Ruiqi Liu

Daliang Xu, Hao Zhang, Liming Yang et al.

On-device inference for Large Language Models (LLMs), driven by increasing privacy concerns and advancements of mobile-sized models, has gained significant interest. However, even mobile-sized LLMs (e.g., Gemma-2B) encounter unacceptably high inference latency, often bottlenecked by the prefill stage in tasks like screen UI understanding. We present llm.npu, the first LLM inference system utilizing on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offloading to reduce prefill latency. llm.npu enhances NPU offloading efficiency by re-constructing the prompt and model in three levels: (1) At prompt level, it divides variable-length prompts into multiple fixed-sized chunks while maintaining data dependencies; (2) At tensor level, it identifies and extracts significant outliers to run on the CPU/GPU in parallel with minimal overhead; (3) At block level, it schedules Transformer blocks in an out-of-order manner to the CPU/GPU and NPU based on their hardware affinity and sensitivity to accuracy. Compared to competitive baselines, llm.npu achieves 22.4x faster prefill speed and 30.7$\times$ energy savings on average, and up to 32.8x speedup in an end-to-end real-world application. For the first time, llm.npu achieves more than 1,000 tokens/sec prefilling for a billion-sized model.

Tiantian Ma, Beixiong Zheng, Changsheng You et al.

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite links experience rapid angular variation due to high orbital velocities, which causes severe beam misalignment and array gain degradation under conventional fixed-antenna architectures. In this letter, we propose a rotatable antenna (RA)-enabled LEO communication framework, where RA arrays are deployed at both the satellite and the ground node (GN) to exploit antenna boresight reconfiguration as an additional spatial degree-of-freedom (DoF) for maintaining directional alignment under high mobility. By leveraging the rank-one line-of-sight (LoS) channel structure inherent to satellite links, we derive closed-form solutions for the joint design of the transmit/receive beamforming and antenna boresight directions, revealing that optimal performance can be achieved via decoupled alignment across antennas with low computational complexity. To enable practical operation under dynamic conditions, we further develop a channel estimation and beam tracking protocol that exploits the predictable satellite orbit to continuously update boresight directions with low training overhead. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled design significantly outperforms fixed and random boresight baselines in terms of achievable rate and robustness to angular variations, highlighting the effectiveness of rotational spatial reconfiguration in high-mobility satellite communications.

Gengsheng Li, Jinghan He, Shijie Wang et al.

Self-play bootstraps LLM reasoning through an iterative Challenger-Solver loop: the Challenger is trained to generate questions that target the Solver's capabilities, and the Solver is optimized on the generated data to expand its reasoning skills. However, existing frameworks like R-Zero often exhibit non-sustained improvement, where early gains degrade as self-play continues. We identify a key failure mode, Diversity Illusion, where the Solver's training signals appear diverse yet collapse into recurring underlying patterns. It manifests as (1) Local Diversity Illusion, where diversity is enforced only within-batch, inducing cross-iteration mode cycling; and (2) Surface Diversity Illusion, where questions vary superficially but require near-identical reasoning skills. To mitigate them, we propose R-Diverse with two aligned innovations: Memory-Augmented Penalty (MAP), which uses a persistent memory bank to discourage recycling across iterations, and Skill-Aware Measurement (SAM), which evaluates diversity by the reasoning skills exercised rather than surface variation of questions. Across 10 math and general reasoning benchmarks, R-Diverse sustains gains over more iterations and consistently outperforms prior self-play methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Gengsheng-Li/R-Diverse.

Junkai Chen, Yuhao He, Junxiang You et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on vision-language tasks, but they may also memorize and expose sensitive or restricted knowledge, raising concerns about privacy and broader safety risks. Machine Unlearning (MU) provides a promising way to remove targeted undesirable knowledge from trained models without retraining from scratch while preserving general model utility. Nevertheless, effective unlearning in MLLMs remains particularly challenging. Existing training-based methods often struggle to balance unlearning effectiveness and model utility. In contrast, training-free methods such as in-context unlearning preserve model utility by avoiding parameter updates, but they do not remove memorized knowledge at the parameter level and may remain vulnerable to reverse-engineering attacks. More importantly, in-context unlearning is insufficient in multimodal settings, where visual inputs can provide strong conditioning signals and induce undesirable outputs. To address these challenges, we propose Visual-Noise Guided In-Context Distillation (VGID), a distillation-based framework for MLLM unlearning. VGID dynamically constructs an unlearning-oriented teacher distribution from the frozen base model through dual-modal intervention that combines visual perturbation with textual in-context unlearning. The resulting intervention-induced distribution serves as a teacher signal for distillation, guiding the student model toward parameter-level unlearning without requiring external teacher models or explicit undesirable response annotations. Experimental results show that VGID achieves strong unlearning effectiveness while preserving competitive model utility, reducing forget set ROUGE-L by 0.371 with only a 0.055 drop in retain set ROUGE-L in a representative setting.

RuiQi Liu, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang et al.

Continual learning (CL) aims to learn new tasks without erasing previous knowledge. However, current CL methods primarily emphasize improving accuracy while often neglecting training efficiency, which consequently restricts their practical application. Drawing inspiration from the brain's contextual gating mechanism, which selectively filters neural information and continuously updates past memories, we propose Low-redundancy Distillation (LoRD), a novel CL method that enhances model performance while maintaining training efficiency. This is achieved by eliminating redundancy in three aspects of CL: student model redundancy, teacher model redundancy, and rehearsal sample redundancy. By compressing the learnable parameters of the student model and pruning the teacher model, LoRD facilitates the retention and optimization of prior knowledge, effectively decoupling task-specific knowledge without manually assigning isolated parameters for each task. Furthermore, we optimize the selection of rehearsal samples and refine rehearsal frequency to improve training efficiency. Through a meticulous design of distillation and rehearsal strategies, LoRD effectively balances training efficiency and model precision. Extensive experimentation across various benchmark datasets and environments demonstrates LoRD's superiority, achieving the highest accuracy with the lowest training FLOPs.

Ruiqi Liu, Manni Cui, Ziheng Qin et al.

High-fidelity generative models have narrowed the perceptual gap between synthetic and real images, posing serious threats to media security. Most existing AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors rely on artifact-based classification and struggle to generalize to evolving generative traces. In contrast, human judgment relies on stable real-world regularities, with deviations from the human cognitive manifold serving as a more generalizable signal of forgery. Motivated by this insight, we reformulate AIGI detection as a Reference-Comparison problem that verifies consistency with the real-image manifold rather than fitting specific forgery cues. We propose MIRROR (Manifold Ideal Reference ReconstructOR), a framework that explicitly encodes reality priors using a learnable discrete memory bank. MIRROR projects an input into a manifold-consistent ideal reference via sparse linear combination, and uses the resulting residuals as robust detection signals. To evaluate whether detectors reach the "superhuman crossover" required to replace human experts, we introduce the Human-AIGI benchmark, featuring a psychophysically curated human-imperceptible subset. Across 14 benchmarks, MIRROR consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving gains of 2.1% on six standard benchmarks and 8.1% on seven in-the-wild benchmarks. On Human-AIGI, MIRROR reaches 89.6% accuracy across 27 generators, surpassing both lay users and visual experts, and further approaching the human perceptual limit as pretrained backbones scale. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/349793927/MIRROR

Kexuan Li, Fangfang Wang, Lingli Yang et al.

The applications of traditional statistical feature selection methods to high-dimension, low sample-size data often struggle and encounter challenging problems, such as overfitting, curse of dimensionality, computational infeasibility, and strong model assumption. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step nonparametric approach called Deep Feature Screening (DeepFS) that can overcome these problems and identify significant features with high precision for ultra high-dimensional, low-sample-size data. This approach first extracts a low-dimensional representation of input data and then applies feature screening based on multivariate rank distance correlation recently developed by Deb and Sen (2021). This approach combines the strengths of both deep neural networks and feature screening, and thereby has the following appealing features in addition to its ability of handling ultra high-dimensional data with small number of samples: (1) it is model free and distribution free; (2) it can be used for both supervised and unsupervised feature selection; and (3) it is capable of recovering the original input data. The superiority of DeepFS is demonstrated via extensive simulation studies and real data analyses.

Zhiheng Li, Zongyang Ma, Jiaxian Chen et al.

The past year has seen over 20 open-source document parsing models, yet thefield still benchmarks almost exclusively on OmniDocBench, a 1,355-pagemanually annotated dataset whose top scores have saturated above 90%. Athree-stage audit pipeline we run on OmniDocBench screens its 21,353evaluator-scored blocks and confirms 2,580 errors (12.08%); combined with overa year of public availability, both annotation quality and contamination riskcall its rankings into question. To address these issues, we presentPureDocBench, a programmatically generated, source-traceable benchmark thatrenders document images from HTML/CSS and produces verifiable annotations fromthe same source, covering 10 domains, 66 subcategories, and 1,475 pages, eachin three versions: clean, digitally degraded, and real-degraded (4,425 imagestotal). Evaluating 40 models spanning pipeline specialists, end-to-endspecialists, and general-purpose VLMs, we find: (i) document parsing is farfrom solved: the best model scores only ~74 out of 100, with a 44.6-point gapbetween the strongest and weakest models; (ii) specialist parsers with <=4Bparameters rival or surpass general VLMs that are 5-100x larger, yet formularecognition remains a shared bottleneck where no model exceeds 67% whenaveraging the formula metric across all three tracks; (iii) general VLMs loseonly 0.99/8.52 Overall points under digital/real degradation versus 4.90/14.21for pipeline specialists, producing ranking reversals that make clean-onlyevaluation misleading for deployment. All data, code, and artifacts arepublicly released.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Zijia An et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires a model to continually learn new classes without forgetting old ones. A common and efficient solution freezes a pre-trained model and employs lightweight adapters, whose parameters are often forced to be orthogonal to prevent inter-task interference. However, we argue that this parameter-constraining method is detrimental to plasticity. To this end, we propose Semantic-Guided Dynamic Sparsification (SGDS), a novel method that proactively guides the activation space by governing the orientation and rank of its subspaces through targeted sparsification. Specifically, SGDS promotes knowledge transfer by encouraging similar classes to share a compact activation subspace, while simultaneously preventing interference by assigning non-overlapping activation subspaces to dissimilar classes. By sculpting class-specific sparse subspaces in the activation space, SGDS effectively mitigates interference without imposing rigid constraints on the parameter space. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SGDS.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Zijia An et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to continuously acquire new classes without forgetting previously learned ones. A dominant paradigm involves freezing a pre-trained model and training lightweight, task-specific adapters. However, maintaining task-specific parameters hinders knowledge transfer and incurs high retrieval costs, while naive parameter fusion often leads to destructive interference and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamical Adapter Fusion (DAF) to construct a single robust global adapter. Grounded in the PAC-Bayes theorem, we derive a fusion mechanism that explicitly integrates three components: the optimized task-specific adapter parameters, the previous global adapter parameters, and the initialization parameters. We utilize the Taylor expansion of the loss function to derive the optimal fusion coefficients, dynamically achieving the best balance between stability and plasticity. Furthermore, we propose a Robust Initialization strategy to effectively capture global knowledge patterns. Experiments on multiple CIL benchmarks demonstrate that DAF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Hangda Liu et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to learn new classes without forgetting old ones. A common method is to freeze a pre-trained model and train a new, lightweight adapter for each task. While this prevents forgetting, it treats the learned knowledge as a simple, unstructured collection and fails to use the relationships between tasks. To this end, we propose the Semantic-guided Adaptive Expert Forest (SAEF), a new method that organizes adapters into a structured hierarchy for better knowledge sharing. SAEF first groups tasks into conceptual clusters based on their semantic relationships. Then, within each cluster, it builds a balanced expert tree by creating new adapters from merging the adapters of similar tasks. At inference time, SAEF finds and activates a set of relevant experts from the forest for any given input. The final prediction is made by combining the outputs of these activated experts, weighted by how confident each expert is. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that SAEF achieves SOTA performance.

Zijia An, Boyu Diao, Ruiqi Liu et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating trainable prompts into pretrained models enables effective incremental learning. However, the application of prompts in incremental object detection (IOD) remains underexplored. Existing prompts pool based approaches assume disjoint class sets across incremental tasks, which are unsuitable for IOD as they overlook the inherent co-occurrence phenomenon in detection images. In co-occurring scenarios, unlabeled objects from previous tasks may appear in current task images, leading to confusion in prompts pool. In this paper, we hold that prompt structures should exhibit adaptive consolidation properties across tasks, with constrained updates to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Motivated by this, we introduce Parameterized Prompts for Incremental Object Detection (P$^2$IOD). Leveraging neural networks global evolution properties, P$^2$IOD employs networks as the parameterized prompts to adaptively consolidate knowledge across tasks. To constrain prompts structure updates, P$^2$IOD further engages a parameterized prompts fusion strategy. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC2007 and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that P$^2$IOD's effectiveness in IOD and achieves the state-of-the-art performance among existing baselines.

Ruiqi Liu, Xiaolei Lv, Gengsheng Li et al.

On-policy knowledge distillation has proven effective for language models, yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. We observe that standard on-policy distillation can improve a student's output quality while failing to strengthen its reliance on visual input: on vision-critical tokens, the student's predictions remain largely unchanged whether or not fine-grained visual detail is present, even though the teacher's predictions depend heavily on it.To make this difference observable, we introduce visual advantage (VA), the token-level log-probability difference when the teacher scores a student-generated rollout with versus without access to fine-grained visual detail. VA is concentrated in a small minority of tokens, and these high-VA tokens are the ones that actually carry the visual supervision signal. This motivates a distillation objective that treats them differently from language scaffolding, so their contribution is not diluted by the abundant surrounding language tokens.We propose Visual-Advantage On-Policy Distillation (VA-OPD), which uses VA at two granularities: rollout-level reweighting by trajectory-averaged VA, and token-level KL averaged within high-VA and low-VA groups separately. We train on two math datasets (Geometry3K and ViRL39K) and evaluate on eight benchmarks covering both mathematical reasoning and visual understanding, across three teacher sizes (4B, 8B, and 32B) on the Qwen3-VL family. VA-OPD improves over standard on-policy distillation on every benchmark, with the gain growing monotonically along both the teacher-size and data-scale axes, suggesting that these factors compound consistently.

Ruiqi Liu, Yi Han, Zhengbo Zhang et al.

The rapid progress of generative models has intensified the need for reliable and robust detection under real-world conditions. However, existing detectors often overfit to generator-specific artifacts and remain highly sensitive to real-world degradations. As generative architectures evolve and images undergo multi-round cross-platform sharing and post-processing (chain degradations), these artifact cues become obsolete and harder to detect. To address this, we propose Real-centric Envelope Modeling (REM), a new paradigm that shifts detection from learning generator artifacts to modeling the robust distribution of real images. REM introduces feature-level perturbations in self-reconstruction to generate near-real samples, and employs an envelope estimator with cross-domain consistency to learn a boundary enclosing the real image manifold. We further build RealChain, a comprehensive benchmark covering both open-source and commercial generators with simulated real-world degradation. Across eight benchmark evaluations, REM achieves an average improvement of 7.5% over state-of-the-art methods, and notably maintains exceptional generalization on the severely degraded RealChain benchmark, establishing a solid foundation for synthetic image detection under real-world conditions. The code and the RealChain benchmark will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

Saunak Kumar Panda, Tong Li, Ruiqi Liu et al.

Reinforcement learning algorithms have been widely used for decision-making tasks in various domains. However, the performance of these algorithms can be impacted by high variance and instability, particularly in environments with noise or sparse rewards. In this paper, we propose a framework to perform statistical online inference for a sample-averaged Q-learning approach. We adapt the functional central limit theorem (FCLT) for the modified algorithm under some general conditions and then construct confidence intervals for the Q-values via random scaling. We conduct experiments to perform inference on both the modified approach and its traditional counterpart, Q-learning using random scaling and report their coverage rates and confidence interval widths on two problems: a grid world problem as a simple toy example and a dynamic resource-matching problem as a real-world example for comparison between the two solution approaches.

Jialiang Shen, Jiyang Zheng, Yunqi Xue et al.

With growing concerns over image authenticity and digital safety, the field of AI-generated image (AIGI) detection has progressed rapidly. Yet, most AIGI detectors still struggle under real-world degradations, particularly motion blur, which frequently occurs in handheld photography, fast motion, and compressed video. Such blur distorts fine textures and suppresses high-frequency artifacts, causing severe performance drops in real-world settings. We address this limitation with a blur-robust AIGI detection framework based on teacher-student knowledge distillation. A high-capacity teacher (DINOv3), trained on clean (i.e., sharp) images, provides stable and semantically rich representations that serve as a reference for learning. By freezing the teacher to maintain its generalization ability, we distill its feature and logit responses from sharp images to a student trained on blurred counterparts, enabling the student to produce consistent representations under motion degradation. Extensive experiments benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under both motion-blurred and clean conditions, demonstrating improved generalization and real-world applicability. Source codes will be released at: https://github.com/JiaLiangShen/Dino-Detect-for-blur-robust-AIGC-Detection.

Zijia An, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang et al.

Existing Incremental Object Detection (IOD) methods partially alleviate catastrophic forgetting when incrementally detecting new objects in real-world scenarios. However, many of these methods rely on the assumption that unlabeled old-class objects may co-occur with labeled new-class objects in the incremental data. When unlabeled old-class objects are absent, the performance of existing methods tends to degrade. The absence can be mitigated by generating old-class samples, but it incurs high costs. This paper argues that previous generation-based IOD suffers from redundancy, both in the use of generative models, which require additional training and storage, and in the overproduction of generated samples, many of which do not contribute significantly to performance improvements. To eliminate the redundancy, we propose Inversed Objects Replay (IOR). Specifically, we generate old-class samples by inversing the original detectors, thus eliminating the necessity of training and storing additional generative models. We propose augmented replay to reuse the objects in generated samples, reducing redundant generations. Moreover, we propose high-value knowledge distillation focusing on the positions of old-class objects overwhelmed by the background, which transfers the knowledge to the incremental detector. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO 2017 demonstrate that our method can efficiently improve detection performance in IOD scenarios with the absence of old-class objects. The code is available at https://github.com/JiaJia075/IOR.

Saunak Kumar Panda, Yisha Xiang, Ruiqi Liu

Matching plays an important role in the logical allocation of resources across a wide range of industries. The benefits of matching have been increasingly recognized in manufacturing industries. In particular, capacity sharing has received much attention recently. In this paper, we consider the problem of dynamically matching demand-capacity types of manufacturing resources. We formulate the multi-period, many-to-many manufacturing resource-matching problem as a sequential decision process. The formulated manufacturing resource-matching problem involves large state and action spaces, and it is not practical to accurately model the joint distribution of various types of demands. To address the curse of dimensionality and the difficulty of explicitly modeling the transition dynamics, we use a model-free deep reinforcement learning approach to find optimal matching policies. Moreover, to tackle the issue of infeasible actions and slow convergence due to initial biased estimates caused by the maximum operator in Q-learning, we introduce two penalties to the traditional Q-learning algorithm: a domain knowledge-based penalty based on a prior policy and an infeasibility penalty that conforms to the demand-supply constraints. We establish theoretical results on the convergence of our domain knowledge-informed Q-learning providing performance guarantee for small-size problems. For large-size problems, we further inject our modified approach into the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, which we refer to as domain knowledge-informed DDPG (DKDDPG). In our computational study, including small- and large-scale experiments, DKDDPG consistently outperformed traditional DDPG and other RL algorithms, yielding higher rewards and demonstrating greater efficiency in time and episodes.

Luyao Niu, Zhicheng Deng, Boyang Li et al.

The "15-minute city" envisions neighborhoods where residents can meet daily needs via a short walk or bike ride. Realizing this vision requires not only physical proximity but also efficient and reliable access to information about nearby places, services, and events. Existing location-based systems, however, focus mainly on city-level tasks and neglect the spatial, temporal, and cognitive factors that shape localized decision-making. We conceptualize this gap as the Local Life Information Accessibility (LLIA) problem and introduce AskNearby, an AI-driven community application that unifies retrieval and recommendation within the 15-minute life circle. AskNearby integrates (i) a three-layer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline that synergizes graph-based, semantic-vector, and geographic retrieval with (ii) a cognitive-map model that encodes each user's neighborhood familiarity and preferences. Experiments on real-world community datasets demonstrate that AskNearby significantly outperforms LLM-based and map-based baselines in retrieval accuracy and recommendation quality, achieving robust performance in spatiotemporal grounding and cognitive-aware ranking. Real-world deployments further validate its effectiveness. By addressing the LLIA challenge, AskNearby empowers residents to more effectively discover local resources, plan daily activities, and engage in community life.

Ye Wang, Ruiqi Liu, Jiang Lin et al.

In this paper, we introduce OmniStyle-1M, a large-scale paired style transfer dataset comprising over one million content-style-stylized image triplets across 1,000 diverse style categories, each enhanced with textual descriptions and instruction prompts. We show that OmniStyle-1M can not only enable efficient and scalable of style transfer models through supervised training but also facilitate precise control over target stylization. Especially, to ensure the quality of the dataset, we introduce OmniFilter, a comprehensive style transfer quality assessment framework, which filters high-quality triplets based on content preservation, style consistency, and aesthetic appeal. Building upon this foundation, we propose OmniStyle, a framework based on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture designed for high-quality and efficient style transfer. This framework supports both instruction-guided and image-guided style transfer, generating high resolution outputs with exceptional detail. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate OmniStyle's superior performance compared to existing approaches, highlighting its efficiency and versatility. OmniStyle-1M and its accompanying methodologies provide a significant contribution to advancing high-quality style transfer, offering a valuable resource for the research community.

Ruiqi Liu, Peng Zheng, Ye Wang et al.

Existing 3D-aware portrait synthesis methods can generate impressive high-quality images while preserving strong 3D consistency. However, most of them cannot support the fine-grained part-level control over synthesized images. Conversely, some GAN-based 2D portrait synthesis methods can achieve clear disentanglement of facial regions, but they cannot preserve view consistency due to a lack of 3D modeling abilities. To address these issues, we propose 3D-SSGAN, a novel framework for 3D-aware compositional portrait image synthesis. First, a simple yet effective depth-guided 2D-to-3D lifting module maps the generated 2D part features and semantics to 3D. Then, a volume renderer with a novel 3D-aware semantic mask renderer is utilized to produce the composed face features and corresponding masks. The whole framework is trained end-to-end by discriminating between real and synthesized 2D images and their semantic masks. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of 3D-SSGAN in controllable part-level synthesis while preserving 3D view consistency.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang et al.

Continual learning (CL) aims to learn new tasks while retaining past knowledge, addressing the challenge of forgetting during task adaptation. Rehearsal-based methods, which replay previous samples, effectively mitigate forgetting. However, research on enhancing the efficiency of these methods, especially in resource-constrained environments, remains limited, hindering their application in real-world systems with dynamic data streams. The human perceptual system processes visual scenes through complementary frequency channels: low-frequency signals capture holistic cues, while high-frequency components convey structural details vital for fine-grained discrimination. Inspired by this, we propose the Frequency Decomposition and Integration Network (FDINet), a novel framework that decomposes and integrates information across frequencies. FDINet designs two lightweight networks to independently process low- and high-frequency components of images. When integrated with rehearsal-based methods, this frequency-aware design effectively enhances cross-task generalization through low-frequency information, preserves class-specific details using high-frequency information, and facilitates efficient training due to its lightweight architecture. Experiments demonstrate that FDINet reduces backbone parameters by 78%, improves accuracy by up to 7.49% over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and decreases peak memory usage by up to 80%. Additionally, on edge devices, FDINet accelerates training by up to 5$\times$.

Saunak Kumar Panda, Ruiqi Liu, Yisha Xiang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key approach for training agents in complex and uncertain environments. Incorporating statistical inference in RL algorithms is essential for understanding and managing uncertainty in model performance. This paper introduces a generalized framework for time-varying batch-averaged Q-learning, termed sample-averaged Q-learning (SA-QL), which extends traditional single-sample Q-learning by aggregating samples of rewards and next states to better account for data variability and uncertainty. We leverage the functional central limit theorem (FCLT) to establish a novel framework that provides insights into the asymptotic normality of the sample-averaged algorithm under mild conditions. Additionally, we develop a random scaling method for interval estimation, enabling the construction of confidence intervals without requiring extra hyperparameters. Extensive numerical experiments across classic stochastic OpenAI Gym environments, including windy gridworld and slippery frozenlake, demonstrate how different batch scheduling strategies affect learning efficiency, coverage rates, and confidence interval widths. This work establishes a unified theoretical foundation for sample-averaged Q-learning, providing insights into effective batch scheduling and statistical inference for RL algorithms.

Chujie Wang, Zhiyuan Luo, Ruiqi Liu et al.

The current remote sensing image analysis task is increasingly evolving from traditional object recognition to complex intelligence reasoning, which places higher requirements on the model's reasoning ability and the flexibility of tool invocation. To this end, we propose a new multimodal agent framework, Vision-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Framework (VICoT), which implements explicit multi-round reasoning by dynamically incorporating visual tools into the chain of thought. Through a stack-based reasoning structure and a modular MCP-compatible tool suite, VICoT enables LLMs to efficiently perform multi-round, interleaved vision-language reasoning tasks with strong generalization and flexibility.We also propose the Reasoning Stack distillation method to migrate complex Agent behaviors to small, lightweight models, which ensures the reasoning capability while significantly reducing complexity. Experiments on multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that VICoT significantly outperforms existing SOTA frameworks in reasoning transparency, execution efficiency, and generation quality.

Songyuan Li, Teng Wang, Jinrong Tang et al.

Achieving fully analog neural computation requires hardware that can natively implement both linear and nonlinear operations with high efficiency. While analogue matrix-vector multiplication has advanced via compute-in-memory architectures, nonlinear activation functions remain a bottleneck, often requiring digital or hybrid solutions. Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold framework, we propose KANalogue, a fully analogue implementation of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) using negative differential resistance devices as physical realizations of learnable univariate basis functions. By leveraging the intrinsic negative differential resistance characteristics of tunnel diodes fabricated from NbSi2N4/HfSi2N4 heterostructures, we construct coordinate-wise nonlinearities with distinct curvature and support profiles. We extract I-V data from fabricated armchair and zigzag devices, fit high-order polynomials to emulate diode behavior in software, and train KANs on vision benchmarks using these learned basis functions. Our results demonstrate that KANalogue can approximate complex functions with minimal parameters while maintaining classification accuracy competitive with digital baselines. This work bridges device-level physics and function approximation theory, charting a path toward scalable, energy-efficient analogue machine learning systems.

Runjie Shao, Boyu Diao, Zijia An et al.

To meet the demands of applications like robotics and autonomous driving that require real-time responses to dynamic environments, efficient continual learning methods suitable for edge devices have attracted increasing attention. In this transition, using frozen pretrained models with prompts has become a mainstream strategy to combat catastrophic forgetting. However, this approach introduces a new critical bottleneck: plasticity loss, where the model's ability to learn new knowledge diminishes due to the frozen backbone and the limited capacity of prompt parameters. We argue that the reduction in plasticity stems from a lack of update vitality in underutilized parameters during the training process. To this end, we propose the Continual Backpropagation Prompt Network (CBPNet), an effective and parameter efficient framework designed to restore the model's learning vitality. We innovatively integrate an Efficient CBP Block that counteracts plasticity decay by adaptively reinitializing these underutilized parameters. Experimental results on edge devices demonstrate CBPNet's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks. On Split CIFAR-100, it improves average accuracy by over 1% against a strong baseline, and on the more challenging Split ImageNet-R, it achieves a state of the art accuracy of 69.41%. This is accomplished by training additional parameters that constitute less than 0.2% of the backbone's size, validating our approach.

Ruiqi Liu, Xingyu Liu, Xiaohao Xu et al.

Group Re-identification (G-ReID) faces greater complexity than individual Re-identification (ReID) due to challenges like mutual occlusion, dynamic member interactions, and evolving group structures. Prior graph-based approaches have aimed to capture these dynamics by modeling the group as a single topological structure. However, these methods struggle to generalize across diverse group compositions, as they fail to fully represent the multifaceted relationships within the group. In this study, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi-Graphs Learning (HMGL) framework to address these challenges. Our approach models the group as a collection of multi-relational graphs, leveraging both explicit features (such as occlusion, appearance, and foreground information) and implicit dependencies between members. This hierarchical representation, encoded via a Multi-Graphs Neural Network (MGNN), allows us to resolve ambiguities in member relationships, particularly in complex, densely populated scenes. To further enhance matching accuracy, we propose a Multi-Scale Matching (MSM) algorithm, which mitigates issues of member information ambiguity and sensitivity to hard samples, improving robustness in challenging scenarios. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two standard benchmarks, CSG and RoadGroup, with Rank-1/mAP scores of 95.3%/94.4% and 93.9%/95.4%, respectively. These results mark notable improvements of 1.7% and 2.5% in Rank-1 accuracy over existing approaches.

Kexuan Li, Fangfang Wang, Ruiqi Liu et al.

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to model complex dynamics that arises in biology, chemistry, engineering, finance, physics, etc. Calibration of a complicated ODE system using noisy data is generally very difficult. In this work, we propose a two-stage nonparametric approach to address this problem. We first extract the de-noised data and their higher order derivatives using boundary kernel method, and then feed them into a sparsely connected deep neural network with ReLU activation function. Our method is able to recover the ODE system without being subject to the curse of dimensionality and complicated ODE structure. When the ODE possesses a general modular structure, with each modular component involving only a few input variables, and the network architecture is properly chosen, our method is proven to be consistent. Theoretical properties are corroborated by an extensive simulation study that demonstrates the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, we use our method to simultaneously characterize the growth rate of Covid-19 infection cases from 50 states of the USA.

Ruiqi Liu, Mingao Yuan, Zuofeng Shang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and projected stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) are scalable algorithms to compute model parameters in unconstrained and constrained optimization problems. In comparison with SGD, PSGD forces its iterative values into the constrained parameter space via projection. From a statistical point of view, this paper studies the limiting distribution of PSGD-based estimate when the true parameters satisfy some linear-equality constraints. Our theoretical findings reveal the role of projection played in the uncertainty of the PSGD-based estimate. As a byproduct, we propose an online hypothesis testing procedure to test the linear-equality constraints. Simulation studies on synthetic data and an application to a real-world dataset confirm our theory.

Ruiqi Liu, Ganggang Xu, Zuofeng Shang

When data is of an extraordinarily large size or physically stored in different locations, the distributed nearest neighbor (NN) classifier is an attractive tool for classification. We propose a novel distributed adaptive NN classifier for which the number of nearest neighbors is a tuning parameter stochastically chosen by a data-driven criterion. An early stopping rule is proposed when searching for the optimal tuning parameter, which not only speeds up the computation but also improves the finite sample performance of the proposed Algorithm. Convergence rate of excess risk of the distributed adaptive NN classifier is investigated under various sub-sample size compositions. In particular, we show that when the sub-sample sizes are sufficiently large, the proposed classifier achieves the nearly optimal convergence rate. Effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through simulation studies as well as an empirical application to a real-world dataset.

Lantian Li, Ruiqi Liu, Jiawen Kang et al.

Research on speaker recognition is extending to address the vulnerability in the wild conditions, among which genre mismatch is perhaps the most challenging, for instance, enrollment with reading speech while testing with conversational or singing audio. This mismatch leads to complex and composite inter-session variations, both intrinsic (i.e., speaking style, physiological status) and extrinsic (i.e., recording device, background noise). Unfortunately, the few existing multi-genre corpora are not only limited in size but are also recorded under controlled conditions, which cannot support conclusive research on the multi-genre problem. In this work, we firstly publish CN-Celeb, a large-scale multi-genre corpus that includes in-the-wild speech utterances of 3,000 speakers in 11 different genres. Secondly, using this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive study on the multi-genre phenomenon, in particular the impact of the multi-genre challenge on speaker recognition and the performance gain when the new dataset is used to conduct multi-genre training.

Ruiqi Liu, Zuofeng Shang, Guang Cheng

The endogeneity issue is fundamentally important as many empirical applications may suffer from the omission of explanatory variables, measurement error, or simultaneous causality. Recently, \cite{hllt17} propose a "Deep Instrumental Variable (IV)" framework based on deep neural networks to address endogeneity, demonstrating superior performances than existing approaches. The aim of this paper is to theoretically understand the empirical success of the Deep IV. Specifically, we consider a two-stage estimator using deep neural networks in the linear instrumental variables model. By imposing a latent structural assumption on the reduced form equation between endogenous variables and instrumental variables, the first-stage estimator can automatically capture this latent structure and converge to the optimal instruments at the minimax optimal rate, which is free of the dimension of instrumental variables and thus mitigates the curse of dimensionality. Additionally, in comparison with classical methods, due to the faster convergence rate of the first-stage estimator, the second-stage estimator has {a smaller (second order) estimation error} and requires a weaker condition on the smoothness of the optimal instruments. Given that the depth and width of the employed deep neural network are well chosen, we further show that the second-stage estimator achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound. Simulation studies on synthetic data and application to automobile market data confirm our theory.

Ruiqi Liu, Ben Boukai, Zuofeng Shang

Deep neural network is a state-of-art method in modern science and technology. Much statistical literature have been devoted to understanding its performance in nonparametric estimation, whereas the results are suboptimal due to a redundant logarithmic sacrifice. In this paper, we show that such log-factors are not necessary. We derive upper bounds for the $L^2$ minimax risk in nonparametric estimation. Sufficient conditions on network architectures are provided such that the upper bounds become optimal (without log-sacrifice). Our proof relies on an explicitly constructed network estimator based on tensor product B-splines. We also derive asymptotic distributions for the constructed network and a relating hypothesis testing procedure. The testing procedure is further proven as minimax optimal under suitable network architectures.

Kexuan Li, Ruiqi Liu, Ganggang Xu et al.

Statistical inference based on lossy or incomplete samples is often needed in research areas such as signal/image processing, medical image storage, remote sensing, signal transmission. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric testing procedure based on samples quantized to $B$ bits through a computationally efficient algorithm. Under mild technical conditions, we establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed test statistic and investigate how the testing power changes as $B$ increases. In particular, we show that if $B$ exceeds a certain threshold, the proposed nonparametric testing procedure achieves the classical minimax rate of testing (Shang and Cheng, 2015) for spline models. We further extend our theoretical investigations to a nonparametric linearity test and an adaptive nonparametric test, expanding the applicability of the proposed methods. Extensive simulation studies {together with a real-data analysis} are used to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed tests.