Bo Lei

Shihan Wu, Xuecheng Liu, Shaoxuan Xie et al.

Despite the critical role of bimanual manipulation in endowing robots with human-like dexterity, large-scale and diverse datasets remain scarce due to the significant hardware heterogeneity across bimanual robotic platforms. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboCOIN, a large-scale multi-embodiment bimanual manipulation dataset comprising over 180,000 demonstrations collected from 15 distinct robotic platforms. Spanning 16 diverse environments-including residential, commercial, and industrial settings-the dataset features 421 bimanual tasks systematically categorized by 39 bimanual collaboration actions and 432 objects. A key innovation of our work is the hierarchical capability pyramid, which provides granular annotations ranging from trajectory-level concepts to segment-level subtasks and frame-level kinematics. Furthermore, we present CoRobot, an efficient data processing pipeline powered by the Robot Trajectory Markup Language (RTML), designed to facilitate quality assessment, automated annotation, and unified multi-embodiment and data management. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RoboCOIN in enhancing the performance of various bimanual manipulation models across a wide spectrum of robotic embodiments. The entire dataset and codebase are fully open-sourced, providing a valuable resource for advancing research in bimanual and multi-embodiment manipulation.

Yiming Liang, Yizhi Li, Yantao Du et al.

Benchmarks play a crucial role in tracking the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and identifying their capability boundaries. However, existing benchmarks predominantly curate questions at the question level, suffering from three fundamental limitations: vulnerability to data contamination, restriction to single-knowledge-point assessment, and reliance on costly domain expert annotation. We propose Encyclo-K, a statement-based benchmark that rethinks benchmark construction from the ground up. Our key insight is that knowledge statements, not questions, can serve as the unit of curation, and questions can then be constructed from them. We extract standalone knowledge statements from authoritative textbooks and dynamically compose them into evaluation questions through random sampling at test time. This design directly addresses all three limitations: the combinatorial space is too vast to memorize, and model rankings remain stable across dynamically generated question sets, enabling reliable periodic dataset refresh; each question aggregates 8-10 statements for comprehensive multi-knowledge assessment; annotators only verify formatting compliance without requiring domain expertise, substantially reducing annotation costs. Experiments on over 50 LLMs demonstrate that Encyclo-K poses substantial challenges with strong discriminative power. Even the top-performing OpenAI-GPT-5.1 achieves only 62.07% accuracy, and model performance displays a clear gradient distribution--reasoning models span from 16.04% to 62.07%, while chat models range from 9.71% to 50.40%. These results validate the challenges introduced by dynamic evaluation and multi-statement comprehensive understanding. These findings establish Encyclo-K as a scalable framework for dynamic evaluation of LLMs' comprehensive understanding over multiple fine-grained disciplinary knowledge statements.

Han Xu, Xuerui Qiu, Baiyu Chen et al.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily based on large-scale dense matrix multiplications. Inspired by the brain's information processing mechanism, we explore the fundamental question: how to effectively integrate the brain's spiking-driven characteristics into LLM inference. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) possess spike-driven characteristics, and some works have attempted to combine SNNs with Transformers. However, achieving spike-driven LLMs with billions of parameters, relying solely on sparse additions, remains a challenge in the SNN field. To address the issues of limited representational capacity and sparsity in existing spike encoding schemes at the LLM level, we propose SDLLM, a spike-driven large language model that eliminates dense matrix multiplications through sparse addition operations. Specifically, we use the plug-and-play gamma-SQP two-step spike encoding method to ensure that the quantization process aligns with the model's semantic space, mitigating representation degradation caused by binary spikes. Furthermore, we introduce bidirectional encoding under symmetric quantization and membrane potential clipping mechanisms, leading to spike trains with no or low firing counts dominating, significantly reducing the model's spike firing rate, while halving the number of time steps. Experimental results show that SDLLM not only significantly reduces inference costs but also achieves state-of-the-art task performance under the spike-based paradigm. For example, compared to previous spike-based LLMs, SDLLM reduces energy consumption by 7x and improves accuracy by 4.2%. Our model provides inspiration for the architecture design of the next generation of event-driven neuromorphic chips.

Bo Lei, Enze Chen, Hyuna Kwon et al.

The diffusion model has emerged as a powerful tool for generating atomic structures for materials science. This work calls attention to the deficiency of current particle-based diffusion models, which represent atoms as a point cloud, in generating even the simplest ordered crystalline structures. The problem is attributed to particles being trapped in local minima during the score-driven simulated annealing of the diffusion process, similar to the physical process of force-driven simulated annealing. We develop a solution, the grand canonical diffusion model, which adopts an alternative voxel-based representation with continuous rather than fixed number of particles. The method is applied towards generation of several common crystalline phases as well as the technologically important and challenging problem of grain boundary structures.

Yizhuo Cai, Bo Lei, Qianying Zhao et al.

Federated learning effectively addresses issues such as data privacy by collaborating across participating devices to train global models. However, factors such as network topology and device computing power can affect its training or communication process in complex network environments. A new network architecture and paradigm with computing-measurable, perceptible, distributable, dispatchable, and manageable capabilities, computing and network convergence (CNC) of 6G networks can effectively support federated learning training and improve its communication efficiency. By guiding the participating devices' training in federated learning based on business requirements, resource load, network conditions, and arithmetic power of devices, CNC can reach this goal. In this paper, to improve the communication efficiency of federated learning in complex networks, we study the communication efficiency optimization of federated learning for computing and network convergence of 6G networks, methods that gives decisions on its training process for different network conditions and arithmetic power of participating devices in federated learning. The experiments address two architectures that exist for devices in federated learning and arrange devices to participate in training based on arithmetic power while achieving optimization of communication efficiency in the process of transferring model parameters. The results show that the method we proposed can (1) cope well with complex network situations (2) effectively balance the delay distribution of participating devices for local training (3) improve the communication efficiency during the transfer of model parameters (4) improve the resource utilization in the network.

Zhiqiang Chen, Guofan Fan, Jinying Gao et al.

The human brain exhibits a strong ability to spontaneously associate different visual attributes of the same or similar visual scene, such as associating sketches and graffiti with real-world visual objects, usually without supervising information. In contrast, in the field of artificial intelligence, controllable generation methods like ControlNet heavily rely on annotated training datasets such as depth maps, semantic segmentation maps, and poses, which limits the method's scalability. Inspired by the neural mechanisms that may contribute to the brain's associative power, specifically the cortical modularization and hippocampal pattern completion, here we propose a self-supervised controllable generation (SCG) framework. Firstly, we introduce an equivariant constraint to promote inter-module independence and intra-module correlation in a modular autoencoder network, thereby achieving functional specialization. Subsequently, based on these specialized modules, we employ a self-supervised pattern completion approach for controllable generation training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed modular autoencoder effectively achieves functional specialization, including the modular processing of color, brightness, and edge detection, and exhibits brain-like features including orientation selectivity, color antagonism, and center-surround receptive fields. Through self-supervised training, associative generation capabilities spontaneously emerge in SCG, demonstrating excellent generalization ability to various tasks such as associative generation on painting, sketches, and ancient graffiti. Compared to the previous representative method ControlNet, our proposed approach not only demonstrates superior robustness in more challenging high-noise scenarios but also possesses more promising scalability potential due to its self-supervised manner.Codes are released on Github and Gitee.

Wenqiang Zu, Shenghao Xie, Bo Lei et al.

Recent progress in generative modeling has enabled high-quality visual synthesis with diffusion-based frameworks, supporting controllable sampling and large-scale training. Inference-time guidance methods such as classifier-free and representative guidance enhance semantic alignment by modifying sampling dynamics; however, they do not fully exploit unsupervised feature representations. Although such visual representations contain rich semantic structure, their integration during generation is constrained by the absence of ground-truth reference images at inference. This work reveals semantic drift in the early denoising stages of diffusion transformers, where stochasticity results in inconsistent alignment even under identical conditioning. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a guidance scheme using a representation alignment projector that injects representations predicted by a projector into intermediate sampling steps, providing an effective semantic anchor without modifying the model architecture. Experiments on SiTs and REPAs show notable improvements in class-conditional ImageNet synthesis, achieving substantially lower FID scores; for example, REPA-XL/2 improves from 5.9 to 3.3, and the proposed method outperforms representative guidance when applied to SiT models. The approach further yields complementary gains when combined with classifier-free guidance, demonstrating enhanced semantic coherence and visual fidelity. These results establish representation-informed diffusion sampling as a practical strategy for reinforcing semantic preservation and image consistency.

Guanglong Sun, Hongwei Yan, Liyuan Wang et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful strategy for training deep neural networks (DNNs). Although it was originally proposed to train a more compact "student" model from a large "teacher" model, many recent efforts have focused on adapting it to promote generalization of the model itself, such as online KD and self KD. Here, we propose an accessible and compatible strategy named Spaced KD to improve the effectiveness of both online KD and self KD, in which the student model distills knowledge from a teacher model trained with a space interval ahead. This strategy is inspired by a prominent theory named spacing effect in biological learning and memory, positing that appropriate intervals between learning trials can significantly enhance learning performance. With both theoretical and empirical analyses, we demonstrate that the benefits of the proposed Spaced KD stem from convergence to a flatter loss landscape during stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We perform extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of Spaced KD in improving the learning performance of DNNs (e.g., the performance gain is up to 2.31% and 3.34% on Tiny-ImageNet over online KD and self KD, respectively). Our codes have been released on github https://github.com/SunGL001/Spaced-KD.

Han Xu, Zhiyong Qin, Di Shang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress but incur substantial computational overhead and energy consumption during inference, limiting deployment in resource-constrained environments. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), with their sparse event-driven computation, offer inherent energy efficiency advantages on neuromorphic hardware, yet extending them to MLLMs faces two key challenges: heterogeneous modalities make uniform spike encoding insufficient, and high-resolution image inputs amplify timestep unfolding overhead. We propose SpikeMLLM, the first spike-based framework for MLLMs, which unifies existing ANN quantization methods in the spiking representation space and incorporates Modality-Specific Temporal Scales (MSTS) guided by Modality Evolution Discrepancy (MED) and Temporally Compressed LIF (TC-LIF) for timestep compression from T=L-1 to T=log2(L)-1. Experiments on four representative MLLMs across diverse multimodal benchmarks show that SpikeMLLM maintains near-lossless performance under aggressive timestep compression (Tv/Tt=3/4), with average gaps of only 0.72% and 1.19% relative to the FP16 baseline on InternVL2-8B and Qwen2VL-72B. We further develop a dedicated RTL accelerator tailored to the spike-driven datapath, observing 9.06x higher throughput and 25.8x better power efficiency relative to an FP16 GPU baseline under a deployment-oriented co-design setting, suggesting the promise of algorithm-hardware co-design for efficient multimodal intelligence.

Yang Li, Xing Zhang, Bo Lei et al.

The combination of mobile edge computing (MEC) and radio frequency-based wireless power transfer (WPT) presents a promising technique for providing sustainable energy supply and computing services at the network edge. This study considers a wireless-powered mobile edge computing system that includes a hybrid access point (HAP) equipped with a computing unit and multiple Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In particular, we propose a novel muti-user cooperation scheme to improve computation performance, where collaborative clusters are dynamically formed. Each collaborative cluster comprises a source device (SD) and an auxiliary device (AD), where the SD can partition the computation task into various segments for local processing, offloading to the HAP, and remote execution by the AD with the assistance of the HAP. Specifically, we aims to maximize the weighted sum computation rate (WSCR) of all the IoT devices in the network. This involves jointly optimizing collaboration, time and data allocation among multiple IoT devices and the HAP, while considering the energy causality property and the minimum data processing requirement of each device. Initially, an optimization algorithm based on the interior-point method is designed for time and data allocation. Subsequently, a priority-based iterative algorithm is developed to search for a near-optimal solution to the multi-user collaboration scheme. Finally, a deep learning-based approach is devised to further accelerate the algorithm's operation, building upon the initial two algorithms. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms is comparable to that of the exhaustive search method, and the deep learning-based algorithm significantly reduces the execution time of the algorithm.

Tavish McDonald, Bo Lei, Stanislav Fort et al.

Models are susceptible to adversarially out-of-distribution (OOD) data despite large training-compute investments into their robustification. Zaremba et al. (2025) make progress on this problem at test time, showing LLM reasoning improves satisfaction of model specifications designed to thwart attacks, resulting in a correlation between reasoning effort and robustness to jailbreaks. However, this benefit of test compute fades when attackers are given access to gradients or multimodal inputs. We address this gap, clarifying that inference-compute offers benefits even in such cases. Our approach argues that compositional generalization, through which OOD data is understandable via its in-distribution (ID) components, enables adherence to defensive specifications on adversarially OOD inputs. Namely, we posit the Robustness from Inference Compute Hypothesis (RICH): inference-compute defenses profit as the model's training data better reflects the attacked data's components. We empirically support this hypothesis across vision language model and attack types, finding robustness gains from test-time compute if specification following on OOD data is unlocked by compositional generalization, while RL finetuning and protracted reasoning are not critical. For example, increasing emphasis on defensive specifications via prompting lowers the success rate of gradient-based multimodal attacks on VLMs robustified by adversarial pretraining, but this same intervention provides no such benefit to not-robustified models. This correlation of inference-compute's robustness benefit with base model robustness is the rich-get-richer dynamic of the RICH: attacked data components are more ID for robustified models, aiding compositional generalization to OOD data. Accordingly, we advise layering train-time and test-time defenses to obtain their synergistic benefit.

Bo Lei, Victor M. Castillo, Yeping Hu

Mesh-based graph neural networks (GNNs) have become effective surrogates for PDE simulations, yet their deep message passing incurs high cost and over-smoothing on large, long-range meshes; hierarchical GNNs shorten propagation paths but still face two key obstacles: (i) building coarse graphs that respect mesh topology, geometry, and physical discontinuities, and (ii) maintaining fine-scale accuracy without sacrificing the speed gained from coarsening. We tackle these challenges with M4GN, a three-tier, segment-centric hierarchical network. M4GN begins with a hybrid segmentation strategy that pairs a fast graph partitioner with a superpixel-style refinement guided by modal-decomposition features, producing contiguous segments of dynamically consistent nodes. These segments are encoded by a permutation-invariant aggregator, avoiding the order sensitivity and quadratic cost of aggregation approaches used in prior works. The resulting information bridges a micro-level GNN, which captures local dynamics, and a macro-level transformer that reasons efficiently across segments, achieving a principled balance between accuracy and efficiency. Evaluated on multiple representative benchmark datasets, M4GN improves prediction accuracy by up to 56% while achieving up to 22% faster inference than state-of-the-art baselines.

Wenqiang Zu, Shenghao Xie, Hao Chen et al.

Foundation models pretrained on large-scale natural images are widely adapted to various cross-domain low-resource downstream tasks, benefiting from generalizable and transferable patterns captured by their representations. However, these representations are later found to gradually vanish during finetuning, accompanied by a degradation of model's original generalizability. In this paper, we argue that such tasks can be effectively adapted without sacrificing the benefits of pretrained representations. We approach this by introducing \textit{Representation Invariance FineTuning (RIFT)}, a regularization that maximizes the representation similarity between pretrained and finetuned models by leveraging orthogonal invariance of manifolds in a computationally efficient way. Experiments demonstrate that our method is compatible with mainstream finetuning methods, offering competitive or even enhanced performance and better preservation of the generalizability.

Elizabeth A. Holm, Ryan Cohn, Nan Gao et al.

The characterization and analysis of microstructure is the foundation of microstructural science, connecting the materials structure to its composition, process history, and properties. Microstructural quantification traditionally involves a human deciding a priori what to measure and then devising a purpose-built method for doing so. However, recent advances in data science, including computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) offer new approaches to extracting information from microstructural images. This overview surveys CV approaches to numerically encode the visual information contained in a microstructural image, which then provides input to supervised or unsupervised ML algorithms that find associations and trends in the high-dimensional image representation. CV/ML systems for microstructural characterization and analysis span the taxonomy of image analysis tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. These tools enable new approaches to microstructural analysis, including the development of new, rich visual metrics and the discovery of processing-microstructure-property relationships.

Liyuan Wang, Bo Lei, Qian Li et al.

Continual acquisition of novel experience without interfering previously learned knowledge, i.e. continual learning, is critical for artificial neural networks, but limited by catastrophic forgetting. A neural network adjusts its parameters when learning a new task, but then fails to conduct the old tasks well. By contrast, the brain has a powerful ability to continually learn new experience without catastrophic interference. The underlying neural mechanisms possibly attribute to the interplay of hippocampus-dependent memory system and neocortex-dependent memory system, mediated by prefrontal cortex. Specifically, the two memory systems develop specialized mechanisms to consolidate information as more specific forms and more generalized forms, respectively, and complement the two forms of information in the interplay. Inspired by such brain strategy, we propose a novel approach named triple memory networks (TMNs) for continual learning. TMNs model the interplay of hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and sensory cortex (a neocortex region) as a triple-network architecture of generative adversarial networks (GAN). The input information is encoded as specific representation of the data distributions in a generator, or generalized knowledge of solving tasks in a discriminator and a classifier, with implementing appropriate brain-inspired algorithms to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in each module. Particularly, the generator replays generated data of the learned tasks to the discriminator and the classifier, both of which are implemented with a weight consolidation regularizer to complement the lost information in generation process. TMNs achieve new state-of-the-art performance on a variety of class-incremental learning benchmarks on MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-50, comparing with strong baseline methods.

Haisheng Fu, Feng Liang, Bo Lei et al.

Recently deep learning-based methods have been applied in image compression and achieved many promising results. In this paper, we propose an improved hybrid layered image compression framework by combining deep learning and the traditional image codecs. At the encoder, we first use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to obtain a compact representation of the input image, which is losslessly encoded by the FLIF codec as the base layer of the bit stream. A coarse reconstruction of the input is obtained by another CNN from the reconstructed compact representation. The residual between the input and the coarse reconstruction is then obtained and encoded by the H.265/HEVC-based BPG codec as the enhancement layer of the bit stream. Experimental results using the Kodak and Tecnick datasets show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning-based layered coding scheme and traditional codecs including BPG in both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics across a wide range of bit rates, when the images are coded in the RGB444 domain.

Nai Bian, Feng Liang, Haisheng Fu et al.

Face recognition technology has advanced rapidly and has been widely used in various applications. Due to the extremely huge amount of data of face images and the large computing resources required correspondingly in large-scale face recognition tasks, there is a requirement for a face image compression approach that is highly suitable for face recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional autoencoder compression network for face recognition tasks. In the compression process, deep features are extracted from the original image by the convolutional neural networks to produce a compact representation of the original image, which is then encoded and saved by existing codec such as PNG. This compact representation is utilized by the reconstruction network to generate a reconstructed image of the original one. In order to improve the face recognition accuracy when the compression framework is used in a face recognition system, we combine this compression framework with a existing face recognition network for joint optimization. We test the proposed scheme and find that after joint training, the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset compressed by our compression framework has higher face verification accuracy than that compressed by JPEG2000, and is much higher than that compressed by JPEG.

Brian L. DeCost, Bo Lei, Toby Francis et al.

We apply a deep convolutional neural network segmentation model to enable novel automated microstructure segmentation applications for complex microstructures typically evaluated manually and subjectively. We explore two microstructure segmentation tasks in an openly-available ultrahigh carbon steel microstructure dataset: segmenting cementite particles in the spheroidized matrix, and segmenting larger fields of view featuring grain boundary carbide, spheroidized particle matrix, particle-free grain boundary denuded zone, and Widmanstätten cementite. We also demonstrate how to combine these data-driven microstructure segmentation models to obtain empirical cementite particle size and denuded zone width distributions from more complex micrographs containing multiple microconstituents. The full annotated dataset is available on materialsdata.nist.gov (https://materialsdata.nist.gov/handle/11256/964).