Dan Si

Yuhao Zhou, Yunpeng Zhu, Yang Zhou et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models hold great promise for general-purpose robotic intelligence, yet scaling up such models is severely bottlenecked by the high cost of acquiring annotated training data. Fortunately, vision-equipped robots deployed across various domains already produce abundant vision-action pairs that can be leveraged to scale up VLA training more efficiently. However, these raw data cannot be centrally aggregated due to various constraints and also exhibit severe heterogeneity. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose ForgeVLA, a federated VLA training framework that learns VLA models from distributed vision-action pairs without centralizing raw data or requiring manual annotations. Specifically, each client in ForgeVLA is equipped with an embodied instruction classifier that maps vision-action pairs to a predefined instruction set, recovering the missing language modality and forming complete vision-language-action triplets. Beyond triplet construction, we also identify vision-language feature collapse as a critical challenge that has been largely overlooked in prior federated VLA research. To mitigate this issue, ForgeVLA combines a client-side contrastive planning loss with a server-side adaptive aggregation strategy to learn task-discriminative representations efficiently. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that ForgeVLA significantly outperforms other baselines, and ablation studies further validate the contribution of each component.

Yuhao Zhou, Yiheng Wang, Xuming He et al.

Scientific discoveries increasingly rely on complex multimodal reasoning based on information-intensive scientific data and domain-specific expertise. Empowered by expert-level scientific benchmarks, scientific Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold the potential to significantly enhance this discovery process in realistic workflows. However, current scientific benchmarks mostly focus on evaluating the knowledge understanding capabilities of MLLMs, leading to an inadequate assessment of their perception and reasoning abilities. To address this gap, we present the Scientists' First Exam (SFE) benchmark, designed to evaluate the scientific cognitive capacities of MLLMs through three interconnected levels: scientific signal perception, scientific attribute understanding, scientific comparative reasoning. Specifically, SFE comprises 830 expert-verified VQA pairs across three question types, spanning 66 multimodal tasks across five high-value disciplines. Extensive experiments reveal that current state-of-the-art GPT-o3 and InternVL-3 achieve only 34.08% and 26.52% on SFE, highlighting significant room for MLLMs to improve in scientific realms. We hope the insights obtained in SFE will facilitate further developments in AI-enhanced scientific discoveries.

Yuhao Zhou, Jindi Lv, Yuxin Tian et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative learning, yet data heterogeneity remains a critical challenge. While existing methods achieve progress in addressing data heterogeneity for participating clients, they fail to generalize to non-participating clients with in-domain distribution shifts and resource constraints. To mitigate this issue, we present HyperFedZero, a novel method that dynamically generates specialized models via a hypernetwork conditioned on distribution-aware embeddings. Our approach explicitly incorporates distribution-aware inductive biases into the model's forward pass, extracting robust distribution embeddings using a NoisyEmbed-enhanced extractor with a Balancing Penalty, effectively preventing feature collapse. The hypernetwork then leverages these embeddings to generate specialized models chunk-by-chunk for non-participating clients, ensuring adaptability to their unique data distributions. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models demonstrate HyperFedZero's remarkable performance, surpassing competing methods consistently with minimal computational, storage, and communication overhead. Moreover, ablation studies and visualizations further validate the necessity of each component, confirming meaningful adaptations and validating the effectiveness of HyperFedZero.

Mingchuan Ma, Yuhao Zhou, Jindi Lv et al.

Online class-incremental learning aims to enable models to continuously adapt to new classes with limited access to past data, while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Replay-based methods address this by maintaining a small memory buffer of previous samples, achieving competitive performance. For effective replay under constrained storage, recent approaches leverage distilled data to enhance the informativeness of memory. However, such approaches often involve significant computational overhead due to the use of bi-level optimization. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce Grid-based Patch Sampling (GPS), a lightweight and effective strategy for distilling informative memory samples without relying on a trainable model. GPS generates informative samples by sampling a subset of pixels from the original image, yielding compact low-resolution representations that preserve both semantic content and structural information. During replay, these representations are reassembled to support training and evaluation. Experiments on extensive benchmarks demonstrate that GRS can be seamlessly integrated into existing replay frameworks, leading to 3%-4% improvements in average end accuracy under memory-constrained settings, with limited computational overhead.