Yani Zhang

Shengpu Wang, Yuhao Mao, Yani Zhang et al.

Floating-point neural networks dominate modern machine learning but incur substantial inference cost, motivating interest in Boolean networks for resource-constrained settings. However, learning compact and accurate Boolean networks is challenging due to their combinatorial nature. In this work, we address this challenge from three different angles: learned connections, compact convolutions and adaptive discretization. First, we propose a novel strategy to learn efficient connections with no additional parameters and negligible computational overhead. Second, we introduce a novel convolutional Boolean architecture that exploits the locality with reduced number of Boolean operations than existing methods. Third, we propose an adaptive discretization strategy to reduce the accuracy drop when converting a continuous-valued network into a Boolean one. Extensive results on standard vision benchmarks demonstrate that the Pareto front of accuracy vs. computation of our method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art, achieving better accuracy with up to 37x fewer Boolean operations.

Jinyue Li, Yuzhou Yu, Jingjing Yang et al.

The accurate classification of benign and malignant pulmonary nodules in CT scans is critical for early lung cancer screening, yet remains challenging due to the multi-scale and heterogeneous nature of pulmonary nodules. While deep learning offers potential for auxiliary diagnosis, most existing models act as "black boxes", lacking the transparency and explainability required for trustworthy clinical integration. To address this issue, we propose M3Net, a novel 3D network for pulmonary nodule classification inspired by the hierarchical diagnostic workflow of radiologists, which integrates multi-scale contextual information from fine-grained structures to global anatomical relationships. Our framework constructs a progressive multi-scale input, from fine-grained nodule structures to local semantics and global spatial relationships. M3Net employs scale-specific encoders and ensures cross-scale semantic consistency through latent space projection and mutual information maximization. Extensive experiments on the public LIDC-IDRI dataset and a self-collected clinical dataset (USTC-FHLN) demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with accuracies of 86.96% and 84.24% respectively, outperforming the best baseline by 3.26% and 2.17%. The results validate that M3Net provides a more robust and clinically relevant solution for pulmonary nodule classification. The code is available at https://github.com/jylEcho/M3-Net.

Tencent Robotics X, HY Vision Team, Xumin Yu et al. · tencent-ai

We introduce HY-Embodied-0.5, a family of foundation models specifically designed for real-world embodied agents. To bridge the gap between general Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the demands of embodied agents, our models are developed to enhance the core capabilities required by embodied intelligence: spatial and temporal visual perception, alongside advanced embodied reasoning for prediction, interaction, and planning. The HY-Embodied-0.5 suite comprises two primary variants: an efficient model with 2B activated parameters designed for edge deployment, and a powerful model with 32B activated parameters targeted for complex reasoning. To support the fine-grained visual perception essential for embodied tasks, we adopt a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to enable modality-specific computing. By incorporating latent tokens, this design effectively enhances the perceptual representation of the models. To improve reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative, self-evolving post-training paradigm. Furthermore, we employ on-policy distillation to transfer the advanced capabilities of the large model to the smaller variant, thereby maximizing the performance potential of the compact model. Extensive evaluations across 22 benchmarks, spanning visual perception, spatial reasoning, and embodied understanding, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our MoT-2B model outperforms similarly sized state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks, while the 32B variant achieves performance comparable to frontier models such as Gemini 3.0 Pro. In downstream robot control experiments, we leverage our robust VLM foundation to train an effective Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, achieving compelling results in real-world physical evaluations. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-Embodied.

Yani Zhang, Dongming Wu, Hao Shi et al.

Embodied 3D grounding aims to localize target objects described in human instructions from ego-centric viewpoint. Most methods typically follow a two-stage paradigm where a trained 3D detector's optimized backbone parameters are used to initialize a grounding model. In this study, we explore a fundamental question: Does embodied 3D grounding benefit enough from detection? To answer this question, we assess the grounding performance of detection models using predicted boxes filtered by the target category. Surprisingly, these detection models without any instruction-specific training outperform the grounding models explicitly trained with language instructions. This indicates that even category-level embodied 3D grounding may not be well resolved, let alone more fine-grained context-aware grounding. Motivated by this finding, we propose DEGround, which shares DETR queries as object representation for both DEtection and Grounding and enables the grounding to benefit from basic category classification and box detection. Based on this framework, we further introduce a regional activation grounding module that highlights instruction-related regions and a query-wise modulation module that incorporates sentence-level semantic into the query representation, strengthening the context-aware understanding of language instructions. Remarkably, DEGround outperforms state-of-the-art model BIP3D by 7.52% at overall accuracy on the EmbodiedScan validation set. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/zyn213/DEGround.

Yani Zhang, Dongming Wu, Wencheng Han et al.

Referring understanding is a fundamental task that bridges natural language and visual content by localizing objects described in free-form expressions. However, existing works are constrained by limited language expressiveness, lacking the capacity to model object dynamics in spatial numbers and temporal states. To address these limitations, we introduce a new and general referring understanding task, termed referring multi-object tracking (RMOT). Its core idea is to employ a language expression as a semantic cue to guide the prediction of multi-object tracking, comprehensively accounting for variations in object quantity and temporal semantics. Along with RMOT, we introduce a RMOT benchmark named Refer-KITTI-V2, featuring scalable and diverse language expressions. To efficiently generate high-quality annotations covering object dynamics with minimal manual effort, we propose a semi-automatic labeling pipeline that formulates a total of 9,758 language prompts. In addition, we propose TempRMOT, an elegant end-to-end Transformer-based framework for RMOT. At its core is a query-driven Temporal Enhancement Module that represents each object as a Transformer query, enabling long-term spatial-temporal interactions with other objects and past frames to efficiently refine these queries. TempRMOT achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Refer-KITTI and Refer-KITTI-V2, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. The source code and dataset is available at https://github.com/zyn213/TempRMOT.

Yani Zhang, Helmut Bölcskei

Deep ReLU neural networks admit nontrivial functional symmetries: vastly different architectures and parameters (weights and biases) can realize the same function. We address the complete identification problem -- given a function f, deriving the architecture and parameters of all feedforward ReLU networks giving rise to f. We translate ReLU networks into Lukasiewicz logic formulae, and effect functional equivalent network transformations through algebraic rewrites governed by the logic axioms. A compositional norm form is proposed to facilitate the mapping from Lukasiewicz logic formulae back to ReLU networks. Using Chang's completeness theorem, we show that for every functional equivalence class, all ReLU networks in that class are connected by a finite set of symmetries corresponding to the finite set of axioms of Lukasiewicz logic. This idea is reminiscent of Shannon's seminal work on switching circuit design, where the circuits are translated into Boolean formulae, and synthesis is effected by algebraic rewriting governed by Boolean logic axioms.

Yani Zhang, Helmut Bölcskei

We develop a theory characterizing the fundamental capability of deep neural networks to learn, from evolution traces, the logical rules governing the behavior of cellular automata (CA). This is accomplished by first establishing a novel connection between CA and Lukasiewicz propositional logic. While binary CA have been known for decades to essentially perform operations in Boolean logic, no such relationship exists for general CA. We demonstrate that many-valued (MV) logic, specifically Lukasiewicz propositional logic, constitutes a suitable language for characterizing general CA as logical machines. This is done by interpolating CA transition functions to continuous piecewise linear functions, which, by virtue of the McNaughton theorem, yield formulae in MV logic characterizing the CA. Recognizing that deep rectified linear unit (ReLU) networks realize continuous piecewise linear functions, it follows that these formulae are naturally extracted from CA evolution traces by deep ReLU networks. A corresponding algorithm together with a software implementation is provided. Finally, we show that the dynamical behavior of CA can be realized by recurrent neural networks.

Yani Zhang, Helmut Bölcskei

We propose a new perspective on deep ReLU networks, namely as circuit counterparts of Lukasiewicz infinite-valued logic -- a many-valued (MV) generalization of Boolean logic. An algorithm for extracting formulae in MV logic from deep ReLU networks is presented. As the algorithm applies to networks with general, in particular also real-valued, weights, it can be used to extract logical formulae from deep ReLU networks trained on data.