Liyu Zhang

CL
h-index18
8papers
15citations
Novelty53%
AI Score52

8 Papers

AIMay 26
MobileExplorer: Accelerating On-Device Inference for Mobile GUI Agents via Online Exploration

Runxi Huang, Liyu Zhang, Shengzhong Liu et al.

Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents enable AI models to autonomously operate smartphones on behalf of users. However, most existing systems focus primarily on optimizing task accuracy and rely on cloud-hosted models for inference, which introduces privacy concerns and network-dependent latency. As a result, fully on-device deployment of mobile GUI agents remains underexplored. We propose MobileExplorer, a new framework that accelerates on-device inference for vision-based mobile GUI agents via online exploration. The key idea is to exploit the long per-step reasoning time of vision-language models (VLMs) by performing lightweight, parallel exploration of UI elements. During model inference, the agent proactively probes semantically relevant UI elements and records these exploration traces as structured memory. To ensure reliable execution in live mobile environments, we design a two-level rollback mechanism that robustly restores the initial UI state when a fast but naive backtracking strategy fails. The collected exploration traces are then summarized into concise contextual hints and injected into the prompt to enhance the subsequent reasoning step. We evaluate MobileExplorer on multiple off-the-shelf devices using the AndroidWorld benchmark, as well as newly designed, more complex tasks and dynamic on-device environments. MobileExplorer reduces the average number of reasoning steps and end-to-end latency by 23\%, while maintaining or improving task success rates by up to 5\%. A video demonstration of MobileExplorer performance in the real world is available at https://youtu.be/thK7MJmdlvM .

CLDec 16, 2024Code
ConKE: Conceptualization-Augmented Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning

Liyu Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang et al. · tencent-ai

Knowledge Editing (KE) aims to adjust a Large Language Model's (LLM) internal representations and parameters to correct inaccuracies and improve output consistency without incurring the computational expense of re-training the entire model. However, editing commonsense knowledge still faces difficulties, including limited knowledge coverage in existing resources, the infeasibility of annotating labels for an overabundance of commonsense knowledge, and the strict knowledge formats of current editing methods. In this paper, we address these challenges by presenting ConceptEdit, a framework that integrates conceptualization and instantiation into the KE pipeline for LLMs to enhance their commonsense reasoning capabilities. ConceptEdit dynamically diagnoses implausible commonsense knowledge within an LLM using another verifier LLM and augments the source knowledge to be edited with conceptualization for stronger generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs enhanced with ConceptEdit successfully generate commonsense knowledge with improved plausibility compared to other baselines and achieve stronger performance across multiple question answering benchmarks. Our data, code, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/ConKE.

CLJan 30
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Differential Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Junyou Su, He Zhu, Xiao Luo et al.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to adapting large language models, yet training on complete datasets incurs prohibitive costs with diminishing returns. Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity: techniques optimized for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks, and vice versa. We observe that measuring entropy differences between base models and minimally instruction-tuned calibrated models reveals a pattern -- samples with the lowest differential entropy consistently yield optimal performance across domains, yet this principle manifests domain-adaptively: reasoning tasks favor entropy increase (cognitive expansion), while general tasks favor entropy decrease (cognitive compression). We introduce InstructDiff, a unified framework that operationalizes differential entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropy-based ranking. Extensive experiments show that InstructDiff achieves 17\% relative improvement over full data training on mathematical reasoning and 52\% for general instruction-following, outperforming prior baselines while using only 10\% of the data.

LGDec 17, 2025
Chorus: Harmonizing Context and Sensing Signals for Data-Free Model Customization in IoT

Liyu Zhang, Yejia Liu, Kwun Ho Liu et al.

In real-world IoT applications, sensor data is usually collected under diverse and dynamic contextual conditions where factors such as sensor placements or ambient environments can significantly affect data patterns and downstream performance. Traditional domain adaptation or generalization methods often ignore such context information or use simplistic integration strategies, making them ineffective in handling unseen context shifts after deployment. In this paper, we propose Chorus, a context-aware, data-free model customization approach that adapts models to unseen deployment conditions without requiring target-domain data. The key idea is to learn effective context representations that capture their influence on sensor data patterns and to adaptively integrate them based on the degree of context shift. Specifically, Chorus first performs unsupervised cross-modal reconstruction between unlabeled sensor data and language-based context embeddings, while regularizing the context embedding space to learn robust, generalizable context representations. Then, it trains a lightweight gated head on limited labeled samples to dynamically balance sensor and context contributions-favoring context when sensor evidence is ambiguous and vice versa. To further reduce inference latency, Chorus employs a context-caching mechanism that reuses cached context representations and updates only upon detected context shifts. Experiments on IMU, speech, and WiFi sensing tasks under diverse context shifts show that Chorus outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 11.3% in unseen contexts, while maintaining comparable latency on smartphone and edge devices.

CVApr 5
OP-GRPO: Efficient Off-Policy GRPO for Flow-Matching Models

Liyu Zhang, Kehan Li, Tingrui Han et al.

Post training via GRPO has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving the generation quality of flow-matching models. However, GRPO suffers from inherently low sample efficiency due to its on-policy training paradigm. To address this limitation, we present OP-GRPO, the first Off-Policy GRPO framework tailored for flow-matching models. First, we actively select high-quality trajectories and adaptively incorporate them into a replay buffer for reuse in subsequent training iterations. Second, to mitigate the distribution shift introduced by off-policy samples, we propose a sequence-level importance sampling correction that preserves the integrity of GRPO's clipping mechanism while ensuring stable policy updates. Third, we theoretically and empirically show that late denoising steps yield ill-conditioned off-policy ratios, and mitigate this by truncating trajectories at late steps. Across image and video generation benchmarks, OP-GRPO achieves comparable or superior performance to Flow-GRPO with only 34.2% of the training steps on average, yielding substantial gains in training efficiency while maintaining generation quality.

CLMay 2, 2025
Synthesize-on-Graph: Knowledgeable Synthetic Data Generation for Continue Pre-training of Large Language Models

Shengjie Ma, Xuhui Jiang, Chengjin Xu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but remain data-inefficient, especially when learning from small, specialized corpora with limited and proprietary data. Existing synthetic data generation methods for continue pre-training focus on intra-document content and overlook cross-document knowledge associations, limiting content diversity and depth. We propose Synthetic-on-Graph (SoG), a synthetic data generation framework that incorporates cross-document knowledge associations for efficient corpus expansion. SoG constructs a context graph by extracting entities and concepts from the original corpus, representing cross-document associations, and employing a graph walk strategy for knowledge-associated sampling. This enhances synthetic data diversity and coherence, enabling models to learn complex knowledge structures and handle rare knowledge. To further improve the quality of synthetic data, we integrate two complementary strategies, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Contrastive Clarifying (CC), to enhance both reasoning capability and discriminative power. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SoG surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on multi-hop and domain-specific question answering, while achieving competitive performance on long-context reading comprehension. These results highlight the superior generalization ability of SoG. Our work advances the paradigm of synthetic data generation and offers practical solutions for efficient knowledge acquisition in LLMs, particularly for downstream tasks and domains with limited training data.

LGOct 24, 2024
SAMG: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning via State-Action-Conditional Offline Model Guidance

Liyu Zhang, Haochi Wu, Xu Wan et al.

Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning (RL) pre-trains models on offline data and refines policies through online fine-tuning. However, existing O2O RL algorithms typically require maintaining the tedious offline datasets to mitigate the effects of out-of-distribution (OOD) data, which significantly limits their efficiency in exploiting online samples. To address this deficiency, we introduce a new paradigm for O2O RL called State-Action-Conditional Offline \Model Guidance (SAMG). It freezes the pre-trained offline critic to provide compact offline understanding for each state-action sample, thus eliminating the need for retraining on offline data. The frozen offline critic is incorporated with the online target critic weighted by a state-action-adaptive coefficient. This coefficient aims to capture the offline degree of samples at the state-action level, and is updated adaptively during training. In practice, SAMG could be easily integrated with Q-function-based algorithms. Theoretical analysis shows good optimality and lower estimation error. Empirically, SAMG outperforms state-of-the-art O2O RL algorithms on the D4RL benchmark.

CLJun 16, 2024
On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions

Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Haochen Shi et al.

Conceptualization, a fundamental element of human cognition, plays a pivotal role in human generalizable reasoning. Generally speaking, it refers to the process of sequentially abstracting specific instances into higher-level concepts and then forming abstract knowledge that can be applied in unfamiliar or novel situations. This enhances models' inferential capabilities and supports the effective transfer of knowledge across various domains. Despite its significance, the broad nature of this term has led to inconsistencies in understanding conceptualization across various works, as there exists different types of instances that can be abstracted in a wide variety of ways. There is also a lack of a systematic overview that comprehensively examines existing works on the definition, execution, and application of conceptualization to enhance reasoning tasks. In this paper, we address these gaps by first proposing a categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized, in order to clarify the term and define the scope of our work. Then, we present the first comprehensive survey of over 150 papers, surveying various definitions, resources, methods, and downstream applications related to conceptualization into a unified taxonomy, with a focus on the entity and event levels. Furthermore, we shed light on potential future directions in this field and hope to garner more attention from the community.