Caiyan Qin

Sihan Cao, Jianwei Zhang, Pengcheng Zheng et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) incur substantial inference costs due to the processing of a vast number of visual tokens. Existing methods typically struggle to model progressive visual token reduction as a multi-step decision process with sequential dependencies and often rely on hand-engineered scoring rules that lack adaptive optimization for complex reasoning trajectories. To overcome these limitations, we propose TPRL, a reinforcement learning framework that learns adaptive pruning trajectories through language-guided sequential optimization tied directly to end-task performance. We formulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision process with explicit state transitions and employ a self-supervised autoencoder to compress visual tokens into a compact state representation for efficient policy learning. The pruning policy is initialized through learning from demonstrations and subsequently fine-tuned using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to jointly optimize task accuracy and computational efficiency. Our experimental results demonstrate that TPRL removes up to 66.7\% of visual tokens and achieves up to a 54.2\% reduction in FLOPs during inference while maintaining a near-lossless average accuracy drop of only 0.7\%. Code is released at \href{https://github.com/MagicVicCoder/TPRL}{\textcolor{mypink}{https://github.com/MagicVicCoder/TPRL}}.

Pengcheng Zheng, Chaoning Zhang, Ya Wen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in natural language understanding and reasoning, while recent extensions that incorporate visual inputs enable them to process multimodal information. Despite these advances, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) incur substantial computational and memory costs, hindering deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Existing layer pruning methods typically rely on local similarity metrics or static proxy signals, failing to capture the global and dynamic evolution of representations across model depth, which often leads to the removal of transition-critical layers. To address this limitation, we propose a topology-aware layer pruning framework for LVLMs. Specifically, we represent layer wise hidden states as point clouds and models their evolution using \textit{simplicial complexes}. By leveraging \textit{zigzag persistent homology}, we quantify inter-layer topological consistency and enable adaptive pruning that preserves critical representational transitions. Extensive experiments on diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing pruning methods across a wide range of sparsity ratios. Our code is available at https://github.com/zpc456/TopoVLM.

Jiaquan Zhang, Caiyan Qin, Haoyu Bian et al.

Neural operators learn mappings from function-dependent inputs to solutions, providing an effective framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). For time-dependent PDEs, existing methods typically perform long-horizon prediction through autoregressive rollout directly in high-dimensional physical field spaces, where each predicted state is recursively fed back as the input for the next step. Although effective for short-term prediction, this autoregressive rollout and the lack of continuous-time modeling lead to progressive error accumulation over long-horizon rollouts. In this work, we propose Autoregression-Free Neural Operators (AFNO), which map the time evolution of PDEs into a latent space and model continuous-time vector fields within it. AFNO uses flow matching to learn the latent vector field, thereby enabling continuous evolution over extended horizons, avoiding autoregressive rollout and capturing dynamics under varying parameter configurations through explicit conditioning on physical parameters. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on six PDEs demonstrate that AFNO improves long-horizon prediction stability and consistently reduces rollout errors compared with the baselines.

Xudong Wang, Chaoning Zhang, Qigan Sun et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge during generation. However, the effectiveness of RAG depends not only on the design of the retriever and the capacity of the underlying model, but also on how retrieved evidence is structured and aligned with the query. Existing RAG approaches typically retrieve and concatenate unstructured text fragments as context, which often introduces redundant or weakly relevant information. This practice leads to excessive context accumulation, reduced semantic alignment, and fragmented reasoning chains, thereby degrading generation quality while increasing token consumption. To address these challenges, we propose Tri-RAG, a structured triplet-based retrieval framework that improves retrieval efficiency through reasoning-aligned context construction. Tri-RAG automatically transforms external knowledge from natural language into standardized structured triplets consisting of Condition, Proof, and Conclusion, explicitly capturing logical relations among knowledge fragments using lightweight prompt-based adaptation with frozen model parameters. Building on this representation, the triplet head Condition is treated as an explicit semantic anchor for retrieval and matching, enabling precise identification of query-relevant knowledge units without directly concatenating lengthy raw texts. As a result, Tri-RAG achieves a favorable balance between retrieval accuracy and context token efficiency. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Tri-RAG significantly improves retrieval quality and reasoning efficiency, while producing more stable generation behavior and more efficient resource utilization in complex reasoning scenarios.

Zijian Liu, Sihan Cao, Pengcheng Zheng et al.

Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated strong capability in video understanding, yet they still suffer from hallucinations. Existing mitigation methods typically rely on training, input modification, auxiliary guidance, or additional decoding procedures, while largely overlooking a more fundamental challenge. During generation, Video-LLMs tend to over-rely on a limited portion of temporal evidence, leading to temporally imbalanced evidence aggregation across the video. To address this issue, we investigate a decoder-side phenomenon in which the model exhibits a temporally imbalanced concentration pattern. We term the frame with the highest aggregated frame-level attention mass the anchor frame. We find that this bias is largely independent of the input video and instead appears to reflect a persistent, model-specific structural or positional bias, whose over-dominance is closely associated with hallucination-prone generation. Motivated by this insight, we propose Decoder-side Temporal Rebalancing (DTR), a training-free, layer-selective inference method that rebalances temporal evidence allocation in middle-to-late decoder layers without altering visual encoding or requiring auxiliary models. DTR adaptively calibrates decoder-side visual attention to alleviate temporally imbalanced concentration and encourage under-attended frames to contribute more effectively to response generation. In this way, DTR guides the decoder to ground its outputs in temporally broader and more balanced video evidence. Extensive experiments on hallucination and video understanding benchmarks show that DTR consistently improves hallucination robustness across diverse Video-LLM families, while preserving competitive video understanding performance and high inference efficiency.

Yutong Xiao, Ran Ran, Jiwei Wei et al.

The rapid advancement of generative technologies has made synthetic images nearly indistinguishable from real ones, thereby creating an urgent need for robust detectors to counter misinformation. However, existing methods mainly rely on universal artifact features that are shared across multiple generators. We observe that as the diversity of generators increases, the overlap of these common features gradually decreases. This severely undermines model generalization. In contrast, focusing only on unique artifacts tends to cause overfitting to specific forgery patterns. To address this challenge, we propose LEGO (LoRA-Enabled Generator-Oriented Framework). The core mechanism of LEGO employs an MLP to modulate multiple LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) blocks, each pretrained to capture the unique artifacts of a specific generator, followed by attention-based feature fusion. Unlike conventional methods that seek a single universal solution, LEGO delegates unique artifact extraction to specialized LoRA modules by dividing its training procedure into two stages. Each LoRA module is individually trained on a single-generator dataset to learn generator-specific representations, then MLP and attention layers are trained on mixed datasets to dynamically regulate the contribution of each module. Benefiting from its modular yet robust design, LEGO can be naturally extended by incorporating new LoRA modules for adaptation to newly emerging next-generation datasets, while still achieving substantially better performance than prior SOTA methods with fewer than 30,000 training images, less than 10% of their training data, and only 5 epochs in each training stage.

Avilasha Mandal, Chaoning Zhang, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari et al.

Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a vision foundation model has significantly advanced in prompt-driven video object segmentation, yet their practical deployment remains limited by the high computational and memory cost of processing dense visual tokens across time. The SAM2 pipelines typically propagate all visual tokens produced by the image encoder through downstream temporal reasoning modules, regardless of their relevance to the target object, resulting in reduced scalability due to quadratic memory attention overhead. In this work, we introduce a text-guided token pruning framework that improves inference efficiency by selectively reducing token density prior to temporal propagation, without modifying the underlying segmentation architecture. Operating after visual encoding and before memory based propagation, our method ranks tokens using a lightweight routing mechanism that integrates local visual context, semantic relevance derived from object-centric textual descriptions (either user-provided or automatically generated), and uncertainty cues that help preserve ambiguous or boundary critical regions. By retaining only the most informative tokens for downstream processing, the proposed approach reduces redundant computation while maintaining segmentation fidelity. Extensive experiments across multiple challenging video segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that post-encoder token pruning provides a practical and effective pathway to efficient, prompt-aware video segmentation, achieving up to 42.50 percent faster inference and 37.41 percent lower GPU memory usage compared to the unpruned baseline SAM2, while preserving competitive J and F performance. These results highlight the potential of early token selection to improve the scalability of transformer-based video segmentation systems for real-time and resource-constrained applications.

Zhenzhen Huang, Chaoning Zhang, Haoyu Bian et al.

Soft prompt tuning leverages continuous embeddings to capture task-specific information in large pre-trained language models (LLMs), achieving competitive performance in few-shot settings. However, soft prompts rely on high-dimensional, implicit representations and lack explicit semantics and traceable training behaviors, which limits their interpretability. To address this limitation, we propose a soft prompt tuning optimization method based on topological morphological evolution. Specifically, we employ persistent homology from topological data analysis (TDA) to quantify the structural representations of soft prompts in continuous parameter space and their training process evolution. Quantitative analysis shows that topologically stable and compact soft prompts achieve better downstream performance. Based on this empirical observation, we construct a loss function for optimizing soft prompt tuning, termed Topological Soft Prompt Loss (TSLoss). TSLoss guides the model to learn structurally stable adaptations by quantifying inter-parameter connectivity and redundancy. Extensive experiments show that training with TSLoss accelerates convergence and improves tuning performance, providing an interpretable method to understand and optimize soft prompt tuning from structural and topological perspectives.

Jianwei Zhang, Sihan Cao, Chaoning Zhang et al.

Recent large-scale generative models enable high-quality 3D synthesis. However, the public accessibility of pre-trained weights introduces a critical vulnerability. Adversaries can fine-tune these models to steal specialized knowledge acquired during pre-training, leading to intellectual property infringement. Unlike defenses for 2D images and language models, 3D generators require specialized protection due to their explicit Gaussian representations, which expose fundamental structural parameters directly to gradient-based optimization. We propose GaussLock, the first approach designed to defend 3D generative models against fine-tuning attacks. GaussLock is a lightweight parameter-space immunization framework that integrates authorized distillation with attribute-aware trap losses targeting position, scale, rotation, opacity, and color. Specifically, these traps systematically collapse spatial distributions, distort geometric shapes, align rotational axes, and suppress primitive visibility to fundamentally destroy structural integrity. By jointly optimizing these dual objectives, the distillation process preserves fidelity on authorized tasks while the embedded traps actively disrupt unauthorized reconstructions. Experiments on large-scale Gaussian models demonstrate that GaussLock effectively neutralizes unauthorized fine-tuning attacks. It substantially degrades the quality of unauthorized reconstructions, evidenced by significantly higher LPIPS and lower PSNR, while effectively maintaining performance on authorized fine-tuning.

Jiaquan Zhang, Qigan Sun, Chaoning Zhang et al.

Enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) remains a core challenge in natural language processing. The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm dominates practical applications for its single-round efficiency, yet its reasoning chains often exhibit logical gaps. While multi-round paradigms like Graph-of-Thoughts (GoT), Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), and Atom of Thought (AoT) achieve strong performance and reveal effective reasoning structures, their high cost limits practical use. To address this problem, this paper proposes a topology-based method for optimizing reasoning chains. The framework embeds essential topological patterns of effective reasoning into the lightweight CoT paradigm. Using persistent homology, we map CoT, ToT, and GoT into a unified topological space to quantify their structural features. On this basis, we design a unified optimization system: a Topological Optimization Agent diagnoses deviations in CoT chains from desirable topological characteristics and simultaneously generates targeted strategies to repair these structural deficiencies. Compared with multi-round reasoning methods like ToT and GoT, experiments on multiple datasets show that our approach offers a superior balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency, showcasing a practical solution to ``single-round generation with multi-round intelligence''.

Jianwei Zhang, Chaoning Zhang, Sihan Cao et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from prohibitive inference costs due to the massive number of visual tokens processed by the language decoder. Existing pruning methods often lead to significant performance degradation because the irreversible removal of visual tokens causes a distribution shift in the hidden states that deviates from the pre-trained full-token regime. To address this, we propose Representation Consistency Pruner, which we refer to as RCP, as a novel framework that integrates cumulative visual token pruning with a delayed repair mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a cross-attention pruner that leverages the intrinsic attention of the LLM as a baseline to predict cumulative masks, ensuring consistent and monotonic token reduction across layers. To compensate for the resulting information loss, we design a delayed repair adapter denoted as DRA, which caches the essence of pruned tokens and applies FiLM-based modulation specifically to the answer generation tokens. We employ a repair loss to match the first and second-order statistics of the pruned representations with a full-token teacher. RCP is highly efficient because it trains only lightweight plug-in modules while allowing for physical token discarding at inference. Extensive experiments on LVLM benchmarks demonstrate that RCP removes up to 88.9\% of visual tokens and reduces FLOPs by up to 85.7\% with only a marginal average accuracy drop, and outperforms prior methods that avoid fine-tuning the original model on several widely used benchmarks.

Jiaquan Zhang, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Songbo Zhang et al.

Neural operators offer an effective framework for learning solutions of partial differential equations for many physical systems in a resolution-invariant and data-driven manner. Existing neural operators, however, often suffer from instability in multi-layer iteration and long-horizon rollout, which stems from the unconstrained Euclidean latent space updates that violate the geometric and conservation laws. To address this challenge, we propose to constrain manifolds with low-rank Lie algebra parameterization that performs group action updates on the latent representation. Our method, termed Manifold Constraining based on Lie group (MCL), acts as an efficient \emph{plug-and-play} module that enforces geometric inductive bias to existing neural operators. Extensive experiments on various partial differential equations, such as 1-D Burgers and 2-D Navier-Stokes, over a wide range of parameters and steps demonstrate that our method effectively lowers the relative prediction error by 30-50\% at the cost of 2.26\% of parameter increase. The results show that our approach provides a scalable solution for improving long-term prediction fidelity by addressing the principled geometric constraints absent in the neural operator updates.

Zhenzhen Huang, Haoyu Bian, Jiaquan Zhang et al.

Several complex physical systems are governed by multi-scale partial differential equations (PDEs) that exhibit both smooth low-frequency components and localized high-frequency structures. Existing physics-informed neural network (PINN) methods typically train with fixed coordinate system inputs, where geometric misalignment with these structures induces gradient stiffness and ill-conditioning that hinder convergence. To address this issue, we introduce a mapping paradigm that reshapes the input coordinates through differentiable geometric compactification mappings and couples the geometric structure of PDEs with the spectral properties of residual operators. Based on this paradigm, we propose Geometric Compactification (GC)-PINN, a framework that introduces three mapping strategies for periodic boundaries, far-field scale expansion, and localized singular structures in the input domain without modifying the underlying PINN architecture. Extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields more uniform residual distributions and higher solution accuracy on representative 1D and 2D PDEs, while improving training stability and convergence speed.

Shuchang Zhou, Shangkun Wu, Jiwei Wei et al.

AI-generated images are becoming increasingly realistic and diverse, posing significant challenges for generalizable detection. While Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) provide rich semantic representations and frequency-based methods capture complementary artifact cues, existing approaches that combine these modalities still suffer from limited generalization, with notable performance degradation on unseen generative models. We attribute this limitation to two key factors: frequency shortcut bias toward easily distinguishable cues associated with specific generators and cross-domain representation conflict between high-level semantics and low-level frequency patterns. To address these issues, we propose a Frequency-aware Gated Injection Network (FGINet) to improve generalization. Specifically, we design a Band-Masked Frequency Encoder (BMFE) that applies cross-band masking in the frequency domain to reduce reliance on generator-specific patterns and encourage more diverse and generalizable representations. We further introduce a Layer-wise Gated Frequency Injection (LGFI) mechanism to progressively inject frequency cues into the VFM backbone with adaptive gating, aligning with its hierarchical abstraction and alleviating representation conflict. Moreover, we propose a Hyperspherical Compactness Learning (HCL) framework with a cosine margin objective to learn compact and well-separated representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FGINet achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization across multiple challenging datasets.

Yitian Zhou, Chaoning Zhang, Jiaquan Zhang et al.

Long-context large language models remain computationally expensive to run and often fail to reliably process very long inputs, which makes context compression an important component of many systems. Existing compression approaches typically rely on trained compressors, dense retrieval-style selection, or heuristic trimming, and they often struggle to jointly preserve task relevance, topic coverage, and cross-sentence coherence under a strict token budget. To address this, we propose a training-free and model-agnostic compression framework that selects a compact set of sentences guided by structural graph priors. Our method constructs a sparse hybrid sentence graph that combines mutual k-NN semantic edges with short-range sequential edges, extracts a topic skeleton via clustering, and ranks sentences using an interpretable score that integrates task relevance, cluster representativeness, bridge centrality, and a cycle coverage cue. A budgeted greedy selection with redundancy suppression then produces a readable compressed context in original order. Experimental results on four datasets show that our approach is competitive with strong extractive and abstractive baselines, demonstrating larger gains on long-document benchmarks.

Yutong Li, Yitian Zhou, Xudong Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, including multi-step reasoning such as mathematical proving. However, existing approaches often lack an explicit and dynamic mechanism to structurally represent and evolve intermediate reasoning states, which limits their ability to perform context-aware theorem selection and iterative conclusion generation. To address these challenges, we propose GraphMind, a novel dynamic graph-based framework that integrates the graph neural network (GNN) with LLMs to iteratively select theorems and generate intermediate conclusions for multi-step reasoning. Our method models the reasoning process as a heterogeneous evolving graph, where nodes represent conditions, theorems, and conclusions, while edges capture logical dependencies between nodes. By encoding the current reasoning state with GNN and leveraging semantic matching for theorem selection, our framework enables context-aware, interpretable, and structured reasoning in a closed-loop manner. Experiments on various question-answering (QA) datasets demonstrate that our proposed GraphMind method achieves consistent performance improvements and significantly outperforms existing baselines in multi-step reasoning, validating the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.

Chaoning Zhang, Joseph Cho, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), developed by Meta AI Research, represents a significant breakthrough in computer vision, offering a robust framework for image and video segmentation. This survey provides a comprehensive exploration of the SAM family, including SAM and SAM 2, highlighting their advancements in granularity and contextual understanding. Our study demonstrates SAM's versatility across a wide range of applications while identifying areas where improvements are needed, particularly in scenarios requiring high granularity and in the absence of explicit prompts. By mapping the evolution and capabilities of SAM models, we offer insights into their strengths and limitations and suggest future research directions, including domain-specific adaptations and enhanced memory and propagation mechanisms. We believe that this survey comprehensively covers the breadth of SAM's applications and challenges, setting the stage for ongoing advancements in segmentation technology.