Weihang You

Arif Hassan Zidan, Yi Pan, Hanqi Jiang et al.

World models, internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment, have emerged as a central paradigm in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, enabling agents to predict, plan, and reason within learned representations. Despite rapid progress across reinforcement learning, robotics, autonomous driving, and video generation, the field lacks a unified framework integrating its diverse architectural choices, training methods, reasoning mechanisms, and application settings. This survey addresses that gap with a multi-axis taxonomy organized along four dimensions: (i) architecture, encompassing representation format, dynamics formulation, input modality, learning paradigm, and downstream application; (ii) methodological family, including state-space and recurrent approaches, transformer-based models, diffusion-based generators, physics-informed networks, and language-augmented multimodal systems; (iii) reasoning strategy, covering imagination-based planning, latent policy learning, counterfactual reasoning, and planning under uncertainty; and (iv) application domain, spanning robotics, autonomous driving, video prediction, multimodal agents, reinforcement learning, scientific modeling, medical imaging, educational measurement, and business and finance. Tracing the field from early cognitive-science foundations to milestone systems such as PlaNet, the Dreamer family, MuZero, Sora, Cosmos, and Genie, we examine how these dimensions interact and highlight the recent convergence of chain-of-thought reasoning with world-model imagination. We review evaluation protocols and benchmarks, identify persistent challenges such as compounding prediction errors, sim-to-real transfer, and fragmented evaluation, and outline future directions toward unified multimodal world models, foundation-scale interactive simulators, and safe deployment in safety-critical domains.

Zhengliang Liu, Weihang You, Peng Shu et al.

American college applications require students to navigate fragmented admissions policies, repetitive and conditional forms, and ambiguous questions that often demand cross-referencing multiple sources. We present EZCollegeApp, a large language model (LLM)-powered system that assists high-school students by structuring application forms, grounding suggested answers in authoritative admissions documents, and maintaining full human control over final responses. The system introduces a mapping-first paradigm that separates form understanding from answer generation, enabling consistent reasoning across heterogeneous application portals. EZCollegeApp integrates document ingestion from official admissions websites, retrieval-augmented question answering, and a human-in-the-loop chatbot interface that presents suggestions alongside application fields without automated submission. We describe the system architecture, data pipeline, internal representations, security and privacy measures, and evaluation through automated testing and human quality assessment. Our source code is released on GitHub (https://github.com/ezcollegeapp-public/ezcollegeapp-public) to facilitate the broader impact of this work.

Sohan Shankar, Yi Pan, Hanqi Jiang et al.

This position and survey paper identifies the emerging convergence of neuroscience, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and neuromorphic computing toward a unified research paradigm. Using a framework grounded in brain physiology, we highlight how synaptic plasticity, sparse spike-based communication, and multimodal association provide design principles for next-generation AGI systems that potentially combine both human and machine intelligences. The review traces this evolution from early connectionist models to state-of-the-art large language models, demonstrating how key innovations like transformer attention, foundation-model pre-training, and multi-agent architectures mirror neurobiological processes like cortical mechanisms, working memory, and episodic consolidation. We then discuss emerging physical substrates capable of breaking the von Neumann bottleneck to achieve brain-scale efficiency in silicon: memristive crossbars, in-memory compute arrays, and emerging quantum and photonic devices. There are four critical challenges at this intersection: 1) integrating spiking dynamics with foundation models, 2) maintaining lifelong plasticity without catastrophic forgetting, 3) unifying language with sensorimotor learning in embodied agents, and 4) enforcing ethical safeguards in advanced neuromorphic autonomous systems. This combined perspective across neuroscience, computation, and hardware offers an integrative agenda for in each of these fields.

Zishuai Liu, Weihang You, Jin Lu et al.

Ambient sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) in smart homes remains challenging due to the need for real-time inference, spatially grounded reasoning, and context-aware temporal modeling. Existing approaches often rely on pre-segmented, within-activity data and overlook the physical layout of the environment, limiting their robustness in continuous, real-world deployments. In this paper, we propose MARAuder's Map, a novel framework for real-time activity recognition from raw, unsegmented sensor streams. Our method projects sensor activations onto the physical floorplan to generate trajectory-aware, image-like sequences that capture the spatial flow of human movement. These representations are processed by a hybrid deep learning model that jointly captures spatial structure and temporal dependencies. To enhance temporal awareness, we introduce a learnable time embedding module that encodes contextual cues such as hour-of-day and day-of-week. Additionally, an attention-based encoder selectively focuses on informative segments within each observation window, enabling accurate recognition even under cross-activity transitions and temporal ambiguity. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world smart home datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines, offering a practical solution for real-time HAR in ambient sensor environments.

Hanqi Jiang, Junhao Chen, Yi Pan et al.

Medical vision--language models (VLMs) are usually evaluated on intact image--question pairs, but trustworthy clinical use requires a stronger property: a model must recognise when the evidential basis for an answer has failed. We study this through silent failures under perturbed evidence, where a vision-required medical question is paired with a false premise, wording perturbation, knowledge-only rewrite, or ROI-corrupted image, yet the model returns a fluent non-refusal answer. We introduce medvigil, a 300-case evaluation suite drawn from four public medical VQA sources, supervised end to end by four board-certified radiologists: every gold answer, refusal option, candidate-answer set, paraphrase, false-premise trap, ROI box, and clinical risk tier is clinician-authored. Two attending radiologists annotate every case in parallel, a senior radiologist consolidates the released manifest, and a separate fourth radiologist independent of construction answers every probe to provide the human reference baseline. The release contains 2{,}556 MCQ probes, 240 counterfactual triplets, physician-adjudicated risk-tier and answerability flags, ROI boxes, and a paired open-ended variant. We report seven correctness-conditioned audit metrics that summarise into the medvigil Composite Score (MCS), and audit 16 vision-capable models plus two text-only baselines. The independent radiologist scores MCS 83.3 at silent-failure rate 5.8%, leaving a 14.1-point composite headroom above the strongest audited model (Claude Opus 4.7 at 69.2). The benchmark and evaluation harness are publicly released.

Ehsan Latif, Yifan Zhou, Shuchen Guo et al.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, it demonstrates capabilities comparable to human intelligence, with significant potential to transform education and workforce development. This study evaluates OpenAI o1-preview's ability to perform higher-order cognitive tasks across 14 dimensions, including critical thinking, systems thinking, computational thinking, design thinking, metacognition, data literacy, creative thinking, abstract reasoning, quantitative reasoning, logical reasoning, analogical reasoning, and scientific reasoning. We used validated instruments like the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test and the Biological Systems Thinking Test to compare the o1-preview's performance with human performance systematically. Our findings reveal that o1-preview outperforms humans in most categories, achieving 150% better results in systems thinking, computational thinking, data literacy, creative thinking, scientific reasoning, and abstract reasoning. However, compared to humans, it underperforms by around 25% in logical reasoning, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning. In analogical reasoning, both o1-preview and humans achieved perfect scores. Despite these strengths, the o1-preview shows limitations in abstract reasoning, where human psychology students outperform it, highlighting the continued importance of human oversight in tasks requiring high-level abstraction. These results have significant educational implications, suggesting a shift toward developing human skills that complement AI, such as creativity, abstract reasoning, and critical thinking. This study emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in education and calls for a recalibration of educational goals, teaching methods, and curricula to align with an AI-driven world.

Weihang You, Hanqi Jiang, Yi Pan et al.

Understanding neural responses to visual stimuli remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of brain representations and the modality gap between neural data and visual inputs. Existing methods, mainly based on reducing neural decoding to generation tasks or simple correlations, fail to reflect the hierarchical and temporal processes of visual processing in the brain. To address these limitations, we present NeuroAlign, a novel framework for fine-grained fMRI-video alignment inspired by the hierarchical organization of the human visual system. Our framework implements a two-stage mechanism that mirrors biological visual pathways: global semantic understanding through Neural-Temporal Contrastive Learning (NTCL) and fine-grained pattern matching through enhanced vector quantization. NTCL explicitly models temporal dynamics through bidirectional prediction between modalities, while our DynaSyncMM-EMA approach enables dynamic multi-modal fusion with adaptive weighting. Experiments demonstrate that NeuroAlign significantly outperforms existing methods in cross-modal retrieval tasks, establishing a new paradigm for understanding visual cognitive mechanisms.

Weihang You, Qingchan Zhu, David Liu et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning excels in language models but struggles in vision-language models due to premature visual-to-text conversion that discards continuous information such as geometry and spatial layout. While recent methods enhance CoT through static enumeration or attention-based selection, they remain passive, i.e., processing pre-computed inputs rather than actively seeking task-relevant details. Inspired by human active perception, we introduce ViThinker, a framework that enables vision-language models to autonomously generate decision (query) tokens triggering the synthesis of expert-aligned visual features on demand. ViThinker internalizes vision-expert capabilities during training, performing generative mental simulation during inference without external tool calls. Through a two-stage curriculum: first distilling frozen experts into model parameters, then learning task-driven querying via sparsity penalties, i.e., ViThinker discovers minimal sufficient perception for each reasoning step. Evaluations across vision-centric benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements, validating that active query generation outperforms passive approaches in both perceptual grounding and reasoning accuracy.

Weihang You, Hanqi Jiang, Zishuai Liu et al.

Real world collection of Activities of Daily Living data is challenging due to privacy concerns, costly deployment and labeling, and the inherent sparsity and imbalance of human behavior. We present ADLGen, a generative framework specifically designed to synthesize realistic, event triggered, and symbolic sensor sequences for ambient assistive environments. ADLGen integrates a decoder only Transformer with sign based symbolic temporal encoding, and a context and layout aware sampling mechanism to guide generation toward semantically rich and physically plausible sensor event sequences. To enhance semantic fidelity and correct structural inconsistencies, we further incorporate a large language model into an automatic generate evaluate refine loop, which verifies logical, behavioral, and temporal coherence and generates correction rules without manual intervention or environment specific tuning. Through comprehensive experiments with novel evaluation metrics, ADLGen is shown to outperform baseline generators in statistical fidelity, semantic richness, and downstream activity recognition, offering a scalable and privacy-preserving solution for ADL data synthesis.