slow-reasoning module analyze the memories generated by the fast-reasoning module. Through deep reflection, it extracts experiences that enhance the generalization ability of decision-making. These experiences are structurally stored and used to continuously optimize the fast-reasoning module. Unlike traditional methods that treat fast-slow reasoning as independent mechanisms, our framework enables fast-slow interaction. By leveraging the experiences from slow reasoning. This interaction allows the system to continuously adapt and efficiently execute navigation tasks when facing unseen scenarios.

Yuxin Gou, Aming Wu, Richang Hong et al.

A comprehensive understanding of molecular structures is important for the prediction of molecular ground-state conformation involving property information. Meanwhile, state space model (e.g., Mamba) has recently emerged as a promising mechanism for long sequence modeling and has achieved remarkable results in various language and vision tasks. However, towards molecular ground-state conformation prediction, exploiting Mamba to understand molecular structure is underexplored. To this end, we strive to design a generic and efficient framework with Mamba to capture critical components. In general, molecular structure could be considered to consist of three elements, i.e., atom types, atom positions, and connections between atoms. Thus, considering the three elements, an approach of Mamba-driven multi-perspective structural understanding (MPSU-Mamba) is proposed to localize molecular ground-state conformation. Particularly, for complex and diverse molecules, three different kinds of dedicated scanning strategies are explored to construct a comprehensive perception of corresponding molecular structures. And a bright-channel guided mechanism is defined to discriminate the critical conformation-related atom information. Experimental results on QM9 and Molecule3D datasets indicate that MPSU-Mamba significantly outperforms existing methods. Furthermore, we observe that for the case of few training samples, MPSU-Mamba still achieves superior performance, demonstrating that our method is indeed beneficial for understanding molecular structures.

Zhipeng Wang, Hao Wang, Jiexi Yan et al.

Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (ZS-SBIR) is a novel cross-modal retrieval task, where abstract sketches are used as queries to retrieve natural images under zero-shot scenario. Most existing methods regard ZS-SBIR as a traditional classification problem and employ a cross-entropy or triplet-based loss to achieve retrieval, which neglect the problems of the domain gap between sketches and natural images and the large intra-class diversity in sketches. Toward this end, we propose a novel Domain-Smoothing Network (DSN) for ZS-SBIR. Specifically, a cross-modal contrastive method is proposed to learn generalized representations to smooth the domain gap by mining relations with additional augmented samples. Furthermore, a category-specific memory bank with sketch features is explored to reduce intra-class diversity in the sketch domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach notably outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both Sketchy and TU-Berlin datasets. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/haowang1992/DSN.

Xitie Zhang, Aming Wu, Yahong Han

Cross-task generalization is a core challenge in open-world robotic manipulation, and the key lies in extracting transferable manipulation knowledge from seen tasks. Recent in-context learning approaches leverage seen task demonstrations to generate actions for unseen tasks without parameter updates. However, existing methods provide only low-level continuous action sequences as context, failing to capture composable skill knowledge and causing models to degenerate into superficial trajectory imitation. We propose Decompose and Recompose, a skill reasoning framework using atomic skill-action pairs as intermediate representations. Our approach decomposes seen demonstrations into interpretable skill--action alignments, enabling the model to recompose these skills for unseen tasks through compositional reasoning. Specifically, we construct a task-adaptive dynamic demonstration library via visual-semantic retrieval combined with skill sequences from a planning agent, complemented by a coverage-aware static library to fill missing skill patterns. Together, these yield skill-comprehensive demonstrations that explicitly elicit compositional reasoning for skill composition and execution ordering. Experiments on the AGNOSTOS benchmark and real-world environments validate our method's zero-shot cross-task generalization capability.

Deng Li, Aming Wu, Yaowei Wang et al.

Single-domain generalization aims to learn a model from single source domain data to achieve generalized performance on other unseen target domains. Existing works primarily focus on improving the generalization ability of static networks. However, static networks are unable to dynamically adapt to the diverse variations in different image scenes, leading to limited generalization capability. Different scenes exhibit varying levels of complexity, and the complexity of images further varies significantly in cross-domain scenarios. In this paper, we propose a dynamic object-centric perception network based on prompt learning, aiming to adapt to the variations in image complexity. Specifically, we propose an object-centric gating module based on prompt learning to focus attention on the object-centric features guided by the various scene prompts. Then, with the object-centric gating masks, the dynamic selective module dynamically selects highly correlated feature regions in both spatial and channel dimensions enabling the model to adaptively perceive object-centric relevant features, thereby enhancing the generalization capability. Extensive experiments were conducted on single-domain generalization tasks in image classification and object detection. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, which validates the effectiveness and generally of our proposed method.

Shuxu Chen, Yitian Zhou, Jiaquan Zhang et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a simple and effective way to elicit step-by-step solutions from large language models (LLMs). However, CoT reasoning can be unstable across runs on long, multi-step problems, leading to inconsistent answers for unchanged task. Most prior work focuses on improving the forward reasoning chain within a single pass, with less attention to iterative and contrastive correction. To address this gap, we propose CAP-CoT, a Cycle Adversarial Prompt optimization framework designed to improve both CoT reasoning accuracy and stability of a single deployed solver. In each cycle, a forward solver generates candidate reasoning chains, an adversarial challenger constructs plausible but deliberately flawed chains using targeted error strategies, and a feedback agent contrasts the two chains and produces step-aligned structured feedback. This feedback closes the optimization loop in two directions, including updating the solver prompt based on errors exposed by the challenger, and updating the challenger prompt to generate increasingly targeted errors in subsequent cycles. Unlike safety-oriented adversarial prompting such as jailbreak or prompt-injection attacks, our adversarial component is task-semantic and aims to expose logical vulnerabilities in reasoning chains. Experiments across six benchmarks and four LLM backbones demonstrate that within two to three adversarial prompt optimization cycles, CAP-CoT consistently reduces variability across runs while improving reasoning accuracy and robustness to prompt perturbations.

Yingjie He, Zhaolu Kang, Kehan Jiang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is ill-posed for automated evaluation because multiple valid word orders often exist. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including semantic fidelity, logical validity, consistency, robustness sensitivity, and information density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent dissociation between semantic recall and structural planning, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.

Yang Li, Aming Wu, Zihao Zhang et al.

In this paper, we focus on Novel Class Discovery for Point Cloud Segmentation (3D-NCD), aiming to learn a model that can segment unlabeled (novel) 3D classes using only the supervision from labeled (base) 3D classes. The key to this task is to setup the exact correlations between the point representations and their base class labels, as well as the representation correlations between the points from base and novel classes. A coarse or statistical correlation learning may lead to the confusion in novel class inference. lf we impose a causal relationship as a strong correlated constraint upon the learning process, the essential point cloud representations that accurately correspond to the classes should be uncovered. To this end, we introduce a structural causal model (SCM) to re-formalize the 3D-NCD problem and propose a new method, i.e., Joint Learning of Causal Representation and Reasoning. Specifically, we first analyze hidden confounders in the base class representations and the causal relationships between the base and novel classes through SCM. We devise a causal representation prototype that eliminates confounders to capture the causal representations of base classes. A graph structure is then used to model the causal relationships between the base classes' causal representation prototypes and the novel class prototypes, enabling causal reasoning from base to novel classes. Extensive experiments and visualization results on 3D and 2D NCD semantic segmentation demonstrate the superiorities of our method.

Deng Li, Aming Wu, Yang Li et al.

In practice, environments constantly change over time and space, posing significant challenges for object detectors trained based on a closed-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same distribution. To this end, continual test-time adaptation has attracted much attention, aiming to improve detectors' generalization by fine-tuning a few specific parameters, e.g., BatchNorm layers. However, based on a small number of test images, fine-tuning certain parameters may affect the representation ability of other fixed parameters, leading to performance degradation. Instead, we explore a new mechanism, i.e., converting the fine-tuning process to a specific-parameter generation. Particularly, we first design a dual-path LoRA-based domain-aware adapter that disentangles features into domain-invariant and domain-specific components, enabling efficient adaptation. Additionally, a conditional diffusion-based parameter generation mechanism is presented to synthesize the adapter's parameters based on the current environment, preventing the optimization from getting stuck in local optima. Finally, we propose a class-centered optimal transport alignment method to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments conducted on various continuous domain adaptive object detection tasks demonstrate the effectiveness. Meanwhile, visualization results show that the representation extracted by the generated parameters can capture more object-related information and strengthen the generalization ability.

Zihao Zhang, Aming Wu, Yahong Han

Recently, a task of Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (Single-DGOD) is proposed, aiming to generalize a detector to multiple unknown domains never seen before during training. Due to the unavailability of target-domain data, some methods leverage the multimodal capabilities of vision-language models, using textual prompts to estimate cross-domain information, enhancing the model's generalization capability. These methods typically use a single textual prompt, often referred to as the one-step prompt method. However, when dealing with complex styles such as the combination of rain and night, we observe that the performance of the one-step prompt method tends to be relatively weak. The reason may be that many scenes incorporate not just a single style but a combination of multiple styles. The one-step prompt method may not effectively synthesize combined information involving various styles. To address this limitation, we propose a new method, i.e., Style Evolving along Chain-of-Thought, which aims to progressively integrate and expand style information along the chain of thought, enabling the continual evolution of styles. Specifically, by progressively refining style descriptions and guiding the diverse evolution of styles, this approach enables more accurate simulation of various style characteristics and helps the model gradually learn and adapt to subtle differences between styles. Additionally, it exposes the model to a broader range of style features with different data distributions, thereby enhancing its generalization capability in unseen domains. The significant performance gains over five adverse-weather scenarios and the Real to Art benchmark demonstrate the superiorities of our method.

Aming Wu, Rui Liu, Yahong Han et al.

To improve the generalization of detectors, for domain adaptive object detection (DAOD), recent advances mainly explore aligning feature-level distributions between the source and single-target domain, which may neglect the impact of domain-specific information existing in the aligned features. Towards DAOD, it is important to extract domain-invariant object representations. To this end, in this paper, we try to disentangle domain-invariant representations from domain-specific representations. And we propose a novel disentangled method based on vector decomposition. Firstly, an extractor is devised to separate domain-invariant representations from the input, which are used for extracting object proposals. Secondly, domain-specific representations are introduced as the differences between the input and domain-invariant representations. Through the difference operation, the gap between the domain-specific and domain-invariant representations is enlarged, which promotes domain-invariant representations to contain more domain-irrelevant information. In the experiment, we separately evaluate our method on the single- and compound-target case. For the single-target case, experimental results of four domain-shift scenes show our method obtains a significant performance gain over baseline methods. Moreover, for the compound-target case (i.e., the target is a compound of two different domains without domain labels), our method outperforms baseline methods by around 4%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

Aming Wu, Yahong Han, Linchao Zhu et al.

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to strengthen the performance of novel object detection with few labeled samples. To alleviate the constraint of few samples, enhancing the generalization ability of learned features for novel objects plays a key role. Thus, the feature learning process of FSOD should focus more on intrinsical object characteristics, which are invariant under different visual changes and therefore are helpful for feature generalization. Unlike previous attempts of the meta-learning paradigm, in this paper, we explore how to enhance object features with intrinsical characteristics that are universal across different object categories. We propose a new prototype, namely universal prototype, that is learned from all object categories. Besides the advantage of characterizing invariant characteristics, the universal prototypes alleviate the impact of unbalanced object categories. After enhancing object features with the universal prototypes, we impose a consistency loss to maximize the agreement between the enhanced features and the original ones, which is beneficial for learning invariant object characteristics. Thus, we develop a new framework of few-shot object detection with universal prototypes ({FSOD}^{up}) that owns the merit of feature generalization towards novel objects. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO show the effectiveness of {FSOD}^{up}. Particularly, for the 1-shot case of VOC Split2, {FSOD}^{up} outperforms the baseline by 6.8% in terms of mAP.

Aming Wu, Yahong Han

Recent advances of video captioning often employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) as the decoder. However, RNN is prone to diluting long-term information. Recent works have demonstrated memory network (MemNet) has the advantage of storing long-term information. However, as the decoder, it has not been well exploited for video captioning. The reason partially comes from the difficulty of sequence decoding with MemNet. Instead of the common practice, i.e., sequence decoding with RNN, in this paper, we devise a novel memory decoder for video captioning. Concretely, after obtaining representation of each frame through a pre-trained network, we first fuse the visual and lexical information. Then, at each time step, we construct a multi-layer MemNet-based decoder, i.e., in each layer, we employ a memory set to store previous information and an attention mechanism to select the information related to the current input. Thus, this decoder avoids the dilution of long-term information. And the multi-layer architecture is helpful for capturing dependencies between frames and word sequences. Experimental results show that even without the encoding network, our decoder still could obtain competitive performance and outperform the performance of RNN decoder. Furthermore, compared with one-layer RNN decoder, our decoder has fewer parameters.

Aming Wu, Yahong Han, Linchao Zhu et al.

Most state-of-the-art methods of object detection suffer from poor generalization ability when the training and test data are from different domains, e.g., with different styles. To address this problem, previous methods mainly use holistic representations to align feature-level and pixel-level distributions of different domains, which may neglect the instance-level characteristics of objects in images. Besides, when transferring detection ability across different domains, it is important to obtain the instance-level features that are domain-invariant, instead of the styles that are domain-specific. Therefore, in order to extract instance-invariant features, we should disentangle the domain-invariant features from the domain-specific features. To this end, a progressive disentangled framework is first proposed to solve domain adaptive object detection. Particularly, base on disentangled learning used for feature decomposition, we devise two disentangled layers to decompose domain-invariant and domain-specific features. And the instance-invariant features are extracted based on the domain-invariant features. Finally, to enhance the disentanglement, a three-stage training mechanism including multiple loss functions is devised to optimize our model. In the experiment, we verify the effectiveness of our method on three domain-shift scenes. Our method is separately 2.3\%, 3.6\%, and 4.0\% higher than the baseline method \cite{saito2019strong}.