h-index139
55papers
4,433citations
Novelty48%
AI Score60

55 Papers

CLAug 24, 2023
Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code

Baptiste Rozière, Jonas Gehring, Fabian Gloeckle et al. · meta-ai

We release Code Llama, a family of large language models for code based on Llama 2 providing state-of-the-art performance among open models, infilling capabilities, support for large input contexts, and zero-shot instruction following ability for programming tasks. We provide multiple flavors to cover a wide range of applications: foundation models (Code Llama), Python specializations (Code Llama - Python), and instruction-following models (Code Llama - Instruct) with 7B, 13B, 34B and 70B parameters each. All models are trained on sequences of 16k tokens and show improvements on inputs with up to 100k tokens. 7B, 13B and 70B Code Llama and Code Llama - Instruct variants support infilling based on surrounding content. Code Llama reaches state-of-the-art performance among open models on several code benchmarks, with scores of up to 67% and 65% on HumanEval and MBPP, respectively. Notably, Code Llama - Python 7B outperforms Llama 2 70B on HumanEval and MBPP, and all our models outperform every other publicly available model on MultiPL-E. We release Code Llama under a permissive license that allows for both research and commercial use.

ROJun 3Code
M3imic: Learning a Versatile Whole-Body Controller for Multimodal Motion Mimicking

Zuxing Lu, Ziang Zheng, Yao Lyu et al.

Building a general-purpose whole-body controller is essential for enabling diverse motion capabilities in humanoid robots across a wide range of downstream tasks, including locomotion and loco-manipulation. Different tasks rely on distinct motion reference modalities: locomotion primarily depends on coordinated robot joint trajectories, whereas manipulation requires precise end-effector trajectory tracking. Existing methods often overlook the representational mismatch between dense robot joint angles and sparse end-effector poses. To address this, we propose Multi-Modal Mimic (M3imic), a versatile multi-modal whole-body control framework that unifies heterogeneous motion reference modalities, including robot joint angles, human pose trajectories, and end-effector poses, using modality-specific encoders to map them into a shared latent space. Leveraging large-scale reinforcement learning in the simulator, we train a single policy that achieves sim-to-real transfer across multiple motion reference modalities without modality-specific retraining. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments on the Unitree G1 robot are conducted to evaluate the proposed framework. In simulation, the policy achieves a peak success rate of 98.42\% on an unseen test dataset, demonstrating its exceptional generalization capability. The code is available at https://github.com/Renforce-Dynamics/MultiModalWBC

CLSep 27, 2023
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models

Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog et al. · meta-ai

We present a series of long-context LLMs that support effective context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. Our model series are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 with longer training sequences and on a dataset where long texts are upsampled. We perform extensive evaluation on language modeling, synthetic context probing tasks, and a wide range of research benchmarks. On research benchmarks, our models achieve consistent improvements on most regular tasks and significant improvements on long-context tasks over Llama 2. Notably, with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that does not require human-annotated long instruction data, the 70B variant can already surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on a suite of long-context tasks. Alongside these results, we provide an in-depth analysis on the individual components of our method. We delve into Llama's position encodings and discuss its limitation in modeling long dependencies. We also examine the impact of various design choices in the pretraining process, including the data mix and the training curriculum of sequence lengths -- our ablation experiments suggest that having abundant long texts in the pretrain dataset is not the key to achieving strong performance, and we empirically verify that long context continual pretraining is more efficient and similarly effective compared to pretraining from scratch with long sequences.

IVSep 15, 2022
Prediction of Gender from Longitudinal MRI data via Deep Learning on Adolescent Data Reveals Unique Patterns Associated with Brain Structure and Change over a Two-year Period

Yuda Bi, Anees Abrol, Zening Fu et al.

Deep learning algorithms for predicting neuroimaging data have shown considerable promise in various applications. Prior work has demonstrated that deep learning models that take advantage of the data's 3D structure can outperform standard machine learning on several learning tasks. However, most prior research in this area has focused on neuroimaging data from adults. Within the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset, a large longitudinal development study, we examine structural MRI data to predict gender and identify gender-related changes in brain structure. Results demonstrate that gender prediction accuracy is exceptionally high (>97%) with training epochs >200 and that this accuracy increases with age. Brain regions identified as the most discriminative in the task under study include predominantly frontal areas and the temporal lobe. When evaluating gender predictive changes specific to a two-year increase in age, a broader set of visual, cingulate, and insular regions are revealed. Our findings show a robust gender-related structural brain change pattern, even over a small age range. This suggests that it might be possible to study how the brain changes during adolescence by looking at how these changes are related to different behavioral and environmental factors.

LGApr 15, 2023
SalientGrads: Sparse Models for Communication Efficient and Data Aware Distributed Federated Training

Riyasat Ohib, Bishal Thapaliya, Pratyush Gaggenapalli et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables the training of a model leveraging decentralized data in client sites while preserving privacy by not collecting data. However, one of the significant challenges of FL is limited computation and low communication bandwidth in resource limited edge client nodes. To address this, several solutions have been proposed in recent times including transmitting sparse models and learning dynamic masks iteratively, among others. However, many of these methods rely on transmitting the model weights throughout the entire training process as they are based on ad-hoc or random pruning criteria. In this work, we propose Salient Grads, which simplifies the process of sparse training by choosing a data aware subnetwork before training, based on the model-parameter's saliency scores, which is calculated from the local client data. Moreover only highly sparse gradients are transmitted between the server and client models during the training process unlike most methods that rely on sharing the entire dense model in each round. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our method in a real world federated learning application and report improvement in wall-clock communication time.

CVMar 18
GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model

Angen Ye, Boyuan Wang, Chaojun Ni et al.

World-Action Models (WAM) initialized from pre-trained video generation backbones have demonstrated remarkable potential for robot policy learning. However, existing approaches face two critical bottlenecks that hinder performance and deployment. First, jointly reasoning over future visual dynamics and corresponding actions incurs substantial inference overhead. Second, joint modeling often entangles visual and motion representations, making motion prediction accuracy heavily dependent on the quality of future video forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce GigaWorld-Policy, an action-centered WAM that learns 2D pixel-action dynamics while enabling efficient action decoding, with optional video generation. Specifically, we formulate policy training into two coupled components: the model predicts future action sequences conditioned on the current observation, and simultaneously generates future videos conditioned on the predicted actions and the same observation. The policy is supervised by both action prediction and video generation, providing richer learning signals and encouraging physically plausible actions through visual-dynamics constraints. With a causal design that prevents future-video tokens from influencing action tokens, explicit future-video generation is optional at inference time, allowing faster action prediction during deployment. To support this paradigm, we curate a diverse, large-scale robot dataset to pre-train an action-centered video generation model, which is then adapted as the backbone for robot policy learning. Experimental results on real-world robotic platforms show that GigaWorld-Policy runs 9x faster than the leading WAM baseline, Motus, while improving task success rates by 7%. Moreover, compared with pi-0.5, GigaWorld-Policy improves performance by 95% on RoboTwin 2.0.

LGOct 6, 2023Code
Perfect Alignment May be Poisonous to Graph Contrastive Learning

Jingyu Liu, Huayi Tang, Yong Liu

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) aims to learn node representations by aligning positive pairs and separating negative ones. However, few of researchers have focused on the inner law behind specific augmentations used in graph-based learning. What kind of augmentation will help downstream performance, how does contrastive learning actually influence downstream tasks, and why the magnitude of augmentation matters so much? This paper seeks to address these questions by establishing a connection between augmentation and downstream performance. Our findings reveal that GCL contributes to downstream tasks mainly by separating different classes rather than gathering nodes of the same class. So perfect alignment and augmentation overlap which draw all intra-class samples the same can not fully explain the success of contrastive learning. Therefore, in order to understand how augmentation aids the contrastive learning process, we conduct further investigations into the generalization, finding that perfect alignment that draw positive pair the same could help contrastive loss but is poisonous to generalization, as a result, perfect alignment may not lead to best downstream performance, so specifically designed augmentation is needed to achieve appropriate alignment performance and improve downstream accuracy. We further analyse the result by information theory and graph spectrum theory and propose two simple but effective methods to verify the theories. The two methods could be easily applied to various GCL algorithms and extensive experiments are conducted to prove its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/somebodyhh1/GRACEIS

CVMar 7, 2023
CLIP-Layout: Style-Consistent Indoor Scene Synthesis with Semantic Furniture Embedding

Jingyu Liu, Wenhan Xiong, Ian Jones et al.

Indoor scene synthesis involves automatically picking and placing furniture appropriately on a floor plan, so that the scene looks realistic and is functionally plausible. Such scenes can serve as homes for immersive 3D experiences, or be used to train embodied agents. Existing methods for this task rely on labeled categories of furniture, e.g. bed, chair or table, to generate contextually relevant combinations of furniture. Whether heuristic or learned, these methods ignore instance-level visual attributes of objects, and as a result may produce visually less coherent scenes. In this paper, we introduce an auto-regressive scene model which can output instance-level predictions, using general purpose image embedding based on CLIP. This allows us to learn visual correspondences such as matching color and style, and produce more functionally plausible and aesthetically pleasing scenes. Evaluated on the 3D-FRONT dataset, our model achieves SOTA results in scene synthesis and improves auto-completion metrics by over 50%. Moreover, our embedding-based approach enables zero-shot text-guided scene synthesis and editing, which easily generalizes to furniture not seen during training.

CLDec 16, 2025
Efficient-DLM: From Autoregressive to Diffusion Language Models, and Beyond in Speed

Yonggan Fu, Lexington Whalen, Zhifan Ye et al.

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To this end, we study AR-to-dLM conversion to transform pretrained AR models into efficient dLMs that excel in speed while preserving AR models' task accuracy. We achieve this by identifying limitations in the attention patterns and objectives of existing AR-to-dLM methods and then proposing principles and methodologies for more effective AR-to-dLM conversion. Specifically, we first systematically compare different attention patterns and find that maintaining pretrained AR weight distributions is critical for effective AR-to-dLM conversion. As such, we introduce a continuous pretraining scheme with a block-wise attention pattern, which remains causal across blocks while enabling bidirectional modeling within each block. We find that this approach can better preserve pretrained AR models' weight distributions than fully bidirectional modeling, in addition to its known benefit of enabling KV caching, and leads to a win-win in accuracy and efficiency. Second, to mitigate the training-test gap in mask token distributions (uniform vs. highly left-to-right), we propose a position-dependent token masking strategy that assigns higher masking probabilities to later tokens during training to better mimic test-time behavior. Leveraging this framework, we conduct extensive studies of dLMs' attention patterns, training dynamics, and other design choices, providing actionable insights into scalable AR-to-dLM conversion. These studies lead to the Efficient-DLM family, which outperforms state-of-the-art AR models and dLMs, e.g., our Efficient-DLM 8B achieves +5.4%/+2.7% higher accuracy with 4.5x/2.7x higher throughput compared to Dream 7B and Qwen3 4B, respectively.

CLNov 12, 2025
TiDAR: Think in Diffusion, Talk in Autoregression

Jingyu Liu, Xin Dong, Zhifan Ye et al.

Diffusion language models hold the promise of fast parallel generation, while autoregressive (AR) models typically excel in quality due to their causal structure aligning naturally with language modeling. This raises a fundamental question: can we achieve a synergy with high throughput, higher GPU utilization, and AR level quality? Existing methods fail to effectively balance these two aspects, either prioritizing AR using a weaker model for sequential drafting (speculative decoding), leading to lower drafting efficiency, or using some form of left-to-right (AR-like) decoding logic for diffusion, which still suffers from quality degradation and forfeits its potential parallelizability. We introduce TiDAR, a sequence-level hybrid architecture that drafts tokens (Thinking) in Diffusion and samples final outputs (Talking) AutoRegressively - all within a single forward pass using specially designed structured attention masks. This design exploits the free GPU compute density, achieving a strong balance between drafting and verification capacity. Moreover, TiDAR is designed to be serving-friendly (low overhead) as a standalone model. We extensively evaluate TiDAR against AR models, speculative decoding, and diffusion variants across generative and likelihood tasks at 1.5B and 8B scales. Thanks to the parallel drafting and sampling as well as exact KV cache support, TiDAR outperforms speculative decoding in measured throughput and surpasses diffusion models like Dream and Llada in both efficiency and quality. Most notably, TiDAR is the first architecture to close the quality gap with AR models while delivering 4.71x to 5.91x more tokens per second.

LGNov 6, 2023
Brain Networks and Intelligence: A Graph Neural Network Based Approach to Resting State fMRI Data

Bishal Thapaliya, Esra Akbas, Jiayu Chen et al.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) is a powerful tool for investigating the relationship between brain function and cognitive processes as it allows for the functional organization of the brain to be captured without relying on a specific task or stimuli. In this paper, we present a novel modeling architecture called BrainRGIN for predicting intelligence (fluid, crystallized, and total intelligence) using graph neural networks on rsfMRI derived static functional network connectivity matrices. Extending from the existing graph convolution networks, our approach incorporates a clustering-based embedding and graph isomorphism network in the graph convolutional layer to reflect the nature of the brain sub-network organization and efficient network expression, in combination with TopK pooling and attention-based readout functions. We evaluated our proposed architecture on a large dataset, specifically the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Dataset, and demonstrated its effectiveness in predicting individual differences in intelligence. Our model achieved lower mean squared errors and higher correlation scores than existing relevant graph architectures and other traditional machine learning models for all of the intelligence prediction tasks. The middle frontal gyrus exhibited a significant contribution to both fluid and crystallized intelligence, suggesting their pivotal role in these cognitive processes. Total composite scores identified a diverse set of brain regions to be relevant which underscores the complex nature of total intelligence.

CVSep 10, 2024
Enhancing Long Video Understanding via Hierarchical Event-Based Memory

Dingxin Cheng, Mingda Li, Jingyu Liu et al.

Recently, integrating visual foundation models into large language models (LLMs) to form video understanding systems has attracted widespread attention. Most of the existing models compress diverse semantic information within the whole video and feed it into LLMs for content comprehension. While this method excels in short video understanding, it may result in a blend of multiple event information in long videos due to coarse compression, which causes information redundancy. Consequently, the semantics of key events might be obscured within the vast information that hinders the model's understanding capabilities. To address this issue, we propose a Hierarchical Event-based Memory-enhanced LLM (HEM-LLM) for better understanding of long videos. Firstly, we design a novel adaptive sequence segmentation scheme to divide multiple events within long videos. In this way, we can perform individual memory modeling for each event to establish intra-event contextual connections, thereby reducing information redundancy. Secondly, while modeling current event, we compress and inject the information of the previous event to enhance the long-term inter-event dependencies in videos. Finally, we perform extensive experiments on various video understanding tasks and the results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances.

LGFeb 16
Scaling Beyond Masked Diffusion Language Models

Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Jean-Marie Lemercier, Zhihan Yang et al.

Diffusion language models are a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for faster generation. Among discrete diffusion approaches, Masked diffusion currently dominates, largely driven by strong perplexity on language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we present the first scaling law study of uniform-state and interpolating discrete diffusion methods. We also show that Masked diffusion models can be made approximately 12% more FLOPs-efficient when trained with a simple cross-entropy objective. We find that perplexity is informative within a diffusion family but can be misleading across families, where models with worse likelihood scaling may be preferable due to faster and more practical sampling, as reflected by the speed-quality Pareto frontier. These results challenge the view that Masked diffusion is categorically the future of diffusion language modeling and that perplexity alone suffices for cross-algorithm comparison. Scaling all methods to 1.7B parameters, we show that uniform-state diffusion remains competitive on likelihood-based benchmarks and outperforms autoregressive and Masked diffusion models on GSM8K, despite worse validation perplexity. We provide the code, model checkpoints, and video tutorials on the project page: http://s-sahoo.github.io/scaling-dllms

CVFeb 12
GigaBrain-0.5M*: a VLA That Learns From World Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

GigaBrain Team, Boyuan Wang, Bohan Li et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models that directly predict multi-step action chunks from current observations face inherent limitations due to constrained scene understanding and weak future anticipation capabilities. In contrast, video world models pre-trained on web-scale video corpora exhibit robust spatiotemporal reasoning and accurate future prediction, making them a natural foundation for enhancing VLA learning. Therefore, we propose \textit{GigaBrain-0.5M*}, a VLA model trained via world model-based reinforcement learning. Built upon \textit{GigaBrain-0.5}, which is pre-trained on over 10,000 hours of robotic manipulation data, whose intermediate version currently ranks first on the international RoboChallenge benchmark. \textit{GigaBrain-0.5M*} further integrates world model-based reinforcement learning via \textit{RAMP} (Reinforcement leArning via world Model-conditioned Policy) to enable robust cross-task adaptation. Empirical results demonstrate that \textit{RAMP} achieves substantial performance gains over the RECAP baseline, yielding improvements of approximately 30\% on challenging tasks including \texttt{Laundry Folding}, \texttt{Box Packing}, and \texttt{Espresso Preparation}. Critically, \textit{GigaBrain-0.5M$^*$} exhibits reliable long-horizon execution, consistently accomplishing complex manipulation tasks without failure as validated by real-world deployment videos on our \href{https://gigabrain05m.github.io}{project page}.

CVSep 5, 2024
TC-LLaVA: Rethinking the Transfer from Image to Video Understanding with Temporal Considerations

Mingze Gao, Jingyu Liu, Mingda Li et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved performance across various image-language applications. Recently, there has been a growing interest in adapting image pre-trained MLLMs for video-related tasks. However, most efforts concentrate on enhancing the vision encoder and projector components, while the core part, Large Language Models (LLMs), remains comparatively under-explored. In this paper, we propose two strategies to enhance the model's capability in video understanding tasks by improving inter-layer attention computation in LLMs. Specifically, the first approach focuses on the enhancement of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) with Temporal-Aware Dual RoPE, which introduces temporal position information to strengthen the MLLM's temporal modeling capabilities while preserving the relative position relationships of both visual and text tokens. The second approach involves enhancing the Attention Mask with the Frame-wise Block Causal Attention Mask, a simple yet effective method that broadens visual token interactions within and across video frames while maintaining the causal inference mechanism. Based on these proposed methods, we adapt LLaVA for video understanding tasks, naming it Temporal-Considered LLaVA (TC-LLaVA). Our TC-LLaVA achieves new state-of-the-art performance across various video understanding benchmarks with only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on video-related datasets.

CVAug 13, 2024
Dynamic and Compressive Adaptation of Transformers From Images to Videos

Guozhen Zhang, Jingyu Liu, Shengming Cao et al.

Recently, the remarkable success of pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) from image-text matching has sparked an interest in image-to-video adaptation. However, most current approaches retain the full forward pass for each frame, leading to a high computation overhead for processing entire videos. In this paper, we present InTI, a novel approach for compressive image-to-video adaptation using dynamic Inter-frame Token Interpolation. InTI aims to softly preserve the informative tokens without disrupting their coherent spatiotemporal structure. Specifically, each token pair at identical positions within neighbor frames is linearly aggregated into a new token, where the aggregation weights are generated by a multi-scale context-aware network. In this way, the information of neighbor frames can be adaptively compressed in a point-by-point manner, thereby effectively reducing the number of processed frames by half each time. Importantly, InTI can be seamlessly integrated with existing adaptation methods, achieving strong performance without extra-complex design. On Kinetics-400, InTI reaches a top-1 accuracy of 87.1 with a remarkable 37.5% reduction in GFLOPs compared to naive adaptation. When combined with additional temporal modules, InTI achieves a top-1 accuracy of 87.6 with a 37% reduction in GFLOPs. Similar conclusions have been verified in other common datasets.

LGOct 23, 2023
Graph Ranking Contrastive Learning: A Extremely Simple yet Efficient Method

Yulan Hu, Sheng Ouyang, Jingyu Liu et al.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has emerged as a representative graph self-supervised method, achieving significant success. The currently prevalent optimization objective for GCL is InfoNCE. Typically, it employs augmentation techniques to obtain two views, where a node in one view acts as the anchor, the corresponding node in the other view serves as the positive sample, and all other nodes are regarded as negative samples. The goal is to minimize the distance between the anchor node and positive samples and maximize the distance to negative samples. However, due to the lack of label information during training, InfoNCE inevitably treats samples from the same class as negative samples, leading to the issue of false negative samples. This can impair the learned node representations and subsequently hinder performance in downstream tasks. While numerous methods have been proposed to mitigate the impact of false negatives, they still face various challenges. For instance, while increasing the number of negative samples can dilute the impact of false negatives, it concurrently increases computational burden. Thus, we propose GraphRank, a simple yet efficient graph contrastive learning method that addresses the problem of false negative samples by redefining the concept of negative samples to a certain extent, thereby avoiding the issue of false negative samples. The effectiveness of GraphRank is empirically validated through experiments on the node, edge, and graph level tasks.

CVAug 23, 2024
D&M: Enriching E-commerce Videos with Sound Effects by Key Moment Detection and SFX Matching

Jingyu Liu, Minquan Wang, Ye Ma et al.

Videos showcasing specific products are increasingly important for E-commerce. Key moments naturally exist as the first appearance of a specific product, presentation of its distinctive features, the presence of a buying link, etc. Adding proper sound effects (SFX) to these key moments, or video decoration with SFX (VDSFX), is crucial for enhancing the user engaging experience. Previous studies about adding SFX to videos perform video to SFX matching at a holistic level, lacking the ability of adding SFX to a specific moment. Meanwhile, previous studies on video highlight detection or video moment retrieval consider only moment localization, leaving moment to SFX matching untouched. By contrast, we propose in this paper D&M, a unified method that accomplishes key moment detection and moment to SFX matching simultaneously. Moreover, for the new VDSFX task we build a large-scale dataset SFX-Moment from an E-commerce platform. For a fair comparison, we build competitive baselines by extending a number of current video moment detection methods to the new task. Extensive experiments on SFX-Moment show the superior performance of the proposed method over the baselines.

LGApr 22Code
Towards Event-Aware Forecasting in DeFi: Insights from On-chain Automated Market Maker Protocols

Huaiyu Jia, Jiehshun You, Yizhi Luo et al.

Automated Market Makers (AMMs), as a core infrastructure of decentralized finance (DeFi), uniquely drive on-chain asset pricing through a deterministic reserve ratio mechanism. Unlike traditional markets, AMM price dynamics is triggered largely by on-chain events (e.g., swap) that change the reserve ratio, rather than by continuous responses to off-chain information. This makes event-level analysis crucial for understanding price formation mechanisms in AMMs. However, existing research generally neglects the micro-structural dynamics at the AMMs level, lacking both a comprehensive dataset covering multiple protocols with fine-grained event classification and an effective framework for event-aware modeling. To fill this gap, we construct a dataset containing 8.9 million on-chain event records from four representative AMMs protocols: Pendle, Uniswap v3, Aave and Morpho, with precise annotations of transaction type and block height timestamps. Furthermore, we propose an Uncertainty Weighted Mean Squared Error (UWM) loss function, which incorporates the block interval regression term into the traditional Time-Point Process (TPP) objective function by weighting the uncertainty with homoscedasticity. Extensive experiments on eight advanced TPP architectures demonstrate that this loss function reduces the time prediction error by an average of 56.41\% while maintaining the accuracy of event type prediction, establishing a robust benchmark for event-aware prediction in the AMMs ecosystem. This work provides the necessary data foundation and methodological framework for modeling the discreteness and event-driven characteristics of on-chain price discovery. All datasets and source code are publicly available. https://github.com/yosen-king/Deep-AMM-Events

NIMar 9
Not All Prefills Are Equal: PPD Disaggregation for Multi-turn LLM Serving

Zongze Li, Jingyu Liu, Zach Xu et al.

Prefill-Decode (PD) disaggregation has become the standard architecture for modern LLM inference engines, which alleviates the interference of two distinctive workloads. With the growing demand for multi-turn interactions in chatbots and agentic systems, we re-examined PD in this case and found two fundamental inefficiencies: (1) every turn requires prefilling the new prompt and response from the last turn, and (2) repeated KV transfers between prefill and decode nodes saturate the bandwidth, leading to high latency and even service degradation. Our key insight is that not all prefill operations are equally disruptive: append-prefill -- processing only the new input tokens while reusing cached KV states -- incurs substantially less decoding slowdown than full prefill. This motivates routing append-prefill to decode nodes locally. However, through comprehensive analysis, we show that no single fixed routing strategy satisfies all Service Level Objectives (SLOs) simultaneously. Based on this insight, we propose Prefill Prefill-capable Decode (PPD) disaggregation, a dynamic routing system that decides when to process Turn 2+ requests locally on decode nodes using cached KV states. PPD adapts to varying SLOs via configurable weights and seamlessly integrates with traditional PD deployments. With extensive evaluations, we show that PPD reduces Turn 2+ time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 68% while maintaining competitive time-per-output-token (TPOT), effectively alleviating KV transfer congestion under high load. We believe PPD represents a flexible and efficient paradigm for multi-turn LLM serving.

LGMay 15
Isolating Nonlinear Independent Sources in fMRI with $β$-TCVAE Models

Qiang Li, Shujian Yu, Jesus Malo et al.

Learning meaningful latent representations from nonlinear fMRI data remains a fundamental challenge in neuroimaging analysis. Traditional independent component analysis, widely used due to its ability to estimate interpretable functional brain networks, relies on a linear mixing assumption for latent sources, limiting its ability to capture the inherently nonlinear and complex organization of brain dynamics. More recently, deep representation learning methods have emerged as promising alternatives for modeling nonlinear latent structure. However, many of these approaches have been evaluated primarily on simulated datasets or natural image benchmarks, with comparatively limited validation on real-world neuroimaging data such as fMRI. In this work, we are motivated by the $β$-TCVAE (Total Correlation Variational Autoencoder), a refinement of the $β$-VAE framework for learning latent representations without introducing additional hyperparameters during training. We adapt and modify this model to fMRI data for nonlinear source disentanglement, aiming to separate mixed spatial and temporal brain signals into interpretable components. We show that the $β$-TCVAE framework can recover meaningful nonlinear spatial components with biological relevance, including well-established intrinsic connectivity networks such as the default mode network. Furthermore, we evaluate the learned representations using functional network connectivity, showing that the latent structure captures coherent and interpretable brain organization patterns. This study provides a pilot investigation that bridges nonlinear representation learning and fMRI analysis.

CLMar 2, 2025Code
Optimizing Multi-Hop Document Retrieval Through Intermediate Representations

Jiaen Lin, Jingyu Liu, Yingbo Liu

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) encounters challenges when addressing complex queries, particularly multi-hop questions. While several methods tackle multi-hop queries by iteratively generating internal queries and retrieving external documents, these approaches are computationally expensive. In this paper, we identify a three-stage information processing pattern in LLMs during layer-by-layer reasoning, consisting of extraction, processing, and subsequent extraction steps. This observation suggests that the representations in intermediate layers contain richer information compared to those in other layers. Building on this insight, we propose Layer-wise RAG (L-RAG). Unlike prior methods that focus on generating new internal queries, L-RAG leverages intermediate representations from the middle layers, which capture next-hop information, to retrieve external knowledge. L-RAG achieves performance comparable to multi-step approaches while maintaining inference overhead similar to that of standard RAG. Experimental results show that L-RAG outperforms existing RAG methods on open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets, including MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The code is available in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/L-RAG-ADD5/

MEDec 31, 2025
Deep Deterministic Nonlinear ICA via Total Correlation Minimization with Matrix-Based Entropy Functional

Qiang Li, Shujian Yu, Liang Ma et al.

Blind source separation, particularly through independent component analysis (ICA), is widely utilized across various signal processing domains for disentangling underlying components from observed mixed signals, owing to its fully data-driven nature that minimizes reliance on prior assumptions. However, conventional ICA methods rely on an assumption of linear mixing, limiting their ability to capture complex nonlinear relationships and to maintain robustness in noisy environments. In this work, we present deep deterministic nonlinear independent component analysis (DDICA), a novel deep neural network-based framework designed to address these limitations. DDICA leverages a matrix-based entropy function to directly optimize the independence criterion via stochastic gradient descent, bypassing the need for variational approximations or adversarial schemes. This results in a streamlined training process and improved resilience to noise. We validated the effectiveness and generalizability of DDICA across a range of applications, including simulated signal mixtures, hyperspectral image unmixing, modeling of primary visual receptive fields, and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that DDICA effectively separates independent components with high accuracy across a range of applications. These findings suggest that DDICA offers a robust and versatile solution for blind source separation in diverse signal processing tasks.

CVMar 18, 2024
Scene-LLM: Extending Language Model for 3D Visual Understanding and Reasoning

Rao Fu, Jingyu Liu, Xilun Chen et al.

This paper introduces Scene-LLM, a 3D-visual-language model that enhances embodied agents' abilities in interactive 3D indoor environments by integrating the reasoning strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs). Scene-LLM adopts a hybrid 3D visual feature representation, that incorporates dense spatial information and supports scene state updates. The model employs a projection layer to efficiently project these features in the pre-trained textual embedding space, enabling effective interpretation of 3D visual information. Unique to our approach is the integration of both scene-level and ego-centric 3D information. This combination is pivotal for interactive planning, where scene-level data supports global planning and ego-centric data is important for localization. Notably, we use ego-centric 3D frame features for feature alignment, an efficient technique that enhances the model's ability to align features of small objects within the scene. Our experiments with Scene-LLM demonstrate its strong capabilities in dense captioning, question answering, and interactive planning. We believe Scene-LLM advances the field of 3D visual understanding and reasoning, offering new possibilities for sophisticated agent interactions in indoor settings.

IVApr 21, 2021Code
A Structure-Aware Relation Network for Thoracic Diseases Detection and Segmentation

Jie Lian, Jingyu Liu, Shu Zhang et al.

Instance level detection and segmentation of thoracic diseases or abnormalities are crucial for automatic diagnosis in chest X-ray images. Leveraging on constant structure and disease relations extracted from domain knowledge, we propose a structure-aware relation network (SAR-Net) extending Mask R-CNN. The SAR-Net consists of three relation modules: 1. the anatomical structure relation module encoding spatial relations between diseases and anatomical parts. 2. the contextual relation module aggregating clues based on query-key pair of disease RoI and lung fields. 3. the disease relation module propagating co-occurrence and causal relations into disease proposals. Towards making a practical system, we also provide ChestX-Det, a chest X-Ray dataset with instance-level annotations (boxes and masks). ChestX-Det is a subset of the public dataset NIH ChestX-ray14. It contains ~3500 images of 13 common disease categories labeled by three board-certified radiologists. We evaluate our SAR-Net on it and another dataset DR-Private. Experimental results show that it can enhance the strong baseline of Mask R-CNN with significant improvements. The ChestX-Det is released at https://github.com/Deepwise-AILab/ChestX-Det-Dataset.

IVOct 19, 2020Code
The Detection of Thoracic Abnormalities ChestX-Det10 Challenge Results

Jie Lian, Jingyu Liu, Yizhou Yu et al.

The detection of thoracic abnormalities challenge is organized by the Deepwise AI Lab. The challenge is divided into two rounds. In this paper, we present the results of 6 teams which reach the second round. The challenge adopts the ChestX-Det10 dateset proposed by the Deepwise AI Lab. ChestX-Det10 is the first chest X-Ray dataset with instance-level annotations, including 10 categories of disease/abnormality of 3,543 images. The annotations are located at https://github.com/Deepwise-AILab/ChestX-Det10-Dataset. In the challenge, we randomly split all data into 3001 images for training and 542 images for testing.

IVJun 17, 2020Code
ChestX-Det10: Chest X-ray Dataset on Detection of Thoracic Abnormalities

Jingyu Liu, Jie Lian, Yizhou Yu

Instance level detection of thoracic diseases or abnormalities are crucial for automatic diagnosis in chest X-ray images. Most existing works on chest X-rays focus on disease classification and weakly supervised localization. In order to push forward the research on disease classification and localization on chest X-rays. We provide a new benchmark called ChestX-Det10, including box-level annotations of 10 categories of disease/abnormality of $\sim$ 3,500 images. The annotations are located at https://github.com/Deepwise-AILab/ChestX-Det10-Dataset.

CVMay 8
NeuroGAN-3D: Enhancing Intrinsic Functional Brain Networks via High-Fidelity 3D Generative Super-Resolution

M. Moein Esfahani, Sepehr Salem Ghahfarokhi, Mohammed Alser et al.

Recent advances in neuroimaging have deepened our understanding of the brain's complex functional and structural organization. Among these, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) - particularly resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) - has emerged as a tool for identifying biomarkers of intrinsic brain connectivity and delineating large-scale neural networks. These networks are typically represented as volumetric spatial maps that capture functionally coherent brain regions and reflect individual differences in brain activity and structure. The spatial resolution of these maps plays an important role, as it determines the ability to localize functional units with precision, perform reliable brain parcellation, and detect subtle, spatially specific neurobiological alterations associated with development, aging, or disease. Therefore, improving the effective resolution of neuroimaging-derived maps holds significant promise for enabling more detailed insights into brain architecture and its relationship to behavior and pathology. To address this need, we propose NeuroGAN-3D, a novel 3D generative super-resolution model tailored to the computational demands of volumetric neuroimaging. Our model leverages a generative adversarial network architecture to enhance the spatial resolution of rs-fMRI spatial maps, significantly outperforming a conventional baseline.

SYMay 7
Probabilistic Assessment of Rare Transient Instability Events via Kriging-based Active Learning Framework

Jingyu Liu, Xiaoting Wang, Xiaozhe Wang

The increasing uncertainty in modern power systems, driven by the integration of intermittent energy sources and variable loads, underscores the need for probabilistic transient stability assessment. However, existing assessment methods primarily focus on average system stability behavior and may struggle or incur high computational cost when identifying rare transient instability events, which in turn are critical for ensuring system resilience. To address this, the paper proposes a Kriging-based active learning framework to accurately characterize rare instability regions within the input uncertainty space and estimate the associated small instability probability, while requiring only a limited number of expensive time-domain simulations. The proposed active learning (AL) framework is tested on a modified IEEE 59-bus system with simulated load and wind uncertainties, and a WECC 240-bus system incorporating real-world wind and solar generation data. Comparative studies with the existing random forest-based active learning method and three non-AL methods demonstrate that the proposed AL framework achieves superior accuracy and computational efficiency.

CVMay 22, 2024
VTG-LLM: Integrating Timestamp Knowledge into Video LLMs for Enhanced Video Temporal Grounding

Yongxin Guo, Jingyu Liu, Mingda Li et al.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) strives to accurately pinpoint event timestamps in a specific video using linguistic queries, significantly impacting downstream tasks like video browsing and editing. Unlike traditional task-specific models, Video Large Language Models (video LLMs) can handle multiple tasks concurrently in a zero-shot manner. Consequently, exploring the application of video LLMs for VTG tasks has become a burgeoning research area. However, despite considerable advancements in video content understanding, video LLMs often struggle to accurately pinpoint timestamps within videos, limiting their effectiveness in VTG tasks. To address this, we introduce VTG-LLM, a model designed to enhance video LLMs' timestamp localization abilities. Our approach includes: (1) effectively integrating timestamp knowledge into visual tokens; (2) incorporating absolute-time tokens to manage timestamp knowledge without concept shifts; and (3) introducing a lightweight, high-performance, slot-based token compression technique designed to accommodate the demands of a large number of frames to be sampled for VTG tasks. Additionally, we present VTG-IT-120K, a collection of publicly available VTG datasets that we have re-annotated to improve upon low-quality annotations. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of VTG-LLM in comparison to other video LLM methods across a variety of VTG tasks.

CVOct 13, 2024
EITNet: An IoT-Enhanced Framework for Real-Time Basketball Action Recognition

Jingyu Liu, Xinyu Liu, Mingzhe Qu et al.

Integrating IoT technology into basketball action recognition enhances sports analytics, providing crucial insights into player performance and game strategy. However, existing methods often fall short in terms of accuracy and efficiency, particularly in complex, real-time environments where player movements are frequently occluded or involve intricate interactions. To overcome these challenges, we propose the EITNet model, a deep learning framework that combines EfficientDet for object detection, I3D for spatiotemporal feature extraction, and TimeSformer for temporal analysis, all integrated with IoT technology for seamless real-time data collection and processing. Our contributions include developing a robust architecture that improves recognition accuracy to 92\%, surpassing the baseline EfficientDet model's 87\%, and reducing loss to below 5.0 compared to EfficientDet's 9.0 over 50 epochs. Furthermore, the integration of IoT technology enhances real-time data processing, providing adaptive insights into player performance and strategy. The paper details the design and implementation of EITNet, experimental validation, and a comprehensive evaluation against existing models. The results demonstrate EITNet's potential to significantly advance automated sports analysis and optimize data utilization for player performance and strategy improvement.

CLJan 5
Tackling the Inherent Difficulty of Noise Filtering in RAG

Jingyu Liu, Jiaen Lin, Yong Liu

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a widely adopted approach to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge and reducing hallucinations. However, noisy or irrelevant documents are often introduced during RAG, potentially degrading performance and even causing hallucinated outputs. While various methods have been proposed to filter out such noise, we argue that identifying irrelevant information from retrieved content is inherently difficult and limited number of transformer layers can hardly solve this. Consequently, retrievers fail to filter out irrelevant documents entirely. Therefore, LLMs must be robust against such noise, but we demonstrate that standard fine-tuning approaches are often ineffective in enabling the model to selectively utilize relevant information while ignoring irrelevant content due to the structural constraints of attention patterns. To address this, we propose a novel fine-tuning method designed to enhance the model's ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information within retrieved documents. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our approach significantly improves the robustness and performance of LLMs.

NCMay 19, 2024
DSAM: A Deep Learning Framework for Analyzing Temporal and Spatial Dynamics in Brain Networks

Bishal Thapaliya, Robyn Miller, Jiayu Chen et al.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a noninvasive technique pivotal for understanding human neural mechanisms of intricate cognitive processes. Most rs-fMRI studies compute a single static functional connectivity matrix across brain regions of interest, or dynamic functional connectivity matrices with a sliding window approach. These approaches are at risk of oversimplifying brain dynamics and lack proper consideration of the goal at hand. While deep learning has gained substantial popularity for modeling complex relational data, its application to uncovering the spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain is still limited. We propose a novel interpretable deep learning framework that learns goal-specific functional connectivity matrix directly from time series and employs a specialized graph neural network for the final classification. Our model, DSAM, leverages temporal causal convolutional networks to capture the temporal dynamics in both low- and high-level feature representations, a temporal attention unit to identify important time points, a self-attention unit to construct the goal-specific connectivity matrix, and a novel variant of graph neural network to capture the spatial dynamics for downstream classification. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on the Human Connectome Project dataset with 1075 samples to build and interpret the model for the classification of sex group, and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Dataset with 8520 samples for independent testing. Compared our proposed framework with other state-of-art models, results suggested this novel approach goes beyond the assumption of a fixed connectivity matrix and provides evidence of goal-specific brain connectivity patterns, which opens up the potential to gain deeper insights into how the human brain adapts its functional connectivity specific to the task at hand.

AIMay 16, 2024
How Far Are We From AGI: Are LLMs All We Need?

Tao Feng, Chuanyang Jin, Jingyu Liu et al.

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly impacted human society, driving significant advancements in multiple sectors. AGI, distinguished by its ability to execute diverse real-world tasks with efficiency and effectiveness comparable to human intelligence, reflects a paramount milestone in AI evolution. While existing studies have reviewed specific advancements in AI and proposed potential paths to AGI, such as large language models (LLMs), they fall short of providing a thorough exploration of AGI's definitions, objectives, and developmental trajectories. Unlike previous survey papers, this work goes beyond summarizing LLMs by addressing key questions about our progress toward AGI and outlining the strategies essential for its realization through comprehensive analysis, in-depth discussions, and novel insights. We start by articulating the requisite capability frameworks for AGI, integrating the internal, interface, and system dimensions. As the realization of AGI requires more advanced capabilities and adherence to stringent constraints, we further discuss necessary AGI alignment technologies to harmonize these factors. Notably, we emphasize the importance of approaching AGI responsibly by first defining the key levels of AGI progression, followed by the evaluation framework that situates the status quo, and finally giving our roadmap of how to reach the pinnacle of AGI. Moreover, to give tangible insights into the ubiquitous impact of the integration of AI, we outline existing challenges and potential pathways toward AGI in multiple domains. In sum, serving as a pioneering exploration into the current state and future trajectory of AGI, this paper aims to foster a collective comprehension and catalyze broader public discussions among researchers and practitioners on AGI.

CLFeb 5, 2025
Speculative Prefill: Turbocharging TTFT with Lightweight and Training-Free Token Importance Estimation

Jingyu Liu, Beidi Chen, Ce Zhang

Improving time-to-first-token (TTFT) is an essentially important objective in modern large language model (LLM) inference engines. Optimizing TTFT directly results in higher maximal QPS and meets the requirements of many critical applications. However, boosting TTFT is notoriously challenging since it is compute-bounded and the performance bottleneck shifts from the self-attention that many prior works focus on to the MLP part. In this work, we present SpecPrefill, a training free framework that accelerates the inference TTFT for both long and medium context queries based on the following insight: LLMs are generalized enough to preserve the quality given only a carefully chosen subset of prompt tokens. At its core, SpecPrefill leverages a lightweight model to speculate locally important tokens based on the context. These tokens, along with the necessary positional information, are then sent to the main model for processing. We evaluate SpecPrefill with a diverse set of tasks, followed by a comprehensive benchmarking of performance improvement both in a real end-to-end setting and ablation studies. SpecPrefill manages to serve Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct-FP8 with up to 7$\times$ maximal end-to-end QPS on real downstream tasks and 7.66$\times$ TTFT improvement.

CVApr 12, 2024
A Survey of Neural Network Robustness Assessment in Image Recognition

Jie Wang, Jun Ai, Minyan Lu et al.

In recent years, there has been significant attention given to the robustness assessment of neural networks. Robustness plays a critical role in ensuring reliable operation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in complex and uncertain environments. Deep learning's robustness problem is particularly significant, highlighted by the discovery of adversarial attacks on image classification models. Researchers have dedicated efforts to evaluate robustness in diverse perturbation conditions for image recognition tasks. Robustness assessment encompasses two main techniques: robustness verification/ certification for deliberate adversarial attacks and robustness testing for random data corruptions. In this survey, we present a detailed examination of both adversarial robustness (AR) and corruption robustness (CR) in neural network assessment. Analyzing current research papers and standards, we provide an extensive overview of robustness assessment in image recognition. Three essential aspects are analyzed: concepts, metrics, and assessment methods. We investigate the perturbation metrics and range representations used to measure the degree of perturbations on images, as well as the robustness metrics specifically for the robustness conditions of classification models. The strengths and limitations of the existing methods are also discussed, and some potential directions for future research are provided.

LGOct 15, 2024
ECGN: A Cluster-Aware Approach to Graph Neural Networks for Imbalanced Classification

Bishal Thapaliya, Anh Nguyen, Yao Lu et al.

Classifying nodes in a graph is a common problem. The ideal classifier must adapt to any imbalances in the class distribution. It must also use information in the clustering structure of real-world graphs. Existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have not addressed both problems together. We propose the Enhanced Cluster-aware Graph Network (ECGN), a novel method that addresses these issues by integrating cluster-specific training with synthetic node generation. Unlike traditional GNNs that apply the same node update process for all nodes, ECGN learns different aggregations for different clusters. We also use the clusters to generate new minority-class nodes in a way that helps clarify the inter-class decision boundary. By combining cluster-aware embeddings with a global integration step, ECGN enhances the quality of the resulting node embeddings. Our method works with any underlying GNN and any cluster generation technique. Experimental results show that ECGN consistently outperforms its closest competitors by up to 11% on some widely studied benchmark datasets.

CVApr 9
Fundus-R1: Training a Fundus-Reading MLLM with Knowledge-Aware Reasoning on Public Data

Yuchuan Deng, Qijie Wei, Kaiheng Qian et al.

Fundus imaging such as CFP, OCT and UWF is crucial for the early detection of retinal anomalies and diseases. Fundus image understanding, due to its knowledge-intensive nature, poses a challenging vision-language task. An emerging approach to addressing the task is to post-train a generic multimodal large language model (MLLM), either by supervised finetuning (SFT) or by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), on a considerable amount of in-house samples paired with high-quality clinical reports. However, these valuable samples are not publicly accessible, which not only hinders reproducibility but also practically limits research to few players. To overcome the barrier, we make a novel attempt to train a reasoning-enhanced fundus-reading MLLM, which we term Fundus-R1, using exclusively public datasets, wherein over 94\% of the data are annotated with only image-level labels. Our technical contributions are two-fold. First, we propose a RAG-based method for composing image-specific, knowledge-aware reasoning traces. Such auto-generated traces link visual findings identified by a generic MLLM to the image labels in terms of ophthalmic knowledge. Second, we enhance RLVR with a process reward that encourages self-consistency of the generated reasoning trace in each rollout. Extensive experiments on three fundus-reading benchmarks, i.e., FunBench, Omni-Fundus and GMAI-Fundus, show that Fundus-R1 clearly outperforms multiple baselines, including its generic counterpart (Qwen2.5-VL) and a stronger edition post-trained without using the generated traces. This work paves the way for training powerful fundus-reading MLLMs with publicly available data.

AIJun 1, 2025
Do not Abstain! Identify and Solve the Uncertainty

Jingyu Liu, Jingquan Peng, xiaopeng Wu et al.

Despite the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains, they frequently exhibit overconfidence when encountering uncertain scenarios, yet existing solutions primarily rely on evasive responses (e.g., "I don't know") overlooks the opportunity of identifying and addressing the uncertainty to generate more satisfactory responses. To systematically investigate and improve LLMs' ability of recognizing and addressing the source of uncertainty, we introduce \textbf{ConfuseBench}, a benchmark mainly focus on three types of uncertainty: document scarcity, limited capability, and query ambiguity. Experiments with ConfuseBench reveal that current LLMs struggle to accurately identify the root cause of uncertainty and solve it. They prefer to attribute uncertainty to query ambiguity while overlooking capability limitations, especially for those weaker models. To tackle this challenge, we first generate context-aware inquiries that highlight the confusing aspect of the original query. Then we judge the source of uncertainty based on the uniqueness of the inquiry's answer. Further we use an on-policy training method, InteractDPO to generate better inquiries. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

CVMar 25, 2025
Multi-Object Sketch Animation by Scene Decomposition and Motion Planning

Jingyu Liu, Zijie Xin, Yuhan Fu et al.

Sketch animation, which brings static sketches to life by generating dynamic video sequences, has found widespread applications in GIF design, cartoon production, and daily entertainment. While current methods for sketch animation perform well in single-object sketch animation, they struggle in multi-object scenarios. By analyzing their failures, we identify two major challenges of transitioning from single-object to multi-object sketch animation: object-aware motion modeling and complex motion optimization. For multi-object sketch animation, we propose MoSketch based on iterative optimization through Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and thus animating a multi-object sketch in a training-data free manner. To tackle the two challenges in a divide-and-conquer strategy, MoSketch has four novel modules, i.e., LLM-based scene decomposition, LLM-based motion planning, multi-grained motion refinement, and compositional SDS. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing sketch animation approaches. MoSketch takes a pioneering step towards multi-object sketch animation, opening new avenues for future research and applications.

IVMar 5, 2025
PGAD: Prototype-Guided Adaptive Distillation for Multi-Modal Learning in AD Diagnosis

Yanfei Li, Teng Yin, Wenyi Shang et al.

Missing modalities pose a major issue in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) diagnosis, as many subjects lack full imaging data due to cost and clinical constraints. While multi-modal learning leverages complementary information, most existing methods train only on complete data, ignoring the large proportion of incomplete samples in real-world datasets like ADNI. This reduces the effective training set and limits the full use of valuable medical data. While some methods incorporate incomplete samples, they fail to effectively address inter-modal feature alignment and knowledge transfer challenges under high missing rates. To address this, we propose a Prototype-Guided Adaptive Distillation (PGAD) framework that directly incorporates incomplete multi-modal data into training. PGAD enhances missing modality representations through prototype matching and balances learning with a dynamic sampling strategy. We validate PGAD on the ADNI dataset with varying missing rates (20%, 50%, and 70%) and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of prototype matching and adaptive sampling, highlighting the potential of our framework for robust and scalable AD diagnosis in real-world clinical settings.

LGJan 17, 2025
Self-Clustering Graph Transformer Approach to Model Resting-State Functional Brain Activity

Bishal Thapaliya, Esra Akbas, Ram Sapkota et al.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) offers valuable insights into the human brain's functional organization and is a powerful tool for investigating the relationship between brain function and cognitive processes, as it allows for the functional organization of the brain to be captured without relying on a specific task or stimuli. In this study, we introduce a novel attention mechanism for graphs with subnetworks, named Self-Clustering Graph Transformer (SCGT), designed to handle the issue of uniform node updates in graph transformers. By using static functional connectivity (FC) correlation features as input to the transformer model, SCGT effectively captures the sub-network structure of the brain by performing cluster-specific updates to the nodes, unlike uniform node updates in vanilla graph transformers, further allowing us to learn and interpret the subclusters. We validate our approach on the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset, comprising 7,957 participants, for the prediction of total cognitive score and gender classification. Our results demonstrate that SCGT outperforms the vanilla graph transformer method and other recent models, offering a promising tool for modeling brain functional connectivity and interpreting the underlying subnetwork structures.

LGMay 15, 2024
Unmasking Efficiency: Learning Salient Sparse Models in Non-IID Federated Learning

Riyasat Ohib, Bishal Thapaliya, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite et al.

In this work, we propose Salient Sparse Federated Learning (SSFL), a streamlined approach for sparse federated learning with efficient communication. SSFL identifies a sparse subnetwork prior to training, leveraging parameter saliency scores computed separately on local client data in non-IID scenarios, and then aggregated, to determine a global mask. Only the sparse model weights are communicated each round between the clients and the server. We validate SSFL's effectiveness using standard non-IID benchmarks, noting marked improvements in the sparsity--accuracy trade-offs. Finally, we deploy our method in a real-world federated learning framework and report improvement in communication time.

AISep 28, 2025
Rethinking Reward Miscalibration of GRPO in Agentic RL

Jingyu Liu, Xiaopeng Wu, Jingquan Peng et al.

Building autonomous agents capable of solving long-horizon, real-world tasks has garnered significant research interest. But outcome based rewards may cause reward miscalibration which means it might mistakenly allocate positive reward to flawed middle steps which is regarded as the key reason making the bad actions being reinforced during training. However we reveal that outcome based reward ensures expected negative advantage for those flawed middle steps, which means the flawed actions should be punished during training. Even accounting for the ``squeezing effect", the probability mass of good actions should increase and the actor should gradually get rid of harmful actions. This shows that flawed actions should be punished during training. We further identify gradient coupling between similar samples as a key issue in agentic RL, the input prompt is extremely similar and the output action space is limited, therefore during training, gradients from well-performing samples can inadvertently strengthen suboptimal or incorrect actions due to similar input observation and output actions. We show that with gradient coupling, some flawed actions might be enhanced. To address this, we propose training the actor to classify good or bad actions to separate the embedding of good/bad actions and alleviate the gradient interference, extensive experiments shows its effectiveness.

DCSep 25, 2025
Tiny but Mighty: A Software-Hardware Co-Design Approach for Efficient Multimodal Inference on Battery-Powered Small Devices

Yilong Li, Shuai Zhang, Yijing Zeng et al. · amazon-science

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are inherently modular, consisting of vision and audio encoders, projectors, and large language models. Yet, they are almost always executed monolithically, which underutilizes the heterogeneous accelerators (NPUs, GPUs, DSPs) in modern SoCs and leads to high end-to-end latency. In this paper, we present NANOMIND, a hardware--software co-design inference framework for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) that breaks large models into modular ``bricks'' (vision, language, audio, etc.) and maps each to its ideal accelerator. The key insight is that large models can be broken into modular components and scheduled to run on the most appropriate compute units. It performs module-level dynamic offloading across accelerators on unified-memory SoCs. By combining customized hardware design, system-level scheduling, and optimized low-bit computation kernels, we demonstrate our framework with a compact, battery-powered device capable of running LMMs entirely on device. This prototype functions as a self-contained intelligent assistant that requires no network connectivity, while achieving higher throughput and superior power efficiency under strict resource constraints. The design further bypasses CPU bottlenecks and reduces redundant memory usage through token-aware buffer management and module-level coordination. Our system outperforms existing implementations in resource efficiency, cutting energy consumption by 42.3\% and GPU memory usage by 11.2\%. This enables a battery-powered device to run LLaVA-OneVision with a camera for nearly half a day and LLaMA-3-8B for voice interactions up to almost 20.8 hours.

CVSep 8, 2025
Breast Cancer Detection in Thermographic Images via Diffusion-Based Augmentation and Nonlinear Feature Fusion

Sepehr Salem, M. Moein Esfahani, Jingyu Liu et al.

Data scarcity hinders deep learning for medical imaging. We propose a framework for breast cancer classification in thermograms that addresses this using a Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for data augmentation. Our DPM-based augmentation is shown to be superior to both traditional methods and a ProGAN baseline. The framework fuses deep features from a pre-trained ResNet-50 with handcrafted nonlinear features (e.g., Fractal Dimension) derived from U-Net segmented tumors. An XGBoost classifier trained on these fused features achieves 98.0\% accuracy and 98.1\% sensitivity. Ablation studies and statistical tests confirm that both the DPM augmentation and the nonlinear feature fusion are critical, statistically significant components of this success. This work validates the synergy between advanced generative models and interpretable features for creating highly accurate medical diagnostic tools.

CVSep 3, 2025
EdgeAttNet: Towards Barb-Aware Filament Segmentation

Victor Solomon, Piet Martens, Jingyu Liu et al.

Accurate segmentation of solar filaments in H-alpha observations is critical for determining filament chirality, a key factor in the behavior of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). However, existing methods often fail to capture fine-scale filament structures, particularly barbs, due to a limited ability to model long-range dependencies and spatial detail. We propose EdgeAttNet, a segmentation architecture built on a U-Net backbone by introducing a novel, learnable edge map derived directly from the input image. This edge map is incorporated into the model by linearly transforming the attention Key and Query matrices with the edge information, thereby guiding the self-attention mechanism at the network's bottleneck to more effectively capture filament boundaries and barbs. By explicitly integrating this structural prior into the attention computations, EdgeAttNet enhances spatial sensitivity and segmentation accuracy while reducing the number of trainable parameters. Trained end-to-end, EdgeAttNet outperforms U-Net and other U-Net-based transformer baselines on the MAGFILO dataset. It achieves higher segmentation accuracy and significantly better recognition of filament barbs, with faster inference performance suitable for practical deployment.

LGAug 29, 2025
Learning Unified Representations from Heterogeneous Data for Robust Heart Rate Modeling

Peng Yang, Zhengdong Huang, Zicheng Xie et al.

Heart rate prediction is vital for personalized health monitoring and fitness, while it frequently faces a critical challenge when deploying in real-world: data heterogeneity. We classify it in two key dimensions: source heterogeneity from fragmented device markets with varying feature sets, and user heterogeneity reflecting distinct physiological patterns across individuals and activities. Existing methods either discard device-specific information, or fail to model user-specific differences, limiting their real-world performance. To address this, we propose a framework that learns latent representations agnostic to both heterogeneity, enabling downstream predictors to work consistently under heterogeneous data patterns. Specifically, we introduce a random feature dropout strategy to handle source heterogeneity, making the model robust to various feature sets. To manage user heterogeneity, we employ a time-aware attention module to capture long-term physiological traits and use a contrastive learning objective to build a discriminative representation space. To reflect the heterogeneous nature of real-world data, we created and publicly released a new benchmark dataset, ParroTao. Evaluations on both ParroTao and the public FitRec dataset show that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines by 17% and 15%, respectively. Furthermore, analysis of the learned representations demonstrates their strong discriminative power, and one downstream application task confirm the practical value of our model.

ROApr 28, 2025
GSFF-SLAM: 3D Semantic Gaussian Splatting SLAM via Feature Field

Zuxing Lu, Xin Yuan, Shaowen Yang et al.

Semantic-aware 3D scene reconstruction is essential for autonomous robots to perform complex interactions. Semantic SLAM, an online approach, integrates pose tracking, geometric reconstruction, and semantic mapping into a unified framework, shows significant potential. However, existing systems, which rely on 2D ground truth priors for supervision, are often limited by the sparsity and noise of these signals in real-world environments. To address this challenge, we propose GSFF-SLAM, a novel dense semantic SLAM system based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that leverages feature fields to achieve joint rendering of appearance, geometry, and N-dimensional semantic features. By independently optimizing feature gradients, our method supports semantic reconstruction using various forms of 2D priors, particularly sparse and noisy signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods in both tracking accuracy and photorealistic rendering quality. When utilizing 2D ground truth priors, GSFF-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance with 95.03\% mIoU, while achieving up to 2.9$\times$ speedup with only marginal performance degradation.

CVMay 23, 2023
Text-guided 3D Human Generation from 2D Collections

Tsu-Jui Fu, Wenhan Xiong, Yixin Nie et al.

3D human modeling has been widely used for engaging interaction in gaming, film, and animation. The customization of these characters is crucial for creativity and scalability, which highlights the importance of controllability. In this work, we introduce Text-guided 3D Human Generation (\texttt{T3H}), where a model is to generate a 3D human, guided by the fashion description. There are two goals: 1) the 3D human should render articulately, and 2) its outfit is controlled by the given text. To address this \texttt{T3H} task, we propose Compositional Cross-modal Human (CCH). CCH adopts cross-modal attention to fuse compositional human rendering with the extracted fashion semantics. Each human body part perceives relevant textual guidance as its visual patterns. We incorporate the human prior and semantic discrimination to enhance 3D geometry transformation and fine-grained consistency, enabling it to learn from 2D collections for data efficiency. We conduct evaluations on DeepFashion and SHHQ with diverse fashion attributes covering the shape, fabric, and color of upper and lower clothing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCH achieves superior results for \texttt{T3H} with high efficiency.