Kang Yang

Yuning Chen, Kang Yang, Zhiyu An et al.

The rapid decline in groundwater around the world poses a significant challenge to sustainable agriculture. To address this issue, agricultural managed aquifer recharge (Ag-MAR) is proposed to recharge the aquifer by artificially flooding agricultural lands using surface water. Ag-MAR requires a carefully selected flooding schedule to avoid affecting the oxygen absorption of crop roots. However, current Ag-MAR scheduling does not take into account complex environmental factors such as weather and soil oxygen, resulting in crop damage and insufficient recharging amounts. This paper proposes MARLP, the first end-to-end data-driven control system for Ag-MAR. We first formulate Ag-MAR as an optimization problem. To that end, we analyze four-year in-field datasets, which reveal the multi-periodicity feature of the soil oxygen level trends and the opportunity to use external weather forecasts and flooding proposals as exogenous clues for soil oxygen prediction. Then, we design a two-stage forecasting framework. In the first stage, it extracts both the cross-variate dependency and the periodic patterns from historical data to conduct preliminary forecasting. In the second stage, it uses weather-soil and flooding-soil causality to facilitate an accurate prediction of soil oxygen levels. Finally, we conduct model predictive control (MPC) for Ag-MAR flooding. To address the challenge of large action spaces, we devise a heuristic planning module to reduce the number of flooding proposals to enable the search for optimal solutions. Real-world experiments show that MARLP reduces the oxygen deficit ratio by 86.8% while improving the recharging amount in unit time by 35.8%, compared with the previous four years.

Oliver Wang, Pengrui Quan, Kang Yang et al.

Practitioners deploying time series forecasting models face a dilemma: exhaustively validating dozens of models is computationally prohibitive, yet choosing the wrong model risks poor performance. We show that spectral predictability~$Ω$ -- a simple signal processing metric -- systematically stratifies model family performance, enabling fast model selection. We conduct controlled experiments in four different domains, then further expand our analysis to 51 models and 28 datasets from the GIFT-Eval benchmark. We find that large time series foundation models (TSFMs) systematically outperform lightweight task-trained baselines when $Ω$ is high, while their advantage vanishes as $Ω$ drops. Computing $Ω$ takes seconds per dataset, enabling practitioners to quickly assess whether their data suits TSFM approaches or whether simpler, cheaper models suffice. We demonstrate that $Ω$ stratifies model performance predictably, offering a practical first-pass filter that reduces validation costs while highlighting the need for models that excel on genuinely difficult (low-$Ω$) problems rather than merely optimizing easy ones.

Gaofeng Dong, Kang Yang, Mani Srivastava

Existing Wi-Fi sensing systems rely on injecting high-rate probing packets to extract channel state information (CSI), leading to communication degradation and poor deployability. Although Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is a promising direction, existing solutions still rely on auxiliary packet injection because they exploit only CSI from data frames. We present UniFi, the first Wi-Fi-based ISAC framework that fully eliminates intrusive packet injection by directly exploiting irregularly sampled CSI from diverse communication packets across multiple frequency bands. UniFi integrates a CSI sanitization pipeline to harmonize heterogeneous packets and remove burst-induced redundancy, together with a time-aware attention model that learns directly from non-uniform CSI sequences without resampling. We further introduce CommCSI-HAR, the first dataset with irregularly sampled CSI from real-world dual-band communication traffic. Extensive evaluations on this dataset and four public benchmarks show that UniFi achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with a compact model size, while fully preserving communication throughput.

Lantao Li, Kang Yang, Rui Song et al.

Cooperative perception enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything communication has shown great promise in enhancing situational awareness for autonomous vehicles and other mobile robotic platforms. Despite recent advances in perception backbones and multi-agent fusion, real-world deployments remain challenged by hard detection cases, exemplified by partial detections and noise accumulation which limit downstream detection accuracy. This work presents Diffusion on Reinforced Cooperative Perception (DRCP), a real-time deployable framework designed to address aforementioned issues in dynamic driving environments. DRCP integrates two key components: (1) Precise-Pyramid-Cross-Modality-Cross-Agent, a cross-modal cooperative perception module that leverages camera-intrinsic-aware angular partitioning for attention-based fusion and adaptive convolution to better exploit external features; and (2) Mask-Diffusion-Mask-Aggregation, a novel lightweight diffusion-based refinement module that encourages robustness against feature perturbations and aligns bird's-eye-view features closer to the task-optimal manifold. The proposed system achieves real-time performance on mobile platforms while significantly improving robustness under challenging conditions. Code will be released in late 2025.

Kamal Al-Sabahi, Zhang Zuping, Yang Kang

Sequence generative models with RNN variants, such as LSTM, GRU, show promising performance on abstractive document summarization. However, they still have some issues that limit their performance, especially while deal-ing with long sequences. One of the issues is that, to the best of our knowledge, all current models employ a unidirectional decoder, which reasons only about the past and still limited to retain future context while giving a prediction. This makes these models suffer on their own by generating unbalanced outputs. Moreover, unidirec-tional attention-based document summarization can only capture partial aspects of attentional regularities due to the inherited challenges in document summarization. To this end, we propose an end-to-end trainable bidirectional RNN model to tackle the aforementioned issues. The model has a bidirectional encoder-decoder architecture; in which the encoder and the decoder are bidirectional LSTMs. The forward decoder is initialized with the last hidden state of the backward encoder while the backward decoder is initialized with the last hidden state of the for-ward encoder. In addition, a bidirectional beam search mechanism is proposed as an approximate inference algo-rithm for generating the output summaries from the bidi-rectional model. This enables the model to reason about the past and future and to generate balanced outputs as a result. Experimental results on CNN / Daily Mail dataset show that the proposed model outperforms the current abstractive state-of-the-art models by a considerable mar-gin.