Zihao Liu

Niantong Li, Guangzheng Hu, Weixu Qiao et al.

Text-to-Image generation has evolved from basic image synthesis into a frequently used core capability in professional creative workflows, where simple text-image alignment can no longer satisfy users' pressing demands for faithful real-world reconstruction and genuine creative expression. Existing benchmarks, however, remain anchored in these foundational criteria and do not yet capture the nuanced capabilities that matter in authentic artistic practice, making it difficult to reliably distinguish state-of-the-art T2I models. To address the gap, we introduce Qwen-Image-Bench, a creator-centric benchmark co-designed with professional artists and grounded in real-world creation scenarios. Qwen-Image-Bench enriches conventional evaluation with two application-driven dimensions: Real-world Fidelity and Creative Generation. Drawing on the staged reasoning inherent in professional artistic workflows, we organize these five pillars into a top-down hierarchical taxonomy that further decomposes into 23 second-level sub-capabilities and 56 third-level verifiable rubrics. To ensure broad coverage, we curate 1000 stratified prompts with each prompt jointly exercising more than four fine-grained facets across multiple pillars. We train a unified judge model Q-Judger based on Qwen3.6-27B, supervised by 80 professional annotators from global art academies under blind labeling and triple-review protocols, that scores every image across all 56 verifiable facets, producing fine-grained, rubric-grounded, and fully attributable diagnostics rather than a single opaque score. Empirically, Qwen-Image-Bench reliably distinguishes leading T2I models, achieving the greatest separation on the two application-driven dimensions of Real-world Fidelity and Creative Generation where existing benchmarks provide little insight, while also providing a trustworthy optimization signal for production-level T2I development.

Tianhe Wu, Kun Yan, Zikai Zhou et al.

Few-step distillation has become an effective strategy for accelerating advanced visual generative models, yet prior work has largely focused on distillation objectives. In this work, we revisit few-step distillation from a complementary perspective, focusing on the training recipe that critically shapes student performance. Using Qwen-Image-2.0 as a representative case, we systematically investigate three factors in unified text-to-image generation and instruction-guided image editing distillation: data composition, teacher guidance, and task mixture. Our empirical analysis reveals several non-obvious behaviors, which motivate the development of Qwen-Image-Flash. Overall, our results suggest that effective few-step distillation requires not only carefully designed objectives, but also principled organization of the broader training pipeline.

Leheng Chen, Zihao Liu, Wanyi He et al.

Recent advances in large language models and agentic AI systems have enabled significant progress in mathematical discovery, from solving competition problems to tackling research-level conjectures. However, open problems in computational mathematics have received comparatively less attention: research in this area often requires not only proofs but also numerical experimentation, adversarial constructions, and algorithm design. In this paper, we introduce an agentic research system, Iteris, designed for open problems in computational mathematics. We apply Iteris to two open problems from a recent Simons Workshop collection (arXiv:2602.05394). In these case studies, Iteris generated numerical evidence, constructions, and proof drafts that led, after expert review and correction, to verified results. The first result is a phase diagram for the asymptotic comparison between conjugate gradient and randomized coordinate descent on power-law spectra; the second is a counterexample showing that QR factorization with column pivoting can fail to select well-conditioned submatrices even under low coherence. These case studies suggest that agentic AI systems can participate meaningfully in research workflows for open problems in computational mathematics, while human validation remains essential.

Anyi Rao, Xuekun Jiang, Sichen Wang et al.

The ability to choose an appropriate camera view among multiple cameras plays a vital role in TV shows delivery. But it is hard to figure out the statistical pattern and apply intelligent processing due to the lack of high-quality training data. To solve this issue, we first collect a novel benchmark on this setting with four diverse scenarios including concerts, sports games, gala shows, and contests, where each scenario contains 6 synchronized tracks recorded by different cameras. It contains 88-hour raw videos that contribute to the 14-hour edited videos. Based on this benchmark, we further propose a new approach temporal and contextual transformer that utilizes clues from historical shots and other views to make shot transition decisions and predict which view to be used. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods on the proposed multi-camera editing benchmark.

Yuanwei Fang, Zihao Liu, Yanheng Lu et al.

With the end of Moore's Law, there is a growing demand for rapid architectural innovations in modern processors, such as RISC-V custom extensions, to continue performance scaling. Program sampling is a crucial step in microprocessor design, as it selects representative simulation points for workload simulation. While SimPoint has been the de-facto approach for decades, its limited expressiveness with Basic Block Vector (BBV) requires time-consuming human tuning, often taking months, which impedes fast innovation and agile hardware development. This paper introduces Neural Program Sampling (NPS), a novel framework that learns execution embeddings using dynamic snapshots of a Graph Neural Network. NPS deploys AssemblyNet for embedding generation, leveraging an application's code structures and runtime states. AssemblyNet serves as NPS's graph model and neural architecture, capturing a program's behavior in aspects such as data computation, code path, and data flow. AssemblyNet is trained with a data prefetch task that predicts consecutive memory addresses. In the experiments, NPS outperforms SimPoint by up to 63%, reducing the average error by 38%. Additionally, NPS demonstrates strong robustness with increased accuracy, reducing the expensive accuracy tuning overhead. Furthermore, NPS shows higher accuracy and generality than the state-of-the-art GNN approach in code behavior learning, enabling the generation of high-quality execution embeddings.

Xiaoyu Zhang, Guangwei Liu, Zihao Liu et al.

In autonomous driving, there is growing interest in end-to-end online vectorized map perception in bird's-eye-view (BEV) space, with an expectation that it could replace traditional high-cost offline high-definition (HD) maps. However, the accuracy and robustness of these methods can be easily compromised in challenging conditions, such as occlusion or adverse weather, when relying only on onboard sensors. In this paper, we propose HRMapNet, leveraging a low-cost Historical Rasterized Map to enhance online vectorized map perception. The historical rasterized map can be easily constructed from past predicted vectorized results and provides valuable complementary information. To fully exploit a historical map, we propose two novel modules to enhance BEV features and map element queries. For BEV features, we employ a feature aggregation module to encode features from both onboard images and the historical map. For map element queries, we design a query initialization module to endow queries with priors from the historical map. The two modules contribute to leveraging map information in online perception. Our HRMapNet can be integrated with most online vectorized map perception methods. We integrate it in two state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving their performance on both the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets. The source code is released at https://github.com/HXMap/HRMapNet.

Zihao Liu, Xing Liu, Yizhai Zhang et al.

Robotic manipulation holds the potential to replace humans in the execution of tedious or dangerous tasks. However, control-based approaches are not suitable due to the difficulty of formally describing open-world manipulation in reality, and the inefficiency of existing learning methods. Thus, applying manipulation in a wide range of scenarios presents significant challenges. In this study, we propose a novel method for skill learning in robotic manipulation called Tactile Active Inference Reinforcement Learning (Tactile-AIRL), aimed at achieving efficient training. To enhance the performance of reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce active inference, which integrates model-based techniques and intrinsic curiosity into the RL process. This integration improves the algorithm's training efficiency and adaptability to sparse rewards. Additionally, we utilize a vision-based tactile sensor to provide detailed perception for manipulation tasks. Finally, we employ a model-based approach to imagine and plan appropriate actions through free energy minimization. Simulation results demonstrate that our method achieves significantly high training efficiency in non-prehensile objects pushing tasks. It enables agents to excel in both dense and sparse reward tasks with just a few interaction episodes, surpassing the SAC baseline. Furthermore, we conduct physical experiments on a gripper screwing task using our method, which showcases the algorithm's rapid learning capability and its potential for practical applications.

Zihao Liu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Guangwei Liu et al.

In autonomous driving, the high-definition (HD) map plays a crucial role in localization and planning. Recently, several methods have facilitated end-to-end online map construction in DETR-like frameworks. However, little attention has been paid to the potential capabilities of exploring the query mechanism for map elements. This paper introduces MapQR, an end-to-end method with an emphasis on enhancing query capabilities for constructing online vectorized maps. To probe desirable information efficiently, MapQR utilizes a novel query design, called scatter-and-gather query, which is modelled by separate content and position parts explicitly. The base map instance queries are scattered to different reference points and added with positional embeddings to probe information from BEV features. Then these scatted queries are gathered back to enhance information within each map instance. Together with a simple and effective improvement of a BEV encoder, the proposed MapQR achieves the best mean average precision (mAP) and maintains good efficiency on both nuScenes and Argoverse 2. In addition, integrating our query design into other models can boost their performance significantly. The source code is available at https://github.com/HXMap/MapQR.

Zihao Liu, Hantao Zhou, Jiguo Li et al.

User simulators are essential for the scalable training and evaluation of interactive AI systems. However, existing approaches often rely on shallow user profiling, struggle to maintain persona consistency over long interactions, and are largely limited to English or single-domain settings. We present MUSE, a multi-domain Chinese user simulation framework designed to generate human-like, controllable, and behaviorally consistent responses. First, we propose Iterative Profile Self-Evolution (IPSE), which gradually optimizes user profiles by comparing and reasoning discrepancies between simulated trajectories and real dialogue behaviors. We then apply Role-Reversal Supervised Fine-Tuning to improve local response realism and human-like expression. To enable fine-grained behavioral alignment, we further train a specialized rubric-based reward model and incorporate it into rubric-guided multi-turn reinforcement learning, which optimizes the simulator at the dialogue level and enhances long-horizon behavioral consistency. Experiments show that MUSE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both utterance-level and session-level evaluations, generating responses that are more realistic, coherent, and persona-consistent over extended interactions.

Zihao Liu, Xiaoyu Wu, Jianqin Wu et al.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to detect anomalies that deviate from what is expected. In open-world scenarios, the expected events may change as requirements change. For example, not wearing a mask may be considered abnormal during a flu outbreak but normal otherwise. However, existing methods assume that the definition of anomalies is invariable, and thus are not applicable to the open world. To address this, we propose a novel open-world VAD paradigm with variable definitions, allowing guided detection through user-provided natural language at inference time. This paradigm necessitates establishing a robust mapping from video and textual definition to anomaly scores. Therefore, we propose LaGoVAD (Language-guided Open-world Video Anomaly Detector), a model that dynamically adapts anomaly definitions under weak supervision with two regularization strategies: diversifying the relative durations of anomalies via dynamic video synthesis, and enhancing feature robustness through contrastive learning with negative mining. Training such adaptable models requires diverse anomaly definitions, but existing datasets typically provide labels without semantic descriptions. To bridge this gap, we collect PreVAD (Pre-training Video Anomaly Dataset), the largest and most diverse video anomaly dataset to date, featuring 35,279 annotated videos with multi-level category labels and descriptions that explicitly define anomalies. Zero-shot experiments on seven datasets demonstrate LaGoVAD's SOTA performance. Our dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/Kamino666/LaGoVAD-PreVAD.

Bing Zhao, Chenfei Wu, Deqing Li et al.

We present Qwen-Image-2.0, an omni-capable image generation foundation model that unifies high-fidelity generation and precise image editing within a single framework. Despite recent progress, existing models still struggle with ultra-long text rendering, multilingual typography, high-resolution photorealism, robust instruction following, and efficient deployment, especially in text-rich and compositionally complex scenarios. Qwen-Image-2.0 addresses these challenges by coupling Qwen3-VL as the condition encoder with a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for joint condition-target modeling, supported by large-scale data curation and a customized multi-stage training pipeline. This enables strong multimodal understanding while preserving flexible generation and editing capabilities. The model supports instructions of up to 1K tokens for generating text-rich content such as slides, posters, infographics, and comics, while significantly improving multilingual text fidelity and typography. It also enhances photorealistic generation with richer details, more realistic textures, and coherent lighting, and follows complex prompts more reliably across diverse styles. Extensive human evaluations show that Qwen-Image-2.0 substantially outperforms previous Qwen-Image models in both generation and editing, marking a step toward more general, reliable, and practical image generation foundation models.

Zekai Zhang, Deqing Li, Kuan Cao et al.

We present Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0, a suite of high-compression Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) that achieve significant advances in both reconstruction fidelity and diffusability. To address the reconstruction bottlenecks of high compression, we adopt an improved architecture featuring Global Skip Connections (GSC) and expanded latent channels. Moreover, we scale training to billions of images and incorporate a synthetic rendering engine to improve performance in text-rich scenarios. To tackle the convergence challenges of high-dimensional latent space, we implement an enhanced semantic alignment strategy to make the latent space highly amenable to diffusion modeling. To optimize computational efficiency, we leverage an asymmetric and attention-free encoder-decoder backbone to minimize encoding overhead. We present a comprehensive evaluation of Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 on public reconstruction benchmarks. To evaluate performance in text-rich scenarios, we propose OmniDoc-TokenBench, a new benchmark comprising a diverse collection of real-world documents coupled with specialized OCR-based evaluation metrics. Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in both general domains and text-rich scenarios at high compression ratio. Furthermore, downstream DiT experiments reveal our models possess superior diffusability, significantly accelerating convergence compared to existing high-compression baselines. These establish Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 as a leading model with high compression, superior reconstruction, and exceptional diffusability.

Qi Zheng, Haozhi Wang, Zihao Liu et al.

Prevalent lossy image compression schemes can be divided into: 1) explicit image compression (EIC), including traditional standards and neural end-to-end algorithms; 2) implicit image compression (IIC) based on implicit neural representations (INR). The former is encountering impasses of either leveling off bitrate reduction at a cost of tremendous complexity while the latter suffers from excessive smoothing quality as well as lengthy decoder models. In this paper, we propose an innovative paradigm, which we dub \textbf{Unicorn} (\textbf{U}nified \textbf{N}eural \textbf{I}mage \textbf{C}ompression with \textbf{O}ne \textbf{N}number \textbf{R}econstruction). By conceptualizing the images as index-image pairs and learning the inherent distribution of pairs in a subtle neural network model, Unicorn can reconstruct a visually pleasing image from a randomly generated noise with only one index number. The neural model serves as the unified decoder of images while the noises and indexes corresponds to explicit representations. As a proof of concept, we propose an effective and efficient prototype of Unicorn based on latent diffusion models with tailored model designs. Quantitive and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that our prototype achieves significant bitrates reduction compared with EIC and IIC algorithms. More impressively, benefitting from the unified decoder, our compression ratio escalates as the quantity of images increases. We envision that more advanced model designs will endow Unicorn with greater potential in image compression. We will release our codes in \url{https://github.com/uniqzheng/Unicorn-Laduree}.

Zihao Liu, Xiaoyu Wu, Wenna Li et al.

Open-world video anomaly detection (OWVAD) aims to detect and explain abnormal events under different anomaly definitions, which is important for applications such as intelligent surveillance and live-streaming content moderation. Recent MLLM-based methods have shown promising open-world generalization, but still suffer from three major limitations: inefficiency for practical deployment, lack of streaming processing adaptation, and limited support for dynamic anomaly definitions in both modeling and evaluation. To address these issues, this paper proposes ESOM, an efficient streaming OWVAD model that operates in a training-free manner. ESOM includes a Definition Normalization module to structure user prompts for reducing hallucination, an Inter-frame-matched Intra-frame Token Merging module to compress redundant visual tokens, a Hybrid Streaming Memory module for efficient causal inference, and a Probabilistic Scoring module that converts interval-level textual outputs into frame-level anomaly scores. In addition, this paper introduces OpenDef-Bench, a new benchmark with clean surveillance videos and diverse natural anomaly definitions for evaluating performance under varying conditions. Extensive experiments show that ESOM achieves real-time efficiency on a single GPU and state-of-the-art performance in anomaly temporal localization, classification, and description generation. The code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/Kamino666/ESOM_OpenDef-Bench.

Shuozhi Yuan, Jinqing Wang, Zihao Liu et al.

Knowledge distillation is typically realized by transferring a teacher model's knowledge into a student's parameters through supervised or reinforcement-based optimization. While effective, such approaches require repeated parameter updates and large-scale training data, limiting their applicability in resource-constrained environments. In this work, we propose TED, a training-free, context-based distillation framework that shifts the update target of distillation from model parameters to an in-context experience injected into the student's prompt. For each input, the student generates multiple reasoning trajectories, while a teacher independently produces its own solution. The teacher then compares the student trajectories with its reasoning and the ground-truth answer, extracting generalized experiences that capture effective reasoning patterns. These experiences are continuously refined and updated over time. A key challenge of context-based distillation is unbounded experience growth and noise accumulation. TED addresses this with an experience compression mechanism that tracks usage statistics and selectively merges, rewrites, or removes low-utility experiences. Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks MathVision and VisualPuzzles show that TED consistently improves performance. On MathVision, TED raises the performance of Qwen3-VL-8B from 0.627 to 0.702, and on VisualPuzzles from 0.517 to 0.561 with just 100 training samples. Under this low-data, no-update setting, TED achieves performance competitive with fully trained parameter-based distillation while reducing training cost by over 5x, demonstrating that meaningful knowledge transfer can be achieved through contextual experience.

Siyi Lang, Hongyi Gao, Yingxin Zhang et al.

On-orbit servicing represents a critical frontier in future aerospace engineering, with the manipulation of dynamic non-cooperative targets serving as a key technology. In microgravity environments, objects are typically free-floating, lacking the support and frictional constraints found on Earth, which significantly escalates the complexity of tasks involving space robotic manipulation. Conventional planning and control-based methods are primarily limited to known, static scenarios and lack real-time responsiveness. To achieve precise robotic manipulation of dynamic targets in unknown and unstructured space environments, this letter proposes a data-driven space robotic manipulation approach that integrates historical temporal information and inter-frame correlation mechanisms. By exploiting the temporal correlation between historical and current frames, the system can effectively capture motion features within the scene, thereby producing stable and smooth manipulation trajectories for dynamic targets. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we developed a ground-based experimental platform consisting of a PIPER X robotic arm and a dual-axis linear stage, which accurately simulates micro-gravity free-floating motion in a 2D plane.

Changti Wu, Shijie Lian, Zihao Liu et al.

Solid geometry problem solving demands spatial mathematical reasoning that integrates spatial intelligence and symbolic reasoning. However, most existing multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks focus primarily on 2D plane geometry, rely on static datasets prone to data contamination and memorization, and evaluate models solely by final answers, overlooking the reasoning process. To address these limitations, we introduce DynaSolidGeo, the first dynamic benchmark for evaluating genuine spatial reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Constructed through a semi-automatic annotation pipeline, DynaSolidGeo contains 503 expert-curated seed questions that can, in principle, dynamically generate an unbounded number of diverse multimodal text-visual instances. Beyond answer accuracy, we incorporate process evaluation based on expert-annotated reasoning chains to measure logical validity and causal coherence. Experiments across representative open-source and closed-source VLMs reveal large performance gaps, severe degradation in dynamic settings, and poor performance on tasks requiring high-level spatial intelligence, such as mental rotation and visualization. The code and dataset are available at \href{https://zgca-ai4edu.github.io/DynaSolidGeo/}{DynaSolidGeo}.

Zihao Liu, Xiaoyu Wu, Wenna Li et al.

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD), which aims to detect anomalies that deviate from expectation, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Existing advancements in VAD primarily focus on model architectures and training strategies, while devoting insufficient attention to evaluation metrics and benchmarks. In this paper, we rethink VAD evaluation methods through comprehensive analyses, revealing three critical limitations in current practices: 1) existing metrics are significantly influenced by single annotation bias; 2) current metrics fail to reward early detection of anomalies; 3) available benchmarks lack the capability to evaluate scene overfitting of fully/weakly-supervised algorithms. To address these limitations, we propose three novel evaluation methods: first, we establish probabilistic AUC/AP (Prob-AUC/AP) metrics utlizing multi-round annotations to mitigate single annotation bias; second, we develop a Latency-aware Average Precision (LaAP) metric that rewards early and accurate anomaly detection; and finally, we introduce two hard normal benchmarks (UCF-HN, MSAD-HN) with videos specifically designed to evaluate scene overfitting. We report performance comparisons of ten state-of-the-art VAD approaches using our proposed evaluation methods, providing novel perspectives for future VAD model development. We release our data and code in https://github.com/Kamino666/RethinkingVAD.

Zihao Liu, Xing Liu, Yizhai Zhang et al.

One of the bottlenecks in robotic intelligence is the instability of neural network models, which, unlike control models, lack a well-defined convergence domain and stability. This leads to risks when applying intelligence in the physical world. Specifically, imitation policy based on neural network may generate hallucinations, leading to inaccurate behaviors that impact the safety of real-world applications. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Curiosity-Diffuser, aimed at guiding the conditional diffusion model to generate trajectories with lower curiosity, thereby improving the reliability of policy. The core idea is to use a Random Network Distillation (RND) curiosity module to assess whether the model's behavior aligns with the training data, and then minimize curiosity by classifier guidance diffusion to reduce overgeneralization during inference. Additionally, we propose a computationally efficient metric for evaluating the reliability of the policy, measuring the similarity between the generated behaviors and the training dataset, to facilitate research about reliability learning. Finally, simulation verify the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method to a variety of scenarios, showing that Curiosity-Diffuser significantly improves task performance and produces behaviors that are more similar to the training data. The code for this work is available at: github.com/CarlDegio/Curiosity-Diffuser

Yuqing Wang, Mika Mäntylä, Zihao Liu et al.

The popularity of continuous integration (CI) is increasing as a result of market pressure to release product features or updates frequently. The ability of CI to deliver quality at speed depends on reliable test automation. In this paper, we present an empirical study to observe the effect of test automation maturity (assessed by standard best practices in the literature) on product quality, test automation effort, and release cycle in the CI context of open source projects. We run our test automation maturity survey and got responses from 37 open source java projects. We also mined software repositories of the same projects. The main results of regression analysis reveal that, higher levels of test automation maturity are positively associated with higher product quality (p-value=0.000624) and shorter release cycle (p-value=0.01891); There is no statistically significant evidence of increased test automation effort due to higher levels of test automation maturity and product quality. Thus, we conclude that, a potential benefit of improving test automation maturity (using standard best practices) is product quality improvement and release cycle acceleration in the CI context of open source projects. We encourage future research to extend our findings by adding more datasets with different programming languages and CI tools, closed source projects, and large-scale industrial projects. Our recommendation to practitioners (in the similar CI context) is to utilize standard best practices to improve test automation maturity.

Haoran You, Xiaohan Chen, Yongan Zhang et al.

Multiplication (e.g., convolution) is arguably a cornerstone of modern deep neural networks (DNNs). However, intensive multiplications cause expensive resource costs that challenge DNNs' deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, driving several attempts for multiplication-less deep networks. This paper presented ShiftAddNet, whose main inspiration is drawn from a common practice in energy-efficient hardware implementation, that is, multiplication can be instead performed with additions and logical bit-shifts. We leverage this idea to explicitly parameterize deep networks in this way, yielding a new type of deep network that involves only bit-shift and additive weight layers. This hardware-inspired ShiftAddNet immediately leads to both energy-efficient inference and training, without compromising the expressive capacity compared to standard DNNs. The two complementary operation types (bit-shift and add) additionally enable finer-grained control of the model's learning capacity, leading to more flexible trade-off between accuracy and (training) efficiency, as well as improved robustness to quantization and pruning. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies, all backed up by our FPGA-based ShiftAddNet implementation and energy measurements. Compared to existing DNNs or other multiplication-less models, ShiftAddNet aggressively reduces over 80% hardware-quantified energy cost of DNNs training and inference, while offering comparable or better accuracies. Codes and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/ShiftAddNet.

Ruicheng Zhang, Guangyu Chen, Zunnan Xu et al.

Scalable Embodied AI faces fundamental constraints due to prohibitive costs and safety risks of real-world interaction. While Embodied World Models (EWMs) offer promise through imagined rollouts, existing approaches suffer from geometric hallucinations and lack unified optimization frameworks for practical policy improvement. We introduce RoboStereo, a symmetric dual-tower 4D world model that employs bidirectional cross-modal enhancement to ensure spatiotemporal geometric consistency and alleviate physics hallucinations. Building upon this high-fidelity 4D simulator, we present the first unified framework for world-model-based policy optimization: (1) Test-Time Policy Augmentation (TTPA) for pre-execution verification, (2) Imitative-Evolutionary Policy Learning (IEPL) leveraging visual perceptual rewards to learn from expert demonstrations, and (3) Open-Exploration Policy Learning (OEPL) enabling autonomous skill discovery and self-correction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate RoboStereo achieves state-of-the-art generation quality, with our unified framework delivering >97% average relative improvement on fine-grained manipulation tasks.

Ruicheng Zhang, Jun Zhou, Zunnan Xu et al. · tsinghua

Trajectory-Guided image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that adhere to user-specified motion instructions. Existing methods typically rely on computationally expensive fine-tuning on scarce annotated datasets. Although some zero-shot methods attempt to trajectory control in the latent space, they may yield unrealistic motion by neglecting 3D perspective and creating a misalignment between the manipulated latents and the network's noise predictions. To address these challenges, we introduce Zo3T, a novel zero-shot test-time-training framework for trajectory-guided generation with three core innovations: First, we incorporate a 3D-Aware Kinematic Projection, leveraging inferring scene depth to derive perspective-correct affine transformations for target regions. Second, we introduce Trajectory-Guided Test-Time LoRA, a mechanism that dynamically injects and optimizes ephemeral LoRA adapters into the denoising network alongside the latent state. Driven by a regional feature consistency loss, this co-adaptation effectively enforces motion constraints while allowing the pre-trained model to locally adapt its internal representations to the manipulated latent, thereby ensuring generative fidelity and on-manifold adherence. Finally, we develop Guidance Field Rectification, which refines the denoising evolutionary path by optimizing the conditional guidance field through a one-step lookahead strategy, ensuring efficient generative progression towards the target trajectory. Zo3T significantly enhances 3D realism and motion accuracy in trajectory-controlled I2V generation, demonstrating superior performance over existing training-based and zero-shot approaches.

Guanlin Liu, Xiaomei Yu, Zihao Liu et al.

Medication Recommendation (MR) is a promising research topic which booms diverse applications in the healthcare and clinical domains. However, existing methods mainly rely on sequential modeling and static graphs for representation learning, which ignore the dynamic correlations in diverse medical events of a patient's temporal visits, leading to insufficient global structural exploration on nodes. Additionally, mitigating drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is another issue determining the utility of the MR systems. To address the challenges mentioned above, this paper proposes a novel MR method with the integration of dynamic networks and multi-view drug representations (DNMDR). Specifically, weighted snapshot sequences for dynamic heterogeneous networks are constructed based on discrete visits in temporal EHRs, and all the dynamic networks are jointly trained to gain both structural correlations in diverse medical events and temporal dependency in historical health conditions, for achieving comprehensive patient representations with both semantic features and structural relationships. Moreover, combining the drug co-occurrences and adverse drug-drug interactions (DDIs) in internal view of drug molecule structure and interactive view of drug pairs, the safe drug representations are available to obtain high-quality medication combination recommendation. Finally, extensive experiments on real world datasets are conducted for performance evaluation, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DNMDR method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models with a large margin on various metrics such as PRAUC, Jaccard, DDI rates and so on.

Zihao Liu, Xinhang Sui, Yueran Song et al.

We introduce PokéAI, the first text-based, multi-agent large language model (LLM) framework designed to autonomously play and progress through Pokémon Red. Our system consists of three specialized agents-Planning, Execution, and Critique-each with its own memory bank, role, and skill set. The Planning Agent functions as the central brain, generating tasks to progress through the game. These tasks are then delegated to the Execution Agent, which carries them out within the game environment. Upon task completion, the Critique Agent evaluates the outcome to determine whether the objective was successfully achieved. Once verification is complete, control returns to the Planning Agent, forming a closed-loop decision-making system. As a preliminary step, we developed a battle module within the Execution Agent. Our results show that the battle AI achieves an average win rate of 80.8% across 50 wild encounters, only 6% lower than the performance of an experienced human player. Furthermore, we find that a model's battle performance correlates strongly with its LLM Arena score on language-related tasks, indicating a meaningful link between linguistic ability and strategic reasoning. Finally, our analysis of gameplay logs reveals that each LLM exhibits a unique playstyle, suggesting that individual models develop distinct strategic behaviors.

Zhiyi Zhu, Xiaoyu Wu, Zihao Liu et al.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG), which aims to localize video clips corresponding to natural language queries, is a fundamental yet challenging task in video understanding. Existing Transformer-based methods often suffer from redundant attention and suboptimal multi-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose MLVTG, a novel framework that integrates two key modules: MambaAligner and LLMRefiner. MambaAligner uses stacked Vision Mamba blocks as a backbone instead of Transformers to model temporal dependencies and extract robust video representations for multi-modal alignment. LLMRefiner leverages the specific frozen layer of a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to implicitly transfer semantic priors, enhancing multi-modal alignment without fine-tuning. This dual alignment strategy, temporal modeling via structured state-space dynamics and semantic purification via textual priors, enables more precise localization. Extensive experiments on QVHighlights, Charades-STA, and TVSum demonstrate that MLVTG achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms existing baselines.

Zihao Liu, Mingwen Ou, Zunnan Xu et al. · tsinghua

Automating the synthesis of coordinated bimanual piano performances poses significant challenges, particularly in capturing the intricate choreography between the hands while preserving their distinct kinematic signatures. In this paper, we propose a dual-stream neural framework designed to generate synchronized hand gestures for piano playing from audio input, addressing the critical challenge of modeling both hand independence and coordination. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (i) a decoupled diffusion-based generation framework that independently models each hand's motion via dual-noise initialization, sampling distinct latent noise for each while leveraging a shared positional condition, and (ii) a Hand-Coordinated Asymmetric Attention (HCAA) mechanism suppresses symmetric (common-mode) noise to highlight asymmetric hand-specific features, while adaptively enhancing inter-hand coordination during denoising. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics. Our project is available at https://monkek123king.github.io/S2C_page/.

Tianle Liu, Zhixiang Wang, Yongwei Zhang et al.

This paper proposes a distributed on-orbit spacecraft assembly algorithm, where future spacecraft can assemble modules with different functions on orbit to form a spacecraft structure with specific functions. This form of spacecraft organization has the advantages of reconfigurability, fast mission response and easy maintenance. Reasonable and efficient on-orbit self-reconfiguration algorithms play a crucial role in realizing the benefits of distributed spacecraft. This paper adopts the framework of imitation learning combined with reinforcement learning for strategy learning of module handling order. A robot arm motion algorithm is then designed to execute the handling sequence. We achieve the self-reconfiguration handling task by creating a map on the surface of the module, completing the path point planning of the robotic arm using A*. The joint planning of the robotic arm is then accomplished through forward and reverse kinematics. Finally, the results are presented in Unity3D.

Weijian Sun, Yanbo Jia, Qi Zeng et al.

Deep-learning-based techniques have been widely adopted for autonomous driving software stacks for mass production in recent years, focusing primarily on perception modules, with some work extending this method to prediction modules. However, the downstream planning and control modules are still designed with hefty handcrafted rules, dominated by optimization-based methods such as quadratic programming or model predictive control. This results in a performance bottleneck for autonomous driving systems in that corner cases simply cannot be solved by enumerating hand-crafted rules. We present a deep-learning-based approach that brings prediction, decision, and planning modules together with the attempt to overcome the rule-based methods' deficiency in real-world applications of autonomous driving, especially for urban scenes. The DNN model we proposed is solely trained with 10 hours of human driver data, and it supports all mass-production ADAS features available on the market to date. This method is deployed onto a Jiyue test car with no modification to its factory-ready sensor set and compute platform. the feasibility, usability, and commercial potential are demonstrated in this article.

Yuqing Wang, Mika V. Mäntylä, Zihao Liu et al.

Mature test automation is key for achieving software quality at speed. In this paper, we present a multivocal literature review with the objective to survey and synthesize the guidelines given in the literature for improving test automation maturity. We selected and reviewed 81 primary studies, consisting of 26 academic literature and 55 grey literature sources. From primary studies, we extracted 26 test automation best practices (e.g., Define an effective test automation strategy, Set up good test environments, Develop high-quality test scripts) and collected many pieces of advice (e.g., in forms of implementation/improvement approaches, technical techniques, concepts, experience-based heuristics) on how to conduct these best practices. We made main observations: (1) There are only 6 best practices whose positive effect on maturity improvement have been evaluated by academic studies using formal empirical methods; (2) Several technical related best practices in this MLR were not presented in test maturity models; (3) Some best practices can be linked to success factors and maturity impediments proposed by other scholars; (4) Most pieces of advice on how to conduct proposed best practices were identified from experience studies and their effectiveness need to be further evaluated with cross-site empirical evidence using formal empirical methods; (5) In the literature, some advice on how to conduct certain best practices are conflicting, and some advice on how to conduct certain best practices still need further qualitative analysis.

Zhuowei Li, Zihao Liu, Zhiqiang Hu et al.

Medical image segmentation has been widely recognized as a pivot procedure for clinical diagnosis, analysis, and treatment planning. However, the laborious and expensive annotation process lags down the speed of further advances. Contrastive learning-based weight pre-training provides an alternative by leveraging unlabeled data to learn a good representation. In this paper, we investigate how contrastive learning benefits the general supervised medical segmentation tasks. To this end, patch-dragsaw contrastive regularization (PDCR) is proposed to perform patch-level tugging and repulsing with the extent controlled by a continuous affinity score. And a new structure dubbed uncertainty-aware feature selection block (UAFS) is designed to perform the feature selection process, which can handle the learning target shift caused by minority features with high uncertainty. By plugging the proposed 2 modules into the existing segmentation architecture, we achieve state-of-the-art results across 8 public datasets from 6 domains. Newly designed modules further decrease the amount of training data to a quarter while achieving comparable, if not better, performances. From this perspective, we take the opposite direction of the original self/un-supervised contrastive learning by further excavating information contained within the label.

Shao-Cheng Wen, Yu-Jen Chen, Zihao Liu et al.

Deep learning had already demonstrated its power in medical images, including denoising, classification, segmentation, etc. All these applications are proposed to automatically analyze medical images beforehand, which brings more information to radiologists during clinical assessment for accuracy improvement. Recently, many medical denoising methods had shown their significant artifact reduction result and noise removal both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, those existing methods are developed around human-vision, i.e., they are designed to minimize the noise effect that can be perceived by human eyes. In this paper, we introduce an application-guided denoising framework, which focuses on denoising for the following neural networks. In our experiments, we apply the proposed framework to different datasets, models, and use cases. Experimental results show that our proposed framework can achieve a better result than human-vision denoising network.

Zihao Liu, Xiaowei Xu, Tao Liu et al.

Cloud based medical image analysis has become popular recently due to the high computation complexities of various deep neural network (DNN) based frameworks and the increasingly large volume of medical images that need to be processed. It has been demonstrated that for medical images the transmission from local to clouds is much more expensive than the computation in the clouds itself. Towards this, 3D image compression techniques have been widely applied to reduce the data traffic. However, most of the existing image compression techniques are developed around human vision, i.e., they are designed to minimize distortions that can be perceived by human eyes. In this paper we will use deep learning based medical image segmentation as a vehicle and demonstrate that interestingly, machine and human view the compression quality differently. Medical images compressed with good quality w.r.t. human vision may result in inferior segmentation accuracy. We then design a machine vision oriented 3D image compression framework tailored for segmentation using DNNs. Our method automatically extracts and retains image features that are most important to the segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on widely adopted segmentation frameworks with HVSMR 2016 challenge dataset show that our method can achieve significantly higher segmentation accuracy at the same compression rate, or much better compression rate under the same segmentation accuracy, when compared with the existing JPEG 2000 method. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first machine vision guided medical image compression framework for segmentation in the clouds.

Tao Liu, Zihao Liu, Fuhong Lin et al.

Modern deep learning enabled artificial neural networks, such as Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), have achieved a series of breaking records on a broad spectrum of recognition applications. However, the enormous computation and storage requirements associated with such deep and complex neural network models greatly challenge their implementations on resource-limited platforms. Time-based spiking neural network has recently emerged as a promising solution in Neuromorphic Computing System designs for achieving remarkable computing and power efficiency within a single chip. However, the relevant research activities have been narrowly concentrated on the biological plausibility and theoretical learning approaches, causing inefficient neural processing and impracticable multilayer extension thus significantly limitations on speed and accuracy when handling the realistic cognitive tasks. In this work, a practical multilayer time-based spiking neuromorphic architecture, namely "MT-Spike", is developed to fill this gap. With the proposed practical time-coding scheme, average delay response model, temporal error backpropagation algorithm, and heuristic loss function, "MT-Spike" achieves more efficient neural processing through flexible neural model size reduction while offering very competitive classification accuracy for realistic recognition tasks. Simulation results well validated that the algorithmic power of deep multi-layer learning can be seamlessly merged with the efficiency of time-based spiking neuromorphic architecture, demonstrating great potentials of "MT-Spike" in resource and power constrained embedded platforms.

Zihao Liu, Qi Liu, Tao Liu et al.

Image compression-based approaches for defending against the adversarial-example attacks, which threaten the safety use of deep neural networks (DNN), have been investigated recently. However, prior works mainly rely on directly tuning parameters like compression rate, to blindly reduce image features, thereby lacking guarantee on both defense efficiency (i.e. accuracy of polluted images) and classification accuracy of benign images, after applying defense methods. To overcome these limitations, we propose a JPEG-based defensive compression framework, namely "feature distillation", to effectively rectify adversarial examples without impacting classification accuracy on benign data. Our framework significantly escalates the defense efficiency with marginal accuracy reduction using a two-step method: First, we maximize malicious features filtering of adversarial input perturbations by developing defensive quantization in frequency domain of JPEG compression or decompression, guided by a semi-analytical method; Second, we suppress the distortions of benign features to restore classification accuracy through a DNN-oriented quantization refine process. Our experimental results show that proposed "feature distillation" can significantly surpass the latest input-transformation based mitigations such as Quilting and TV Minimization in three aspects, including defense efficiency (improve classification accuracy from $\sim20\%$ to $\sim90\%$ on adversarial examples), accuracy of benign images after defense ($\le1\%$ accuracy degradation), and processing time per image ($\sim259\times$ Speedup). Moreover, our solution can also provide the best defense efficiency ($\sim60\%$ accuracy) against the recent adaptive attack with least accuracy reduction ($\sim1\%$) on benign images when compared with other input-transformation based defense methods.

Zihao Liu, Tao Liu, Wujie Wen et al.

As one of most fascinating machine learning techniques, deep neural network (DNN) has demonstrated excellent performance in various intelligent tasks such as image classification. DNN achieves such performance, to a large extent, by performing expensive training over huge volumes of training data. To reduce the data storage and transfer overhead in smart resource-limited Internet-of-Thing (IoT) systems, effective data compression is a "must-have" feature before transferring real-time produced dataset for training or classification. While there have been many well-known image compression approaches (such as JPEG), we for the first time find that a human-visual based image compression approach such as JPEG compression is not an optimized solution for DNN systems, especially with high compression ratios. To this end, we develop an image compression framework tailored for DNN applications, named "DeepN-JPEG", to embrace the nature of deep cascaded information process mechanism of DNN architecture. Extensive experiments, based on "ImageNet" dataset with various state-of-the-art DNNs, show that "DeepN-JPEG" can achieve ~3.5x higher compression rate over the popular JPEG solution while maintaining the same accuracy level for image recognition, demonstrating its great potential of storage and power efficiency in DNN-based smart IoT system design.

Qi Liu, Tao Liu, Zihao Liu et al.

DNN is presenting human-level performance for many complex intelligent tasks in real-world applications. However, it also introduces ever-increasing security concerns. For example, the emerging adversarial attacks indicate that even very small and often imperceptible adversarial input perturbations can easily mislead the cognitive function of deep learning systems (DLS). Existing DNN adversarial studies are narrowly performed on the ideal software-level DNN models with a focus on single uncertainty factor, i.e. input perturbations, however, the impact of DNN model reshaping on adversarial attacks, which is introduced by various hardware-favorable techniques such as hash-based weight compression during modern DNN hardware implementation, has never been discussed. In this work, we for the first time investigate the multi-factor adversarial attack problem in practical model optimized deep learning systems by jointly considering the DNN model-reshaping (e.g. HashNet based deep compression) and the input perturbations. We first augment adversarial example generating method dedicated to the compressed DNN models by incorporating the software-based approaches and mathematical modeled DNN reshaping. We then conduct a comprehensive robustness and vulnerability analysis of deep compressed DNN models under derived adversarial attacks. A defense technique named "gradient inhibition" is further developed to ease the generating of adversarial examples thus to effectively mitigate adversarial attacks towards both software and hardware-oriented DNNs. Simulation results show that "gradient inhibition" can decrease the average success rate of adversarial attacks from 87.99% to 4.77% (from 86.74% to 4.64%) on MNIST (CIFAR-10) benchmark with marginal accuracy degradation across various DNNs.