Zhengnan Li

LG
h-index3
8papers
13citations
Novelty55%
AI Score55

8 Papers

CVMay 14Code
MemLens: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Memory in Large Vision-Language Models

Xiyu Ren, Zhaowei Wang, Yiming Du et al.

Memory is essential for large vision-language models (LVLMs) to handle long, multimodal interactions, with two method directions providing this capability: long-context LVLMs and memory-augmented agents. However, no existing benchmark conducts a systematic comparison of the two on questions that genuinely require multimodal evidence. To close this gap, we introduce MEMLENS, a comprehensive benchmark for memory in multimodal multi-session conversations, comprising 789 questions across five memory abilities (information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal reasoning, knowledge update, and answer refusal) at four standard context lengths (32K-256K tokens) under a cross-modal token-counting scheme. An image-ablation study confirms that solving MEMLENS requires visual evidence: removing evidence images drops two frontier LVLMs below 2% accuracy on the 80.4% of questions whose evidence includes images. Evaluating 27 LVLMs and 7 memory-augmented agents, we find that long-context LVLMs achieve high short-context accuracy through direct visual grounding but degrade as conversations grow, whereas memory agents are length-stable but lose visual fidelity under storage-time compression. Multi-session reasoning caps most systems below 30%, and neither approach alone solves the task. These results motivate hybrid architectures that combine long-context attention with structured multimodal retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/xrenaf/MEMLENS.

LGDec 2, 2024Code
FSMLP: Modelling Channel Dependencies With Simplex Theory Based Multi-Layer Perceptions In Frequency Domain

Zhengnan Li, Haoxuan Li, Hao Wang et al.

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a crucial role in various domains, including web data analysis, energy consumption prediction, and weather forecasting. While Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are lightweight and effective for capturing temporal dependencies, they are prone to overfitting when used to model inter-channel dependencies. In this paper, we investigate the overfitting problem in channel-wise MLPs using Rademacher complexity theory, revealing that extreme values in time series data exacerbate this issue. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a novel Simplex-MLP layer, where the weights are constrained within a standard simplex. This strategy encourages the model to learn simpler patterns and thereby reducing overfitting to extreme values. Based on the Simplex-MLP layer, we propose a novel \textbf{F}requency \textbf{S}implex \textbf{MLP} (FSMLP) framework for time series forecasting, comprising of two kinds of modules: \textbf{S}implex \textbf{C}hannel-\textbf{W}ise MLP (SCWM) and \textbf{F}requency \textbf{T}emporal \textbf{M}LP (FTM). The SCWM effectively leverages the Simplex-MLP to capture inter-channel dependencies, while the FTM is a simple yet efficient temporal MLP designed to extract temporal information from the data. Our theoretical analysis shows that the upper bound of the Rademacher Complexity for Simplex-MLP is lower than that for standard MLPs. Moreover, we validate our proposed method on seven benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant improvements in forecasting accuracy and efficiency, while also showcasing superior scalability. Additionally, we demonstrate that Simplex-MLP can improve other methods that use channel-wise MLP to achieve less overfitting and improved performance. Code are available \href{https://github.com/FMLYD/FSMLP}{\textcolor{red}{here}}.

CVMar 14
Towards Stable Self-Supervised Object Representations in Unconstrained Egocentric Video

Yuting Tan, Xilong Cheng, Yunxiao Qin et al.

Humans develop visual intelligence through perceiving and interacting with their environment - a self-supervised learning process grounded in egocentric experience. Inspired by this, we ask how can artificial systems learn stable object representations from continuous, uncurated first-person videos without relying on manual annotations. This setting poses challenges of separating, recognizing, and persistently tracking objects amid clutter, occlusion, and ego-motion. We propose EgoViT, a unified vision Transformer framework designed to learn stable object representations from unlabeled egocentric video. EgoViT bootstraps this learning process by jointly discovering and stabilizing "proto-objects" through three synergistic mechanisms: (1) Proto-object Learning, which uses intra-frame distillation to form discriminative representations; (2) Depth Regularization, which grounds these representations in geometric structure; and (3) Teacher-Filtered Temporal Consistency, which enforces identity over time. This creates a virtuous cycle where initial object hypotheses are progressively refined into stable, persistent representations. The framework is trained end-to-end on unlabeled first-person videos and exhibits robustness to geometric priors of varied origin and quality. On standard benchmarks, EgoViT achieves +8.0% CorLoc improvement in unsupervised object discovery and +4.8% mIoU improvement in semantic segmentation, demonstrating its potential to lay a foundation for robust visual abstraction in embodied intelligence.

LGMar 12
Slack More, Predict Better: Proximal Relaxation for Probabilistic Latent Variable Model-based Soft Sensors

Zehua Zou, Yiran Ma, Yulong Zhang et al.

Nonlinear Probabilistic Latent Variable Models (NPLVMs) are a cornerstone of soft sensor modeling due to their capacity for uncertainty delineation. However, conventional NPLVMs are trained using amortized variational inference, where neural networks parameterize the variational posterior. While facilitating model implementation, this parameterization converts the distributional optimization problem within an infinite-dimensional function space to parameter optimization within a finite-dimensional parameter space, which introduces an approximation error gap, thereby degrading soft sensor modeling accuracy. To alleviate this issue, we introduce KProxNPLVM, a novel NPLVM that pivots to relaxing the objective itself and improving the NPLVM's performance. Specifically, we first prove the approximation error induced by the conventional approach. Based on this, we design the Wasserstein distance as the proximal operator to relax the learning objective, yielding a new variational inference strategy derived from solving this relaxed optimization problem. Based on this foundation, we provide a rigorous derivation of KProxNPLVM's optimization implementation, prove the convergence of our algorithm can finally sidestep the approximation error, and propose the KProxNPLVM by summarizing the abovementioned content. Finally, extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world industrial datasets are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed KProxNPLVM.

LGMay 24, 2024
FTMixer: Frequency and Time Domain Representations Fusion for Time Series Modeling

Zhengnan Li, Yunxiao Qin, Xilong Cheng et al.

Time series data can be represented in both the time and frequency domains, with the time domain emphasizing local dependencies and the frequency domain highlighting global dependencies. To harness the strengths of both domains in capturing local and global dependencies, we propose the Frequency and Time Domain Mixer (FTMixer). To exploit the global characteristics of the frequency domain, we introduce the Frequency Channel Convolution (FCC) module, designed to capture global inter-series dependencies. Inspired by the windowing concept in frequency domain transformations, we present the Windowing Frequency Convolution (WFC) module to capture local dependencies. The WFC module first applies frequency transformation within each window, followed by convolution across windows. Furthermore, to better capture these local dependencies, we employ channel-independent scheme to mix the time domain and frequency domain patches. Notably, FTMixer employs the Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) with real numbers instead of the complex-number-based Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT), enabling direct utilization of modern deep learning operators in the frequency domain. Extensive experimental results across seven real-world long-term time series datasets demonstrate the superiority of FTMixer, in terms of both forecasting performance and computational efficiency.

LGFeb 1
Analyzing and Improving Diffusion Models for Time-Series Data Imputation: A Proximal Recursion Perspective

Zhichao Chen, Hao Wang, Fangyikang Wang et al.

Diffusion models (DMs) have shown promise for Time-Series Data Imputation (TSDI); however, their performance remains inconsistent in complex scenarios. We attribute this to two primary obstacles: (1) non-stationary temporal dynamics, which can bias the inference trajectory and lead to outlier-sensitive imputations; and (2) objective inconsistency, since imputation favors accurate pointwise recovery whereas DMs are inherently trained to generate diverse samples. To better understand these issues, we analyze DM-based TSDI process through a proximal-operator perspective and uncover that an implicit Wasserstein distance regularization inherent in the process hinders the model's ability to counteract non-stationarity and dissipative regularizer, thereby amplifying diversity at the expense of fidelity. Building on this insight, we propose a novel framework called SPIRIT (Semi-Proximal Transport Regularized time-series Imputation). Specifically, we introduce entropy-induced Bregman divergence to relax the mass preserving constraint in the Wasserstein distance, formulate the semi-proximal transport (SPT) discrepancy, and theoretically prove the robustness of SPT against non-stationarity. Subsequently, we remove the dissipative structure and derive the complete SPIRIT workflow, with SPT serving as the proximal operator. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SPIRIT approach.

LGFeb 1
Rethinking the Flow-Based Gradual Domain Adaption: A Semi-Dual Optimal Transport Perspective

Zhichao Chen, Zhan Zhuang, Yunfei Teng et al.

Gradual domain adaptation (GDA) aims to mitigate domain shift by progressively adapting models from the source domain to the target domain via intermediate domains. However, real intermediate domains are often unavailable or ineffective, necessitating the synthesis of intermediate samples. Flow-based models have recently been used for this purpose by interpolating between source and target distributions; however, their training typically relies on sample-based log-likelihood estimation, which can discard useful information and thus degrade GDA performance. The key to addressing this limitation is constructing the intermediate domains via samples directly. To this end, we propose an Entropy-regularized Semi-dual Unbalanced Optimal Transport (E-SUOT) framework to construct intermediate domains. Specifically, we reformulate flow-based GDA as a Lagrangian dual problem and derive an equivalent semi-dual objective that circumvents the need for likelihood estimation. However, the dual problem leads to an unstable min-max training procedure. To alleviate this issue, we further introduce entropy regularization to convert it into a more stable alternative optimization procedure. Based on this, we propose a novel GDA training framework and provide theoretical analysis in terms of stability and generalization. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the E-SUOT framework.

CLMay 19, 2025
PsyMem: Fine-grained psychological alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs

Xilong Cheng, Yunxiao Qin, Yuting Tan et al.

Existing LLM-based role-playing methods often rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions. Additionally, they typically simulate character memory with implicit model knowledge or basic retrieval augment generation without explicit memory alignment, compromising memory consistency. The two issues weaken reliability of role-playing LLMs in several applications, such as trustworthy social simulation. To address these limitations, we propose PsyMem, a novel framework integrating fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing. PsyMem supplements textual descriptions with 26 psychological indicators to detailed model character. Additionally, PsyMem implements memory alignment training, explicitly trains the model to align character's response with memory, thereby enabling dynamic memory-controlled responding during inference. By training Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on our specially designed dataset (including 5,414 characters and 38,962 dialogues extracted from novels), the resulting model, termed as PsyMem-Qwen, outperforms baseline models in role-playing, achieving the best performance in human-likeness and character fidelity.