Hao Frank Yang

Jianyi Zhang, Hao Frank Yang, Ang Li et al.

Previous studies on federated learning (FL) often encounter performance degradation due to data heterogeneity among different clients. In light of the recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4v and LLaVA, which demonstrate their exceptional proficiency in multimodal tasks, such as image captioning and multimodal question answering. We introduce a novel federated learning framework, named Multimodal Large Language Model Assisted Federated Learning (MLLM-LLaVA-FL), which employs powerful MLLMs at the server end to address the heterogeneous and long-tailed challenges. Owing to the advanced cross-modality representation capabilities and the extensive open-vocabulary prior knowledge of MLLMs, our framework is adept at harnessing the extensive, yet previously underexploited, open-source data accessible from websites and powerful server-side computational resources. Hence, the MLLM-LLaVA-FL not only enhances the performance but also avoids increasing the risk of privacy leakage and the computational burden on local devices, distinguishing it from prior methodologies. Our framework has three key stages. Initially, we conduct global visual-text pretraining of the model. This pretraining is facilitated by utilizing the extensive open-source data available online, with the assistance of MLLMs. Subsequently, the pretrained model is distributed among various clients for local training. Finally, once the locally trained models are transmitted back to the server, a global alignment is carried out under the supervision of MLLMs to further enhance the performance. Experimental evaluations on established benchmarks, show that our framework delivers promising performance in the typical scenarios with data heterogeneity and long-tail distribution across different clients in FL.

Linshen Liu, Boyan Su, Junyue Jiang et al.

This paper presents Edge-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) Collaborative Computing (EMC2), an optimal computing system designed for autonomous vehicles (AVs) that simultaneously achieves low-latency and high-accuracy 3D object detection. Unlike conventional approaches, EMC2 incorporates a scenario-aware MoE architecture specifically optimized for edge platforms. By effectively fusing LiDAR and camera data, the system leverages the complementary strengths of sparse 3D point clouds and dense 2D images to generate robust multimodal representations. To enable this, EMC2 employs an adaptive multimodal data bridge that performs multi-scale preprocessing on sensor inputs, followed by a scenario-aware routing mechanism that dynamically dispatches features to dedicated expert models based on object visibility and distance. In addition, EMC2 integrates joint hardware-software optimizations, including hardware resource utilization optimization and computational graph simplification, to ensure efficient and real-time inference on resource-constrained edge devices. Experiments on open-source benchmarks clearly show the EMC2 advancements as an end-to-end system. On the KITTI dataset, it achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.58% and a 159.06% inference speedup compared to 15 baseline methods on Jetson platforms, with similar performance gains on the nuScenes dataset, highlighting its capability to advance reliable, real-time 3D object detection tasks for AVs. The official implementation is available at https://github.com/LinshenLiu622/EMC2.

Jingyang Zhang, Jingwei Sun, Eric Yeats et al.

The problem of pre-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) has received growing attention due to its implications in critical issues like copyright violation and test data contamination. Despite improved performance, existing methods (including the state-of-the-art, Min-K%) are mostly developed upon simple heuristics and lack solid, reasonable foundations. In this work, we propose a novel and theoretically motivated methodology for pre-training data detection, named Min-K%++. Specifically, we present a key insight that training samples tend to be local maxima of the modeled distribution along each input dimension through maximum likelihood training, which in turn allow us to insightfully translate the problem into identification of local maxima. Then, we design our method accordingly that works under the discrete distribution modeled by LLMs, whose core idea is to determine whether the input forms a mode or has relatively high probability under the conditional categorical distribution. Empirically, the proposed method achieves new SOTA performance across multiple settings. On the WikiMIA benchmark, Min-K%++ outperforms the runner-up by 6.2% to 10.5% in detection AUROC averaged over five models. On the more challenging MIMIR benchmark, it consistently improves upon reference-free methods while performing on par with reference-based method that requires an extra reference model.

Yibo Zhao, Yang Zhao, Hongru Du et al.

Decision-making models for individuals, particularly in high-stakes scenarios like vaccine uptake, often diverge from population optimal predictions. This gap arises from the uniqueness of the individual decision-making process, shaped by numerical attributes (e.g., cost, time) and linguistic influences (e.g., personal preferences and constraints). Developing upon Utility Theory and leveraging the textual-reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), this paper proposes an Adaptive Textual-symbolic Human-centric Reasoning framework (ATHENA) to address the optimal information integration. ATHENA uniquely integrates two stages: First, it discovers robust, group-level symbolic utility functions via LLM-augmented symbolic discovery; Second, it implements individual-level semantic adaptation, creating personalized semantic templates guided by the optimal utility to model personalized choices. Validated on real-world travel mode and vaccine choice tasks, ATHENA consistently outperforms utility-based, machine learning, and other LLM-based models, lifting F1 score by at least 6.5% over the strongest cutting-edge models. Further, ablation studies confirm that both stages of ATHENA are critical and complementary, as removing either clearly degrades overall predictive performance. By organically integrating symbolic utility modeling and semantic adaptation, ATHENA provides a new scheme for modeling human-centric decisions. The project page can be found at https://yibozh.github.io/Athena.

Hongru Du, Jianan Zhao, Yang Zhao et al.

Forecasting the short-term spread of an ongoing disease outbreak is a formidable challenge due to the complexity of contributing factors, some of which can be characterized through interlinked, multi-modality variables such as epidemiological time series data, viral biology, population demographics, and the intersection of public policy and human behavior. Existing forecasting model frameworks struggle with the multifaceted nature of relevant data and robust results translation, which hinders their performances and the provision of actionable insights for public health decision-makers. Our work introduces PandemicLLM, a novel framework with multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) that reformulates real-time forecasting of disease spread as a text reasoning problem, with the ability to incorporate real-time, complex, non-numerical information that previously unattainable in traditional forecasting models. This approach, through a unique AI-human cooperative prompt design and time series representation learning, encodes multi-modal data for LLMs. The model is applied to the COVID-19 pandemic, and trained to utilize textual public health policies, genomic surveillance, spatial, and epidemiological time series data, and is subsequently tested across all 50 states of the U.S. Empirically, PandemicLLM is shown to be a high-performing pandemic forecasting framework that effectively captures the impact of emerging variants and can provide timely and accurate predictions. The proposed PandemicLLM opens avenues for incorporating various pandemic-related data in heterogeneous formats and exhibits performance benefits over existing models. This study illuminates the potential of adapting LLMs and representation learning to enhance pandemic forecasting, illustrating how AI innovations can strengthen pandemic responses and crisis management in the future.

Chengzhi Ji, Xingfeng Li, Zhaodong Lv et al.

Modular end-to-end (ME2E) autonomous driving paradigms combine modular interpretability with global optimization capability and have demonstrated strong performance. However, existing studies mainly focus on accuracy improvement, while critical system-level factors such as inference latency and energy consumption are often overlooked, resulting in increasingly complex model designs that hinder practical deployment. Prior efforts on model compression and acceleration typically optimize either the software or hardware side in isolation. Software-only optimization cannot fundamentally remove intermediate tensor access and operator scheduling overheads, whereas hardware-only optimization is constrained by model structure and precision. As a result, the real-world benefits of such optimizations are often limited. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a reusable software and hardware co-optimization and closed-loop evaluation framework for ME2E autonomous driving inference. The framework jointly integrates software-level model optimization with hardware-level computation optimization under a unified system-level objective. In addition, a multidimensional evaluation metric is introduced to assess system performance by jointly considering safety, comfort, efficiency, latency, and energy, enabling quantitative comparison of different optimization strategies. Experiments across multiple ME2E autonomous driving stacks show that the proposed framework preserves baseline-level driving performance while significantly reducing inference latency and energy consumption, achieving substantial overall system-level improvements. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides practical and actionable guidance for efficient deployment of ME2E autonomous driving systems.

Renjie Li, Ruijie Ye, Mingyang Wu et al.

Humans are integral components of the transportation ecosystem, and understanding their behaviors is crucial to facilitating the development of safe driving systems. Although recent progress has explored various aspects of human behavior$\unicode{x2014}$such as motion, trajectories, and intention$\unicode{x2014}$a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating human behavior understanding in autonomous driving remains unavailable. In this work, we propose $\textbf{MMHU}$, a large-scale benchmark for human behavior analysis featuring rich annotations, such as human motion and trajectories, text description for human motions, human intention, and critical behavior labels relevant to driving safety. Our dataset encompasses 57k human motion clips and 1.73M frames gathered from diverse sources, including established driving datasets such as Waymo, in-the-wild videos from YouTube, and self-collected data. A human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline is developed to generate rich behavior captions. We provide a thorough dataset analysis and benchmark multiple tasks$\unicode{x2014}$ranging from motion prediction to motion generation and human behavior question answering$\unicode{x2014}$thereby offering a broad evaluation suite. Project page : https://MMHU-Benchmark.github.io.

Yuhong Zhang, Guanlin Wu, Ling-Hao Chen et al.

In this paper, we present a novel framework designed to reconstruct long-sequence 3D human motion in the world coordinates from in-the-wild videos with multiple shot transitions. Such long-sequence in-the-wild motions are highly valuable to applications such as motion generation and motion understanding, but are of great challenge to be recovered due to abrupt shot transitions, partial occlusions, and dynamic backgrounds presented in such videos. Existing methods primarily focus on single-shot videos, where continuity is maintained within a single camera view, or simplify multi-shot alignment in camera space only. In this work, we tackle the challenges by integrating an enhanced camera pose estimation with Human Motion Recovery (HMR) by incorporating a shot transition detector and a robust alignment module for accurate pose and orientation continuity across shots. By leveraging a custom motion integrator, we effectively mitigate the problem of foot sliding and ensure temporal consistency in human pose. Extensive evaluations on our created multi-shot dataset from public 3D human datasets demonstrate the robustness of our method in reconstructing realistic human motion in world coordinates.

Guanlin Wu, Boyan Su, Yang Zhao et al.

How to integrate and verify spatial intelligence in foundation models remains an open challenge. Current practice often proxies Visual-Spatial Intelligence (VSI) with purely textual prompts and VQA-style scoring, which obscures geometry, invites linguistic shortcuts, and weakens attribution to genuinely spatial skills. We introduce Spatial Intelligence Grid (SIG): a structured, grid-based schema that explicitly encodes object layouts, inter-object relations, and physically grounded priors. As a complementary channel to text, SIG provides a faithful, compositional representation of scene structure for foundation-model reasoning. Building on SIG, we derive SIG-informed evaluation metrics that quantify a model's intrinsic VSI, which separates spatial capability from language priors. In few-shot in-context learning with state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (e.g. GPT- and Gemini-family models), SIG yields consistently larger, more stable, and more comprehensive gains across all VSI metrics compared to VQA-only representations, indicating its promise as a data-labeling and training schema for learning VSI. We also release SIGBench, a benchmark of 1.4K driving frames annotated with ground-truth SIG labels and human gaze traces, supporting both grid-based machine VSI tasks and attention-driven, human-like VSI tasks in autonomous-driving scenarios.

Yang Zhao, Pu Wang, Hao Frank Yang

Designing optimal prompts and reasoning processes for large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific tasks is both necessary and challenging in real-world applications. Determining how to integrate domain knowledge, enhance reasoning efficiency, and even provide domain experts with refined knowledge integration hints are particularly crucial yet unresolved tasks. In this research, we propose Evolutionary Graph Optimization for Prompting (EGO-Prompt), an automated framework to designing better prompts, efficient reasoning processes and providing enhanced causal-informed process. EGO-Prompt begins with a general prompt and fault-tolerant initial Semantic Causal Graph (SCG) descriptions, constructed by human experts, which is then automatically refined and optimized to guide LLM reasoning. Recognizing that expert-defined SCGs may be partial or imperfect and that their optimal integration varies across LLMs, EGO-Prompt integrates a novel causal-guided textual gradient process in two steps: first, generating nearly deterministic reasoning guidance from the SCG for each instance, and second, adapting the LLM to effectively utilize the guidance alongside the original input. The iterative optimization algorithm further refines both the SCG and the reasoning mechanism using textual gradients with ground-truth. We tested the framework on real-world public health, transportation and human behavior tasks. EGO-Prompt achieves 7.32%-12.61% higher F1 than cutting-edge methods, and allows small models to reach the performence of larger models at under 20% of the original cost. It also outputs a refined, domain-specific SCG that improves interpretability.

Yang Zhao, Pu Wang, Yibo Zhao et al.

Predicting crash events is crucial for understanding crash distributions and their contributing factors, thereby enabling the design of proactive traffic safety policy interventions. However, existing methods struggle to interpret the complex interplay among various sources of traffic crash data, including numeric characteristics, textual reports, crash imagery, environmental conditions, and driver behavior records. As a result, they often fail to capture the rich semantic information and intricate interrelationships embedded in these diverse data sources, limiting their ability to identify critical crash risk factors. In this research, we propose TrafficSafe, a framework that adapts LLMs to reframe crash prediction and feature attribution as text-based reasoning. A multi-modal crash dataset including 58,903 real-world reports together with belonged infrastructure, environmental, driver, and vehicle information is collected and textualized into TrafficSafe Event Dataset. By customizing and fine-tuning LLMs on this dataset, the TrafficSafe LLM achieves a 42% average improvement in F1-score over baselines. To interpret these predictions and uncover contributing factors, we introduce TrafficSafe Attribution, a sentence-level feature attribution framework enabling conditional risk analysis. Findings show that alcohol-impaired driving is the leading factor in severe crashes, with aggressive and impairment-related behaviors having nearly twice the contribution for severe crashes compared to other driver behaviors. Furthermore, TrafficSafe Attribution highlights pivotal features during model training, guiding strategic crash data collection for iterative performance improvements. The proposed TrafficSafe offers a transformative leap in traffic safety research, providing a blueprint for translating advanced AI technologies into responsible, actionable, and life-saving outcomes.

Zhiwen Fan, Pu Wang, Yang Zhao et al.

The increasing rate of road accidents worldwide results not only in significant loss of life but also imposes billions financial burdens on societies. Current research in traffic crash frequency modeling and analysis has predominantly approached the problem as classification tasks, focusing mainly on learning-based classification or ensemble learning methods. These approaches often overlook the intricate relationships among the complex infrastructure, environmental, human and contextual factors related to traffic crashes and risky situations. In contrast, we initially propose a large-scale traffic crash language dataset, named CrashEvent, summarizing 19,340 real-world crash reports and incorporating infrastructure data, environmental and traffic textual and visual information in Washington State. Leveraging this rich dataset, we further formulate the crash event feature learning as a novel text reasoning problem and further fine-tune various large language models (LLMs) to predict detailed accident outcomes, such as crash types, severity and number of injuries, based on contextual and environmental factors. The proposed model, CrashLLM, distinguishes itself from existing solutions by leveraging the inherent text reasoning capabilities of LLMs to parse and learn from complex, unstructured data, thereby enabling a more nuanced analysis of contributing factors. Our experiments results shows that our LLM-based approach not only predicts the severity of accidents but also classifies different types of accidents and predicts injury outcomes, all with averaged F1 score boosted from 34.9% to 53.8%. Furthermore, CrashLLM can provide valuable insights for numerous open-world what-if situational-awareness traffic safety analyses with learned reasoning features, which existing models cannot offer. We make our benchmark, datasets, and model public available for further exploration.