Jusheng Zhang

Zheng Chen, Kai Liu, Jingkai Wang et al.

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the NTIRE 2026 Workshop at CVPR 2026. The challenge aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective super-resolution solutions and analyze recent advances in the field. To reflect the evolving objectives of image super-resolution, the challenge includes two tracks: (1) a restoration track, which emphasizes pixel-wise fidelity and ranks submissions based on PSNR; and (2) a perceptual track, which focuses on visual realism and evaluates results using a perceptual score. A total of 194 participants registered for the challenge, with 31 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, main results, and methods of participating teams. The challenge provides a unified benchmark and offers insights into current progress and future directions in image super-resolution.

Jiawei Yao, Jusheng Zhang, Xiaochao Pan et al.

The task of 3D semantic scene completion using monocular cameras is gaining significant attention in the field of autonomous driving. This task aims to predict the occupancy status and semantic labels of each voxel in a 3D scene from partial image inputs. Despite numerous existing methods, many face challenges such as inaccurately predicting object shapes and misclassifying object boundaries. To address these issues, we propose DepthSSC, an advanced method for semantic scene completion using only monocular cameras. DepthSSC integrates the Spatial Transformation Graph Fusion (ST-GF) module with Geometric-Aware Voxelization (GAV), enabling dynamic adjustment of voxel resolution to accommodate the geometric complexity of 3D space. This ensures precise alignment between spatial and depth information, effectively mitigating issues such as object boundary distortion and incorrect depth perception found in previous methods. Evaluations on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 dataset demonstrate that DepthSSC not only captures intricate 3D structural details effectively but also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Xiaoyang Guo et al.

The ability to perform Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning marks a major milestone for multimodal models (MMs), enabling them to solve complex visual reasoning problems. Yet a critical question remains: is such reasoning genuinely grounded in visual evidence and logically coherent? Existing benchmarks emphasize generation but neglect verification, i.e., the capacity to assess whether a reasoning chain is both visually consistent and logically valid. To fill this gap, we introduce MM-CoT, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to probe the visual grounding and logical coherence of CoT reasoning in MMs. Instead of generating free-form explanations, models must select the sole event chain that satisfies two orthogonal constraints: (i) visual consistency, ensuring all steps are anchored in observable evidence, and (ii) logical coherence, ensuring causal and commonsense validity. Adversarial distractors are engineered to violate one of these constraints, exposing distinct reasoning failures. We evaluate leading vision-language models on MM-CoT and find that even the most advanced systems struggle, revealing a sharp discrepancy between generative fluency and true reasoning fidelity. MM-CoT shows low correlation with existing benchmarks, confirming that it measures a unique combination of visual grounding and logical reasoning. This benchmark provides a foundation for developing future models that reason not just plausibly, but faithfully and coherently within the visual world.

Jusheng Zhang, Xiaoyang Guo, Kaitong Cai et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have transformed multimodal reasoning, but feeding hundreds of visual patch tokens into LLMs incurs quadratic computational costs, straining memory and context windows. Traditional approaches face a trade-off: continuous compression dilutes high-level semantics such as object identities, while discrete quantization loses fine-grained details such as textures. We introduce HTC-VLM, a hybrid framework that disentangles semantics and appearance through dual channels, i.e., a continuous pathway for fine-grained details via ViT patches and a discrete pathway for symbolic anchors using MGVQ quantization projected to four tokens. These are fused into a 580-token hybrid sequence and compressed into a single voco token via a disentanglement attention mask and bottleneck, ensuring efficient and grounded representations. HTC-VLM achieves an average performance retention of 87.2 percent across seven benchmarks (GQA, VQAv2, MMBench, MME, POPE, SEED-Bench, ScienceQA-Image), outperforming the leading continuous baseline at 81.0 percent with a 580-to-1 compression ratio. Attention analyses show that the compressed token prioritizes the discrete anchor, validating its semantic guidance. Our work demonstrates that a minimalist hybrid design can resolve the efficiency-fidelity dilemma and advance scalable VLMs.

Kaitong Cai, Jusheng Zhang, Jing Yang et al.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) typically process hundreds or thousands of visual tokens per image or video frame, incurring quadratic attention cost and substantial redundancy. Existing token reduction methods often ignore the textual query or rely on deep attention maps, whose instability under aggressive pruning leads to degraded semantic alignment. We propose FlashVLM, a text guided visual token selection framework that dynamically adapts visual inputs to the query. Instead of relying on noisy attention weights, FlashVLM computes an explicit cross modal similarity between projected image tokens and normalized text embeddings in the language model space. This extrinsic relevance is fused with intrinsic visual saliency using log domain weighting and temperature controlled sharpening. In addition, a diversity preserving partition retains a minimal yet representative set of background tokens to maintain global context. Under identical token budgets and evaluation protocols, FlashVLM achieves beyond lossless compression, slightly surpassing the unpruned baseline while pruning up to 77.8 percent of visual tokens on LLaVA 1.5, and maintaining 92.8 percent accuracy even under 94.4 percent compression. Extensive experiments on 14 image and video benchmarks demonstrate that FlashVLM delivers state of the art efficiency performance trade offs while maintaining strong robustness and generalization across mainstream VLMs.

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Kaitong Cai et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful multi-agent systems, but scaling them is economically unsustainable: coordinating heterogeneous agents under information asymmetry often spirals costs. Existing paradigms, such as Mixture-of-Agents and knowledge-based routers, rely on heuristic proxies that ignore costs and collapse uncertainty structure, leading to provably suboptimal coordination. We introduce Agora, a framework that reframes coordination as a decentralized market for uncertainty. Agora formalizes epistemic uncertainty into a structured, tradable asset (perceptual, semantic, inferential), and enforces profitability-driven trading among agents based on rational economic rules. A market-aware broker, extending Thompson Sampling, initiates collaboration and guides the system toward cost-efficient equilibria. Experiments on five multimodal benchmarks (MMMU, MMBench, MathVision, InfoVQA, CC-OCR) show that Agora outperforms strong VLMs and heuristic multi-agent strategies, e.g., achieving +8.5% accuracy over the best baseline on MMMU while reducing cost by over 3x. These results establish market-based coordination as a principled and scalable paradigm for building economically viable multi-agent visual intelligence systems.

Hejin Huang, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai et al.

Preference-based alignment objectives have been widely adopted, from RLHF-style pairwise learning in large language models to emerging applications in recommender systems. Yet, existing work rarely examines how Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) behaves under implicit feedback, where unobserved items are not reliable negatives. We conduct systematic experiments on multimodal sequential recommendation to compare common negative-selection strategies and their interaction with DPO training. Our central finding is that a simple modification, replacing deterministic hard negatives with stochastic sampling from a dynamic top-K candidate pool, consistently improves ranking performance. We attribute its effectiveness to two factors: (1) reducing erroneous suppressive gradients caused by false negatives, and (2) retaining informative hard signals while smoothing optimization via controlled stochasticity. With an optional sparse Mixture-of-Experts encoder for efficient capacity scaling, RoDPO achieves up to 5.25% NDCG@5 on three Amazon benchmarks, with nearly unchanged inference cost.

Yihao Wang, Jusheng Zhang, Ziyi Tang et al.

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) is a core vision-language segmentation task that enables pixel-level understanding of targets via free-form linguistic expressions, supporting critical applications such as human-robot interaction and augmented reality. Despite the progress of Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches, existing RES methods still suffer from two key limitations: first, the coarse bounding boxes from MLLMs lead to redundant or non-discriminative point prompts; second, the prevalent reliance on textual coordinate reasoning is unreliable, as it fails to distinguish targets from visually similar distractors. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{\model}, a novel RES framework integrating \textbf{E}ntropy-\textbf{B}ased Point \textbf{D}iscovery (\textbf{EBD}) and \textbf{V}ision-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{R}easoning (\textbf{VBR}). Specifically, EBD identifies high-information candidate points by modeling spatial uncertainty within coarse bounding boxes, treating point selection as an information maximization process. VBR verifies point correctness through joint visual-semantic alignment, abandoning text-only coordinate inference for more robust validation. Built on these components, \model implements a coarse-to-fine workflow: bounding box initialization, entropy-guided point discovery, vision-based validation, and mask decoding. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and ReasonSeg) demonstrate that \model achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness in generating accurate and semantically grounded segmentation masks with minimal prompts.

Yijia Fan, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai et al.

Multi-label classification (MLC) remains vulnerable to label imbalance, spurious correlations, and distribution shifts, challenges that are particularly detrimental to rare label prediction. To address these limitations, we introduce the Causal Cooperative Game (CCG) framework, which conceptualizes MLC as a cooperative multi-player interaction. CCG unifies explicit causal discovery via Neural Structural Equation Models with a counterfactual curiosity reward to drive robust feature learning. Furthermore, it incorporates a causal invariance loss to ensure generalization across diverse environments, complemented by a specialized enhancement strategy for rare labels. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates that CCG substantially outperforms strong baselines in both rare label prediction and overall robustness. Through rigorous ablation studies and qualitative analysis, we validate the efficacy and interpretability of our components, underscoring the potential of synergizing causal inference with cooperative game theory for advancing multi-label learning.

Ziliang Chen, Tianang Xiao, Jusheng Zhang et al.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) delivers strong cross modal generalization by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space, yet it persistently fails at compositional reasoning over objects, attributes, and relations often behaving like a bag-of-words matcher. Prior causal accounts typically model text as a single vector, obscuring token-level structure and leaving core phenomena-such as prompt sensitivity and failures on hard negatives unexplained. We address this gap with a token-aware causal representation learning (CRL) framework grounded in a sequential, language-token SCM. Our theory extends block identifiability to tokenized text, proving that CLIP's contrastive objective can recover the modal-invariant latent variable under both sentence-level and token-level SCMs. Crucially, token granularity yields the first principled explanation of CLIP's compositional brittleness: composition nonidentifiability. We show the existence of pseudo-optimal text encoders that achieve perfect modal-invariant alignment yet are provably insensitive to SWAP, REPLACE, and ADD operations over atomic concepts, thereby failing to distinguish correct captions from hard negatives despite optimizing the same training objective as true-optimal encoders. The analysis further links language-side nonidentifiability to visual-side failures via the modality gap and shows how iterated composition operators compound hardness, motivating improved negative mining strategies.

Jusheng Zhang, Ningyuan Liu, Qinhan Lyu et al.

Deep neural networks typically treat nonlinearities as fixed primitives (e.g., ReLU), limiting both interpretability and the granularity of control over the induced function class. While recent additive models (like KANs) attempt to address this using splines, they often suffer from computational inefficiency and boundary instability. We propose the Rational-ANOVA Network (RAN), a foundational architecture grounded in functional ANOVA decomposition and Padé-style rational approximation. RAN models f(x) as a composition of main effects and sparse pairwise interactions, where each component is parameterized by a stable, learnable rational unit. Crucially, we enforce a strictly positive denominator, which avoids poles and numerical instability while capturing sharp transitions and near-singular behaviors more efficiently than polynomial bases. This ANOVA structure provides an explicit low-order interaction bias for data efficiency and interpretability, while the rational parameterization significantly improves extrapolation. Across controlled function benchmarks and vision classification tasks (e.g., CIFAR-10) under matched parameter and compute budgets, RAN matches or surpasses parameter-matched MLPs and learnable-activation baselines, with better stability and throughput. Code is available at https://github.com/jushengzhang/Rational-ANOVA-Networks.git.

Yijia Fan, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai et al.

Despite recent advancements in 3D-text cross-modal alignment, existing state-of-the-art methods still struggle to align fine-grained textual semantics with detailed geometric structures, and their alignment performance degrades significantly when scaling to large-scale 3D databases. To overcome this limitation, we introduce 3DAlign-DAER, a unified framework designed to align text and 3D geometry via the proposed dynamic attention policy and the efficient retrieval strategy, capturing subtle correspondences for diverse cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks. Specifically, during the training, our proposed dynamic attention policy (DAP) employs the Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module to represent the alignment as learnable fine-grained token-to-point attentions. To optimize these attentions across different tasks and geometric hierarchies, our DAP further exploits the Monte Carlo tree search to dynamically calibrate HAF attention weights via a hybrid reward signal and further enhances the alignment between textual descriptions and local 3D geometry. During the inference, our 3DAlign-DAER introduces an Efficient Retrieval Strategy (ERS) to leverage efficient hierarchical searching in the large-scale embedding spaces, outperforming traditional methods (e.g., KNN) in accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to facilitate text-3D alignment research and train our 3DAlign-DAER, we construct Align3D-2M, a large-scale dataset featuring 2M text-3D pairs, to provide sufficient fine-grained cross-modal annotations. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our 3DAlign-DAER on diverse benchmarks. We will release our codes, models, and datasets.

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Wenjun Lin et al.

We propose GAM-Agent, a game-theoretic multi-agent framework for enhancing vision-language reasoning. Unlike prior single-agent or monolithic models, GAM-Agent formulates the reasoning process as a non-zero-sum game between base agents--each specializing in visual perception subtasks--and a critical agent that verifies logic consistency and factual correctness. Agents communicate via structured claims, evidence, and uncertainty estimates. The framework introduces an uncertainty-aware controller to dynamically adjust agent collaboration, triggering multi-round debates when disagreement or ambiguity is detected. This process yields more robust and interpretable predictions. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks--MMMU, MMBench, MVBench, and V*Bench--demonstrate that GAM-Agent significantly improves performance across various VLM backbones. Notably, GAM-Agent boosts the accuracy of small-to-mid scale models (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL-7B, InternVL3-14B) by 5--6\%, and still enhances strong models like GPT-4o by up to 2--3\%. Our approach is modular, scalable, and generalizable, offering a path toward reliable and explainable multi-agent multimodal reasoning.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Yijia Fan et al.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have greatly improved cross-modal semantic understanding, yet significant limitations remain in fine-grained discrimination and deep causal reasoning tasks. Existing VLMs often rely on superficial statistical correlations, lacking the ability to capture the underlying causal logic between visual and textual content. To address this, we propose CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning (CF-VLM), a novel framework that enhances the causal reasoning capabilities of VLMs through the targeted use of counterfactual samples. CF-VLM introduces three complementary training objectives: maintaining foundational cross-modal alignment, reinforcing the uniqueness and stability of factual scene representations against coherent counterfactuals, and sharpening the model's sensitivity to minimal but critical causal edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CF-VLM consistently outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods on compositional reasoning and generalization benchmarks. Furthermore, it shows promise in mitigating visual hallucinations, indicating improved factual consistency. Our CF-VLM provides a robust foundation for deploying VLMs in high-stakes, real-world scenarios requiring reliable reasoning and interpretability.

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Kaitong Cai et al.

This paper introduces DrDiff, a novel framework for long-text generation that overcomes the efficiency-quality trade-off through three core technologies. First, we design a dynamic expert scheduling mechanism that intelligently allocates computational resources during the diffusion process based on text complexity, enabling more efficient handling of text generation tasks of varying difficulty. Second, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention (HSA) mechanism that adaptively adjusts attention patterns according to a variety of input lengths, reducing computational complexity from O($n^2$) to O($n$) while maintaining model performance. Finally, we propose a soft absorption guidance optimization strategy that combines with DPM-solver++ to reduce diffusion steps, significantly improving generation speed. Comprehensive experiments on various long-text generation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our DrDiff over the existing SOTA methods.

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Kaitong Cai et al.

This paper introduces OSC (Orchestrating Cognitive Synergy), a knowledge-aware adaptive collaboration framework designed to enhance cognitive synergy in multi-agent systems with large language models. While prior work has advanced agent selection and result aggregation, efficient linguistic interactions for deep collaboration among expert agents remain a critical bottleneck. OSC addresses this gap as a pivotal intermediate layer between selection and aggregation, introducing Collaborator Knowledge Models (CKM) to enable each agent to dynamically perceive its collaborators' cognitive states. Through real-time cognitive gap analysis, agents adaptively adjust communication behaviors, including content focus, detail level, and expression style, using learned strategies. Experiments on complex reasoning and problem-solving benchmarks demonstrate that OSC significantly improves task performance and communication efficiency, transforming "parallel-working individuals'' into a "deeply collaborative cognitive team.'' This framework not only optimizes multi-agent collaboration but also offers new insights into LLM agent interaction behaviors.

Jusheng Zhang, Zimeng Huang, Yijia Fan et al.

As scaling large language models faces prohibitive costs, multi-agent systems emerge as a promising alternative, though challenged by static knowledge assumptions and coordination inefficiencies. We introduces Knowledge-Aware Bayesian Bandits (KABB), a novel framework that enhances multi-agent system coordination through semantic understanding and dynamic adaptation. The framework features three key innovations: a three-dimensional knowledge distance model for deep semantic understanding, a dual-adaptation mechanism for continuous expert optimization, and a knowledge-aware Thompson Sampling strategy for efficient expert selection. Extensive evaluation demonstrates KABB achieves an optimal cost-performance balance, maintaining high performance while keeping computational demands relatively low in multi-agent coordination.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Yijia Fan et al.

Multi-label image classification demands adaptive training strategies to navigate complex, evolving visual-semantic landscapes, yet conventional methods rely on static configurations that falter in dynamic settings. We propose MAT-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework that reimagines training as a collaborative, real-time optimization process. By deploying autonomous agents to dynamically tune data augmentation, optimizers, learning rates, and loss functions, MAT-Agent leverages non-stationary multi-armed bandit algorithms to balance exploration and exploitation, guided by a composite reward harmonizing accuracy, rare-class performance, and training stability. Enhanced with dual-rate exponential moving average smoothing and mixed-precision training, it ensures robustness and efficiency. Extensive experiments across Pascal VOC, COCO, and VG-256 demonstrate MAT-Agent's superiority: it achieves an mAP of 97.4 (vs. 96.2 for PAT-T), OF1 of 92.3, and CF1 of 91.4 on Pascal VOC; an mAP of 92.8 (vs. 92.0 for HSQ-CvN), OF1 of 88.2, and CF1 of 87.1 on COCO; and an mAP of 60.9, OF1 of 70.8, and CF1 of 61.1 on VG-256. With accelerated convergence and robust cross-domain generalization, MAT-Agent offers a scalable, intelligent solution for optimizing complex visual models, paving the way for adaptive deep learning advancements.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Jing Yang et al.

Preference-based finetuning of vision--language models (VLMs) is brittle: trivially wrong negatives inject uninformative gradients that destabilize training. We recast alignment as \textbf{learning-dynamics--aware optimization} and introduce \textbf{Cooling-Weighted DPO (CW-DPO)}, a two-stage recipe that explicitly models and exploits the training trajectory. \textbf{Stage 1} performs supervised finetuning with \textbf{gentle negatives}: \textbf{low-weight smoothed supervision} that regularizes the base policy and curbs overconfidence without explicit penalties. \textbf{Stage 2} applies a DPO objective in which the \textbf{negative term is scaled by a cooling weight} computed from the model's \textbf{average token log-probability} on each negative, suppressing uninformative gradients from easy or off-distribution samples while preserving signal from hard negatives. In practice, we emphasize \textbf{on-policy negatives} and allow \textbf{mixed negatives} by blending a controllable fraction of dataset negatives to maintain contrast freshness. Throughout, we instrument training with $Δ\!\log p$ probes on positives and negatives as first-class signals for early stopping, curriculum design, and failure diagnosis. Across diverse VLM tasks, CW-DPO yields \textbf{more stable optimization}, \textbf{better calibration}, and \textbf{higher pairwise win-rates} than SFT-only and vanilla DPO, while \textbf{converging in fewer steps}. Ablations isolate the \textbf{cooling-weight mechanism} as the primary driver of these gains and show complementary benefits from mixing on-policy and dataset negatives. Taken together, our results show that \textbf{smoothing learning dynamics before cooling preferences} is a simple, general principle for robust VLM alignment.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Qinglin Zeng et al.

Optimizing LLM-based workflows is typically formulated as a global search, where candidate workflows are evaluated based on a scalar metric. This paradigm, however, suffers from a critical flaw: information collapse. By reducing rich, multi-step execution traces to simple success/failure signals, existing methods are rendered blind to the underlying structure of failures, fundamentally preventing them from modeling the workflow's failure distribution. We reconceptualize this challenge as a distributional problem. We propose a new paradigm where the optimization goal is not to maximize a scalar score, but to directly minimize a workflow's Expected Failure Mass, i.e., the integral of its failure probability density function defined over a high-dimensional Failure Signature Space (FSS). This distributional lens allows us to move from inefficient, zero-order optimization to a principled, gradient-like descent on the failure landscape itself. We introduce CE-Graph, a framework that operationalizes this paradigm through a novel, failure-driven refinement process. CE-Graph approximates the failure distribution from a pool of counterexamples, identifies its densest regions as recurring failure modes, and applies targeted, operator-constrained graph edits via a Propose-and-Verify mechanism to greedily reduce the failure mass. On math, code, and QA benchmarks, our CE-Graph achieves higher robustness at a significantly lower cost than strong baselines. This suggests that a system's reliability emerges not from avoiding failures, but from systematically learning and reshaping the geometric structure of its failure distributions.

Jinzhou Tang, Jusheng Zhang, Qinhan Lv et al.

Autonomous agents play a crucial role in advancing Artificial General Intelligence, enabling problem decomposition and tool orchestration through Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing paradigms face a critical trade-off. On one hand, reusable fixed workflows require manual reconfiguration upon environmental changes; on the other hand, flexible reactive loops fail to distill reasoning progress into transferable structures. We introduce Hierarchical Variable Agent (HiVA), a novel framework modeling agentic workflows as self-organized graphs with the Semantic-Topological Evolution (STEV) algorithm, which optimizes hybrid semantic-topological spaces using textual gradients as discrete-domain surrogates for backpropagation. The iterative process comprises Multi-Armed Bandit-infused forward routing, diagnostic gradient generation from environmental feedback, and coordinated updates that co-evolve individual semantics and topology for collective optimization in unknown environments. Experiments on dialogue, coding, Long-context Q&A, mathematical, and agentic benchmarks demonstrate improvements of 5-10% in task accuracy and enhanced resource efficiency over existing baselines, establishing HiVA's effectiveness in autonomous task execution.

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Zimo Wen et al.

Driven by applications in autonomous driving robotics and augmented reality 3D object annotation presents challenges beyond 2D annotation including spatial complexity occlusion and viewpoint inconsistency Existing approaches based on single models often struggle to address these issues effectively We propose Tri MARF a novel framework that integrates tri modal inputs including 2D multi view images textual descriptions and 3D point clouds within a multi agent collaborative architecture to enhance large scale 3D annotation Tri MARF consists of three specialized agents a vision language model agent for generating multi view descriptions an information aggregation agent for selecting optimal descriptions and a gating agent that aligns textual semantics with 3D geometry for refined captioning Extensive experiments on Objaverse LVIS Objaverse XL and ABO demonstrate that Tri MARF substantially outperforms existing methods achieving a CLIPScore of 88 point 7 compared to prior state of the art methods retrieval accuracy of 45 point 2 and 43 point 8 on ViLT R at 5 and a throughput of up to 12000 objects per hour on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU

Yijia Fan, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai et al.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) often suffer from inefficient "free-for-all" communication, leading to exponential token costs and low signal-to-noise ratios that hinder their practical deployment. We challenge the notion that more communication is always beneficial, hypothesizing instead that the core issue is the absence of resource rationality. We argue that "free" communication, by ignoring the principle of scarcity, inherently breeds inefficiency and unnecessary expenses. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Auction-based Language Agent (DALA), a novel framework that treats communication bandwidth as a scarce and tradable resource. Specifically, our DALA regards inter-agent communication as a centralized auction, where agents learn to bid for the opportunity to speak based on the predicted value density of their messages. Thus, our DALA intrinsically encourages agents to produce concise, informative messages while filtering out low-value communication. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our economically-driven DALA achieves new state-of-the-art performance across seven challenging reasoning benchmarks, including 84.32% on MMLU and a 91.21% pass@1 rate on HumanEval. Note that this is accomplished with remarkable efficiency, i.e., our DALA uses only 6.25 million tokens, a fraction of the resources consumed by current state-of-the-art methods on GSM8K. Further analysis reveals that our DALA cultivates the emergent skill of strategic silence, effectively adapting its communication strategies from verbosity to silence in a dynamical manner via resource constraints.

Zhihao Zhan, Jiaying Zhou, Likui Zhang et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a unified framework for robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and control generation. Yet existing VLA models still struggle to generalize across diverse tasks, scenes, and camera viewpoints, and often produce coarse or unstable actions. We introduce E0, a continuized discrete diffusion framework that formulates action generation as iterative denoising over quantized action tokens. Compared with continuous diffusion policies, E0 offers two key advantages: (1) discrete action tokens align naturally with the symbolic structure of pretrained VLM/VLA backbones, enabling stronger semantic conditioning; and 2. discrete diffusion matches the true quantized nature of real-world robot control-whose hardware constraints (e.g., encoder resolution, control frequency, actuation latency) inherently discretize continuous signals-and therefore benefits from a Bayes-optimal denoiser that models the correct discrete action distribution, leading to stronger generalization. Compared with discrete autoregressive and mask-based discrete diffusion models, E0 supports a significantly larger and finer-grained action vocabulary and avoids the distributional mismatch introduced by masking-based corruptions-yielding more accurate fine-grained action control. We further introduce a spherical viewpoint perturbation augmentation method to improve robustness to camera shifts without additional data. Experiments on LIBERO, VLABench, and ManiSkill show that E0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across 14 diverse environments, outperforming strong baselines by 10.7% on average. Real-world evaluation on a Franka arm confirms that E0 delivers precise, robust, and transferable manipulation, establishing discrete diffusion as a promising direction for generalizable VLA policy learning.

Kaitong Cai, Jusheng Zhang, Jing Yang et al.

Hybrid offline--online reinforcement learning (O2O RL) promises both sample efficiency and robust exploration, but suffers from instability due to distribution shift between offline and online data. We introduce RLPD-GX, a framework that decouples policy optimization from safety enforcement: a reward-seeking learner explores freely, while a projection-based guardian guarantees rule-consistent execution and safe value backups. This design preserves the exploratory value of online interactions without collapsing to conservative policies. To further stabilize training, we propose dynamic curricula that gradually extend temporal horizons and anneal offline--online data mixing. We prove convergence via a contraction property of the guarded Bellman operator, and empirically show state-of-the-art performance on Atari-100k, achieving a normalized mean score of 3.02 (+45\% over prior hybrid methods) with stronger safety and stability. Beyond Atari, ablations demonstrate consistent gains across safety-critical and long-horizon tasks, underscoring the generality of our design. Extensive and comprehensive results highlight decoupled safety enforcement as a simple yet principled route to robust O2O RL, suggesting a broader paradigm for reconciling exploration and safety in reinforcement learning.

Kaitong Cai, Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a $Δ$-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the ``critical details that determine answer divergence." This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6\% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15\% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from ``post-hoc context cleaning" to ``a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning", offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments.

Yijia Fan, Jusheng Zhang, Jing Yang et al.

To combat the prohibitive communication costs of ``free-for-all" multi-agent systems (MAS), we introduce \textbf{Agent-GSPO}, a framework that directly optimizes for token economy using sequence-level reinforcement learning. Agent-GSPO leverages the stable and memory-efficient Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) algorithm to train agents on a communication-aware reward that explicitly penalizes verbosity. Across seven reasoning benchmarks, Agent-GSPO not only achieves new state-of-the-art performance but does so with a fraction of the token consumption of existing methods. By fostering emergent strategies like ``strategic silence," our approach provides a practical blueprint for developing scalable and economically viable multi-agent systems.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Jing Yang et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face an inherent contradiction in image captioning: their powerful single-step generation capabilities often lead to a myopic decision-making process. This makes it difficult to maintain global narrative coherence while capturing rich details, a limitation that is particularly pronounced in tasks that require multi-step and complex scene description. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we redefine image captioning as a goal-oriented hierarchical refinement planning problem, and further propose a novel framework, named Top-Down Semantic Refinement (TDSR), which models the generation process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, planning within the vast state space of a VLM presents a significant computational hurdle. Our core contribution, therefore, is the design of a highly efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm tailored for VLMs. By incorporating a visual-guided parallel expansion and a lightweight value network, our TDSR reduces the call frequency to the expensive VLM by an order of magnitude without sacrificing planning quality. Furthermore, an adaptive early stopping mechanism dynamically matches computational overhead to the image's complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including DetailCaps, COMPOSITIONCAP, and POPE, demonstrate that our TDSR, as a plug-and-play module, can significantly enhance the performance of existing VLMs (e.g., LLaVA-1.5, Qwen2.5-VL) by achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive results in fine-grained description, compositional generalization, and hallucination suppression.

Jinzhou Tang, Jusheng zhang, Sidi Liu et al.

Achieving human-like reasoning in deep learning models for complex tasks in unknown environments remains a critical challenge in embodied intelligence. While advanced vision-language models (VLMs) excel in static scene understanding, their limitations in spatio-temporal reasoning and adaptation to dynamic, open-set tasks like task-oriented navigation and embodied question answering (EQA) persist due to inadequate modeling of fine-grained spatio-temporal cues and physical world comprehension. To address this, we propose VEME, a novel cross-modal alignment method that enhances generalization in unseen scenes by learning an ego-centric, experience-centered world model. Our framework integrates three key components: (1) a cross-modal alignment framework bridging objects, spatial representations, and visual semantics with spatio-temporal cues to enhance VLM in-context learning; (2) a dynamic, implicit cognitive map activated by world embedding to enable task-relevant geometric-semantic memory recall; and (3) an instruction-based navigation and reasoning framework leveraging embodied priors for long-term planning and efficient exploration. By embedding geometry-aware spatio-temporal episodic experiences, our method significantly improves reasoning and planning in dynamic environments. Experimental results on VSI-Bench and VLN-CE demonstrate 1%-3% accuracy and exploration efficiency improvement compared to traditional approaches.

Jusheng Zhang, Jinzhou Tang, Sidi Liu et al.

Human motion generative modeling or synthesis aims to characterize complicated human motions of daily activities in diverse real-world environments. However, current research predominantly focuses on either low-level, short-period motions or high-level action planning, without taking into account the hierarchical goal-oriented nature of human activities. In this work, we take a step forward from human motion generation to human behavior modeling, which is inspired by cognitive science. We present a unified framework, dubbed Generative Behavior Control (GBC), to model diverse human motions driven by various high-level intentions by aligning motions with hierarchical behavior plans generated by large language models (LLMs). Our insight is that human motions can be jointly controlled by task and motion planning in robotics, but guided by LLMs to achieve improved motion diversity and physical fidelity. Meanwhile, to overcome the limitations of existing benchmarks, i.e., lack of behavioral plans, we propose GBC-100K dataset annotated with a hierarchical granularity of semantic and motion plans driven by target goals. Our experiments demonstrate that GBC can generate more diverse and purposeful high-quality human motions with 10* longer horizons compared with existing methods when trained on GBC-100K, laying a foundation for future research on behavioral modeling of human motions. Our dataset and source code will be made publicly available.

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Kaitong Cai et al.

Although Kolmogorov-Arnold based interpretable networks (KAN) have strong theoretical expressiveness, they face significant parameter explosion and high-frequency feature capture challenges in high-dimensional tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Fourier Network (KAF), which effectively integrates trainable Random Fourier Features (RFF) and a novel hybrid GELU-Fourier activation mechanism to balance parameter efficiency and spectral representation capabilities. Our key technical contributions include: (1) merging KAN's dual-matrix structure through matrix association properties to substantially reduce parameters; (2) introducing learnable RFF initialization strategies to eliminate spectral distortion in high-dimensional approximation tasks; (3) implementing an adaptive hybrid activation function that progressively enhances frequency representation during the training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our KAF across various domains including vision, NLP, audio processing, and differential equation-solving tasks, effectively combining theoretical interpretability with practical utility and computational efficiency.