Ruxi Deng

Xiangye Lin, Hongxin Zhang, Ruxi Deng et al.

In this work, we study Cooperative Spatial Intelligence, the ability of decentralized embodied agents to coordinate effectively under dynamic environmental constraints across city-scale outdoor domains. We introduce Sentinel Challenge, a benchmark where multiple decentralized embodied agents must communicate in natural language to agree on a mutually safe and convenient meeting point within large, city-scale outdoor environments. Each agent must then navigate safely while avoiding dynamic sentinels patrolling the area, using a tool that provides coarse spatial information. To address this, we propose CoSaR (Cooperative Spatial Reasoning and Planning), a framework that bridges the high-level communication and planning abilities of foundation models with the precision of classical spatial navigation algorithms. CoSaR enables agents to exchange situational updates, reason over evolving spatial constraints, and collaboratively replan trajectories. Evaluated across 14 city-level scenes with 3-5 agents, CoSaR consistently leads to faster gathering, shorter path lengths, and improved safety. Our results demonstrate that integrating dynamic communication with spatial reasoning is essential for robust multi-agent cooperation. By formalizing this new setting and providing a scalable benchmark, we aim to build a foundation for advancing cooperative spatial intelligence in embodied multi-agent systems. Code and challenge are available at https://github.com/UMass-Embodied-AGI/Sentinel.

Ruxi Deng, Wenxuan Bao, Tianxin Wei et al.

Pretrained VLMs exhibit strong zero-shot classification capabilities, but their predictions degrade significantly under common image corruptions. To improve robustness, many test-time adaptation (TTA) methods adopt positive data augmentation (PDA), which generates multiple views of each test sample to reduce prediction variance. However, these methods suffer from two key limitations. First, it introduces considerable computational overhead due to the large number of augmentations required per image. Second, it fails to mitigate prediction bias, where the model tends to predict certain classes disproportionately under corruption, as PDA operates on corrupted inputs and typically does not remove the corruption itself. To address these challenges, we propose Panda, a novel TTA method based on negative data augmentation (NDA). Unlike positive augmentations that preserve object semantics, Panda generates negative augmentations by disrupting semantic content. It divides images into patches and randomly assembles them from a shared patch pool. These negatively augmented images retain corruption-specific features while discarding object-relevant signals. We then subtract the mean feature of these negative samples from the original image feature, effectively suppressing corruption-related components while preserving class-relevant information. This mitigates prediction bias under distribution shifts. Panda allows augmentation to be shared across samples within a batch, resulting in minimal computational overhead. Panda can be seamlessly integrated into existing test-time adaptation frameworks and substantially improve their robustness. Our experiments indicate that Panda delivers superior performance compared to PDA methods, and a wide range of TTA methods exhibit significantly enhanced performance when integrated with Panda. Our code is available at https://github.com/ruxideng/Panda .

Wenxuan Bao, Ruxi Deng, Ruizhong Qiu et al.

Test-time adaptation with pre-trained vision-language models has gained increasing attention for addressing distribution shifts during testing. Among these approaches, memory-based algorithms stand out due to their training-free nature and ability to leverage historical test data. However, existing test-time adaptation methods are typically designed for a single domain with abundant data. In decentralized settings such as federated learning, applying these methods individually to each client suffers from limited test data, while directly sharing a single global memory via the server prevents proper personalization to each client's unique distribution. To address this, we propose Latte, a novel framework where each client maintains a local memory to store embeddings from its own historical test data and an external memory to store class prototypes from other relevant clients. During communication, each client retrieves prototypes from similar clients under the server's coordination to expand its memory. For local adaptation, Latte utilizes both embedding similarity and uncertainty to enhance model performance. Our theoretical analysis shows that Latte effectively leverages in-distribution clients while remaining robust to out-of-distribution clients. Extensive experiments on domain adaptation and corruption benchmarks validate that Latte achieves superior performance in decentralized settings, while introducing only negligible communication and computation costs. Our code is available at https://github.com/baowenxuan/Latte .

Wenxuan Bao, Ruxi Deng, Jingrui He

Pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot generalization but remain vulnerable to distribution shifts caused by input corruptions. In this work, we investigate how corruptions affect CLIP's image embeddings and uncover a consistent phenomenon we term as embedding variance collapse, where both intra-class and inter-class variances shrink as corruption severity increases. We find that this collapse is closely tied to performance degradation, with inter-class variance strongly correlated with classification accuracy. To explain this phenomenon, we analyze how corruptions alter the structure of the embedding space. Our theoretical results suggest that the visual encoder tends to encode corruption-related signals, which dilute class-discriminative features and compress the representation geometry. We further show that maximizing inter-class variance, even when estimated from pseudo-labels, can provably enhance embedding quality. Based on this insight, we propose Mint, a simple test-time adaptation method that maximizes pseudo-label-based inter-class variance on the fly using a mean accumulator and a gradient accumulator. Mint operates effectively with small batch sizes and consistently improves performance across multiple corruption benchmarks and CLIP architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/baowenxuan/Mint .