Chong Li

Amazon AGI, Aaron Langford, Aayush Shah et al. · amazon-science

We present Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance. Amazon Nova Pro is a highly-capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks. Amazon Nova Lite is a low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing images, video, documents and text. Amazon Nova Micro is a text-only model that delivers our lowest-latency responses at very low cost. Amazon Nova Canvas is an image generation model that creates professional grade images with rich customization controls. Amazon Nova Reel is a video generation model offering high-quality outputs, customization, and motion control. Our models were built responsibly and with a commitment to customer trust, security, and reliability. We report benchmarking results for core capabilities, agentic performance, long context, functional adaptation, runtime performance, and human evaluation.

Minghao Chen, Fangyun Wei, Chong Li et al.

Prior works on action representation learning mainly focus on designing various architectures to extract the global representations for short video clips. In contrast, many practical applications such as video alignment have strong demand for learning dense representations for long videos. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive action representation learning (CARL) framework to learn frame-wise action representations, especially for long videos, in a self-supervised manner. Concretely, we introduce a simple yet efficient video encoder that considers spatio-temporal context to extract frame-wise representations. Inspired by the recent progress of self-supervised learning, we present a novel sequence contrastive loss (SCL) applied on two correlated views obtained through a series of spatio-temporal data augmentations. SCL optimizes the embedding space by minimizing the KL-divergence between the sequence similarity of two augmented views and a prior Gaussian distribution of timestamp distance. Experiments on FineGym, PennAction and Pouring datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art by a large margin for downstream fine-grained action classification. Surprisingly, although without training on paired videos, our approach also shows outstanding performance on video alignment and fine-grained frame retrieval tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/minghchen/CARL_code.

Yizhong Zhang, Zhiqi Li, Sicheng Xu et al.

Recent research advance has significantly improved the visual realism of immersive 3D video communication. In this work we present a method to further enhance this immersive experience by adding the hand touch capability ("remote hand clapping"). In our system, each meeting participant sits in front of a large screen with haptic feedback. The local participant can reach his hand out to the screen and perform hand clapping with the remote participant as if the two participants were only separated by a virtual glass. A key challenge in emulating the remote hand touch is the realistic rendering of the participant's hand and arm as the hand touches the screen. When the hand is very close to the screen, the RGBD data required for realistic rendering is no longer available. To tackle this challenge, we present a dual representation of the user's hand. Our dual representation not only preserves the high-quality rendering usually found in recent image-based rendering systems but also allows the hand to reach the screen. This is possible because the dual representation includes both an image-based model and a 3D geometry-based model, with the latter driven by a hand skeleton tracked by a side view camera. In addition, the dual representation provides a distance-based fusion of the image-based and 3D geometry-based models as the hand moves closer to the screen. The result is that the image-based and 3D geometry-based models mutually enhance each other, leading to realistic and seamless rendering. Our experiments demonstrate that our method provides consistent hand contact experience between remote users and improves the immersive experience of 3D video communication.

Chong Li, Shaonan Wang, Jiajun Zhang et al.

Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual in-context learning capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages and learn isolated distributions of multilingual sentence representations, which may hinder knowledge transfer across languages. To bridge this gap, we propose a simple yet effective cross-lingual alignment framework exploiting pairs of translation sentences. It aligns the internal sentence representations across different languages via multilingual contrastive learning and aligns outputs by following cross-lingual instructions in the target language. Experimental results show that even with less than 0.1 {\textperthousand} of pre-training tokens, our alignment framework significantly boosts the cross-lingual abilities of generative language models and mitigates the performance gap. Further analyses reveal that it results in a better internal multilingual representation distribution of multilingual models.

Chong Li, Zhun Fan, Ying Chen et al.

Automatic pavement crack detection is an important task to ensure the functional performances of pavements during their service life. Inspired by deep learning (DL), the encoder-decoder framework is a powerful tool for crack detection. However, these models are usually open-loop (OL) systems that tend to treat thin cracks as the background. Meanwhile, these models can not automatically correct errors in the prediction, nor can it adapt to the changes of the environment to automatically extract and detect thin cracks. To tackle this problem, we embed closed-loop feedback (CLF) into the neural network so that the model could learn to correct errors on its own, based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). The resulting model is called CrackCLF and includes the front and back ends, i.e. segmentation and adversarial network. The front end with U-shape framework is employed to generate crack maps, and the back end with a multi-scale loss function is used to correct higher-order inconsistencies between labels and crack maps (generated by the front end) to address open-loop system issues. Empirical results show that the proposed CrackCLF outperforms others methods on three public datasets. Moreover, the proposed CLF can be defined as a plug and play module, which can be embedded into different neural network models to improve their performances.

Yangyu Huang, Xi Chen, Jongyoo Kim et al.

Recent years have witnessed significant growth of face alignment. Though dense facial landmark is highly demanded in various scenarios, e.g., cosmetic medicine and facial beautification, most works only consider sparse face alignment. To address this problem, we present a framework that can enrich landmark density by existing sparse landmark datasets, e.g., 300W with 68 points and WFLW with 98 points. Firstly, we observe that the local patches along each semantic contour are highly similar in appearance. Then, we propose a weakly-supervised idea of learning the refinement ability on original sparse landmarks and adapting this ability to enriched dense landmarks. Meanwhile, several operators are devised and organized together to implement the idea. Finally, the trained model is applied as a plug-and-play module to the existing face alignment networks. To evaluate our method, we manually label the dense landmarks on 300W testset. Our method yields state-of-the-art accuracy not only in newly-constructed dense 300W testset but also in the original sparse 300W and WFLW testsets without additional cost.

Jubin Jose, Chong Li, Xinzhou Wu et al.

The focus of this paper is on the rate and power control algorithms in Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) for vehicular networks. We first propose a utility maximization framework by leveraging the well-developed network congestion control, and formulate two subproblems, one on rate control with fixed transmit powers and the other on power control with fixed rates. Distributed rate control and power control algorithms are developed to solve these two subproblems, respectively, and are proved to be asymptotically optimal. Joint rate and power control can be done by using the two algorithms in an alternating fashion. The performance enhancement of our algorithms compared with a recent rate control algorithm, called EMBARC, is evaluated by using the network simulator ns2.

Chong Li, Shaonan Wang, Yunhao Zhang et al.

Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module: multi-head attention. Inspired by functional specialization in the human brain, which helps to efficiently handle multiple tasks, this work attempts to figure out whether the multi-head attention module will evolve similar function separation under multi-tasking training. If it is, can this mechanism further improve the model performance? To investigate these questions, we introduce an interpreting method to quantify the degree of functional specialization in multi-head attention. We further propose a simple multi-task training method to increase functional specialization and mitigate negative information transfer in multi-task learning. Experimental results on seven pre-trained transformer models have demonstrated that multi-head attention does evolve functional specialization phenomenon after multi-task training which is affected by the similarity of tasks. Moreover, the multi-task training strategy based on functional specialization boosts performance in both multi-task learning and transfer learning without adding any parameters.

Jingyang Huo, Yikai Wang, Xuelin Qian et al.

Recent fMRI-to-image approaches mainly focused on associating fMRI signals with specific conditions of pre-trained diffusion models. These approaches, while producing high-quality images, capture only a limited aspect of the complex information in fMRI signals and offer little detailed control over image creation. In contrast, this paper proposes to directly modulate the generation process of diffusion models using fMRI signals. Our approach, NeuroPictor, divides the fMRI-to-image process into three steps: i) fMRI calibrated-encoding, to tackle multi-individual pre-training for a shared latent space to minimize individual difference and enable the subsequent multi-subject training; ii) fMRI-to-image multi-subject pre-training, perceptually learning to guide diffusion model with high- and low-level conditions across different individuals; iii) fMRI-to-image single-subject refining, similar with step ii but focus on adapting to particular individual. NeuroPictor extracts high-level semantic features from fMRI signals that characterizing the visual stimulus and incrementally fine-tunes the diffusion model with a low-level manipulation network to provide precise structural instructions. By training with about 67,000 fMRI-image pairs from various individuals, our model enjoys superior fMRI-to-image decoding capacity, particularly in the within-subject setting, as evidenced in benchmark datasets. Our code and model are available at https://jingyanghuo.github.io/neuropictor/.

Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen et al.

Enlarging the context window of large language models (LLMs) has become a crucial research area, particularly for applications involving extremely long texts. In this work, we propose a novel training-free framework for processing long texts, utilizing a divide-and-conquer strategy to achieve comprehensive document understanding. The proposed LLM$\times$MapReduce framework splits the entire document into several chunks for LLMs to read and then aggregates the intermediate answers to produce the final output. The main challenge for divide-and-conquer long text processing frameworks lies in the risk of losing essential long-range information when splitting the document, which can lead the model to produce incomplete or incorrect answers based on the segmented texts. Disrupted long-range information can be classified into two categories: inter-chunk dependency and inter-chunk conflict. We design a structured information protocol to better cope with inter-chunk dependency and an in-context confidence calibration mechanism to resolve inter-chunk conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that LLM$\times$MapReduce can outperform representative open-source and commercial long-context LLMs, and is applicable to several different models.

Zhanglin Wu, Tengfei Song, Ning Xie et al.

The rapid advancement of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has significantly propelled applications in document understanding, particularly in optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual translation. However, current evaluations of LVLMs, like the widely used OCRBench, mainly focus on verifying the correctness of their short-text responses and long-text responses with simple layout, while the evaluation of their ability to understand long texts with complex layout design is highly significant but largely overlooked. In this paper, we propose Menu OCR and Translation Benchmark (MOTBench), a specialized evaluation framework emphasizing the pivotal role of menu translation in cross-cultural communication. MOTBench requires LVLMs to accurately recognize and translate each dish, along with its price and unit items on a menu, providing a comprehensive assessment of their visual understanding and language processing capabilities. Our benchmark is comprised of a collection of Chinese and English menus, characterized by intricate layouts, a variety of fonts, and culturally specific elements across different languages, along with precise human annotations. Experiments show that our automatic evaluation results are highly consistent with professional human evaluation. We evaluate a range of publicly available state-of-the-art LVLMs, and through analyzing their output to identify the strengths and weaknesses in their performance, offering valuable insights to guide future advancements in LVLM development. MOTBench is available at https://github.com/gitwzl/MOTBench.

Chong Li, Yingzhuo Deng, Wen Yang et al.

Tokenization is a foundational step in the text process of Large Language Models (LLMs). Texts must be first tokenized into token IDs, which are then input to LLMs. Inefficient tokenization results in long token-ID sequences and will slow down the training and inference of LLMs. The fine-grained knowledge transfer between LLMs, like token-level distillation, is also impeded by the mismatch in vocabulary. To bridge this gap, we introduce a method named TokAlign++ to improve vocabulary adaptation performance by learning better token alignment lexicon. The source and target vocabularies are taken as two different languages, and the bilingual token alignment lexicon is learned from monolingual token representations. Model parameters are rearranged following this bilingual lexicon for new vocabulary, and progressively fine-tuned for adaptation. Experimental results on 15 languages show that our method boosts the multilingual text compression rates and preserves most of the multilingual ability of vanilla models. It costs as few as 1k steps to restore the performance of the vanilla model. After unifying vocabularies between vanilla models, token-level distillation remarkably improves the base model with only 235M tokens.

Chong Li, Chenglin Zhu, Tao Zhang et al.

Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities in various visual tasks. However, their abilities in K12 scenarios are still systematically underexplored. Previous studies suffer from various limitations including narrow subject coverage, insufficient data scale, lack of diversity in question types, and naive answer-centric evaluation method, resulting in insufficient exploration of model capabilities. To address these gaps, we propose K12Vista, the most comprehensive multimodal benchmark for Chinese K12 subject knowledge understanding and reasoning to date, featuring 33,000 questions across five core subjects from primary to high school and three question types. Moreover, beyond the final outcome, we are also concerned with the correctness of MLLMs' reasoning processes. For this purpose, we meticulously compiles errors from MLLMs' reasoning processes and leverage an automated data pipeline to construct K12-PEM-800K, the largest process evaluation dataset offering detailed step-by-step judgement annotations for MLLMs' reasoning. Subsequently, we developed K12-PEM, an advanced process evaluation model that integrates an overall assessment of both the reasoning process and answer correctness. Moreover, we also introduce K12-PEBench, the first high-quality, human-annotated benchmark specifically designed for evaluating abilities of reasoning process evaluation.Extensive experiments reveal that current MLLMs exhibit significant flaws when reasoning within K12Vista, providing critical insights for the development of more capable MLLMs.We open our resources at https://github.com/lichongod/K12Vista.

Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo et al.

We introduce VASA, a framework for generating lifelike talking faces with appealing visual affective skills (VAS) given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only generating lip movements that are exquisitely synchronized with the audio, but also producing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness. The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512x512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.

Chong Li, Xiangyang Xue, Jianfeng Feng et al.

Episodic memory enables humans to recall past experiences by associating semantic elements such as objects, locations, and time into coherent event representations. While large pretrained models have shown remarkable progress in modeling semantic memory, the mechanisms for forming associative structures that support episodic memory remain underexplored. Inspired by hippocampal CA3 dynamics and its role in associative memory, we propose the Latent Structured Hopfield Network (LSHN), a biologically inspired framework that integrates continuous Hopfield attractor dynamics into an autoencoder architecture. LSHN mimics the cortical-hippocampal pathway: a semantic encoder extracts compact latent representations, a latent Hopfield network performs associative refinement through attractor convergence, and a decoder reconstructs perceptual input. Unlike traditional Hopfield networks, our model is trained end-to-end with gradient descent, achieving scalable and robust memory retrieval. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a simulated episodic memory task demonstrate superior performance in recalling corrupted inputs under occlusion and noise, outperforming existing associative memory models. Our work provides a computational perspective on how semantic elements can be dynamically bound into episodic memory traces through biologically grounded attractor mechanisms. Code: https://github.com/fudan-birlab/LSHN.

Zhanglin Wu, Tengfei Song, Ning Xie et al.

This paper presents the technical solution proposed by Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC) for the "End-to-End Document Image Machine Translation for Complex Layouts" competition at the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (DIMT25@ICDAR2025). Leveraging state-of-the-art open-source large vision-language model (LVLM), we introduce a training framework that combines multi-task learning with perceptual chain-of-thought to develop a comprehensive end-to-end document translation system. During the inference phase, we apply minimum Bayesian decoding and post-processing strategies to further enhance the system's translation capabilities. Our solution uniquely addresses both OCR-based and OCR-free document image translation tasks within a unified framework. This paper systematically details the training methods, inference strategies, LVLM base models, training data, experimental setups, and results, demonstrating an effective approach to document image machine translation.

Wen Yang, Chong Li, Jiajun Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising translation performance among various natural languages. However, many LLMs especially the open-sourced ones, such as BLOOM and LLaMA, are English-dominant and support only dozens of natural languages, making the potential of LLMs on language translation less explored. In this work, we present BigTranslate which adapts LLaMA that covers only 20 languages and enhances it with multilingual translation capability on more than 100 languages. BigTranslate is built upon LLaMA-13B and it is optimized in three steps. First, we continue training LLaMA with massive Chinese monolingual data. Second, we continue training the model with a large-scale parallel dataset that covers 102 natural languages. Third, we instruct-tune the foundation model with multilingual translation instructions, leading to our BigTranslate model. The preliminary experiments on multilingual translation show that BigTranslate performs comparably with ChatGPT and Google Translate in many languages and even outperforms ChatGPT in 8 language pairs. We release the BigTranslate model and hope it can advance the research progress.

Yadong Li, Jun Liu, Tao Zhang et al.

We introduce Baichuan-Omni-1.5, an omni-modal model that not only has omni-modal understanding capabilities but also provides end-to-end audio generation capabilities. To achieve fluent and high-quality interaction across modalities without compromising the capabilities of any modality, we prioritized optimizing three key aspects. First, we establish a comprehensive data cleaning and synthesis pipeline for multimodal data, obtaining about 500B high-quality data (text, audio, and vision). Second, an audio-tokenizer (Baichuan-Audio-Tokenizer) has been designed to capture both semantic and acoustic information from audio, enabling seamless integration and enhanced compatibility with MLLM. Lastly, we designed a multi-stage training strategy that progressively integrates multimodal alignment and multitask fine-tuning, ensuring effective synergy across all modalities. Baichuan-Omni-1.5 leads contemporary models (including GPT4o-mini and MiniCPM-o 2.6) in terms of comprehensive omni-modal capabilities. Notably, it achieves results comparable to leading models such as Qwen2-VL-72B across various multimodal medical benchmarks.

Yunhao Zhang, Xiaohan Zhang, Chong Li et al.

Pre-trained computational language models have recently made remarkable progress in harnessing the language abilities which were considered unique to humans. Their success has raised interest in whether these models represent and process language like humans. To answer this question, this paper proposes MulCogBench, a multi-modal cognitive benchmark dataset collected from native Chinese and English participants. It encompasses a variety of cognitive data, including subjective semantic ratings, eye-tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). To assess the relationship between language models and cognitive data, we conducted a similarity-encoding analysis which decodes cognitive data based on its pattern similarity with textual embeddings. Results show that language models share significant similarities with human cognitive data and the similarity patterns are modulated by the data modality and stimuli complexity. Specifically, context-aware models outperform context-independent models as language stimulus complexity increases. The shallow layers of context-aware models are better aligned with the high-temporal-resolution MEG signals whereas the deeper layers show more similarity with the high-spatial-resolution fMRI. These results indicate that language models have a delicate relationship with brain language representations. Moreover, the results between Chinese and English are highly consistent, suggesting the generalizability of these findings across languages.

Zhixiang Lu, Chong Zhang, Chenyu Xue et al.

Neural machine translation (NMT) from Chinese to low-resource Southeast Asian languages remains severely constrained by the extreme scarcity of clean parallel corpora and the pervasive noise in existing mined data. This chronic shortage not only impedes effective model training but also sustains a large performance gap with high-resource directions, leaving millions of speakers of languages such as Lao, Burmese, and Tagalog with persistently low-quality translation systems despite recent advances in large multilingual models. We introduce \textbf{M}ultilingual \textbf{E}xpert-\textbf{R}eward \textbf{I}nformed \textbf{T}uning (\textbf{MERIT}), a unified translation framework that transforms the traditional English-centric ALT benchmark into a Chinese-centric evaluation suite for five Southeast Asian low-resource languages (LRLs). Our framework combines language-specific token prefixing (LTP) with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and a novel group relative policy optimization (GRPO) guided by the semantic alignment reward (SAR). These results confirm that, in LRL{\textrightarrow}Chinese translation, targeted data curation and reward-guided optimization dramatically outperform mere model scaling.

Yuxuan Zhang, Yulong Li, Zichen Yu et al.

Long-sequence causal reasoning seeks to uncover causal relationships within extended time series data but is hindered by complex dependencies and the challenges of validating causal links. To address the limitations of large-scale language models (e.g., GPT-4) in capturing intricate emotional causality within extended dialogues, we propose CauseMotion, a long-sequence emotional causal reasoning framework grounded in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multimodal fusion. Unlike conventional methods relying only on textual information, CauseMotion enriches semantic representations by incorporating audio-derived features-vocal emotion, emotional intensity, and speech rate-into textual modalities. By integrating RAG with a sliding window mechanism, it effectively retrieves and leverages contextually relevant dialogue segments, thus enabling the inference of complex emotional causal chains spanning multiple conversational turns. To evaluate its effectiveness, we constructed the first benchmark dataset dedicated to long-sequence emotional causal reasoning, featuring dialogues with over 70 turns. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RAG-based multimodal integrated approach, the efficacy of substantially enhances both the depth of emotional understanding and the causal inference capabilities of large-scale language models. A GLM-4 integrated with CauseMotion achieves an 8.7% improvement in causal accuracy over the original model and surpasses GPT-4o by 1.2%. Additionally, on the publicly available DiaASQ dataset, CauseMotion-GLM-4 achieves state-of-the-art results in accuracy, F1 score, and causal reasoning accuracy.

Yunhao Zhang, Shaonan Wang, Nan Lin et al.

Understanding the core dimensions of conceptual semantics is fundamental to uncovering how meaning is organized in language and the brain. Existing approaches often rely on predefined semantic dimensions that offer only broad representations, overlooking finer conceptual distinctions. This paper proposes a novel framework to investigate the subdimensions underlying coarse-grained semantic dimensions. Specifically, we introduce a Disentangled Continuous Semantic Representation Model (DCSRM) that decomposes word embeddings from large language models into multiple sub-embeddings, each encoding specific semantic information. Using these sub-embeddings, we identify a set of interpretable semantic subdimensions. To assess their neural plausibility, we apply voxel-wise encoding models to map these subdimensions to brain activation. Our work offers more fine-grained interpretable semantic subdimensions of conceptual meaning. Further analyses reveal that semantic dimensions are structured according to distinct principles, with polarity emerging as a key factor driving their decomposition into subdimensions. The neural correlates of the identified subdimensions support their cognitive and neuroscientific plausibility.

Chenglin Zhu, Tao Zhang, Chong Li et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still perform poorly on scientific tasks, particularly those requiring multi-step and interpretable reasoning. Their limitations include insufficient scientific reasoning patterns, lack of global coherence in multi-step inference, and the absence of reflective self-correction, making them unreliable in structured scientific contexts. We introduce EduFlow, the first end-to-end framework that covers the full pipeline of educational scientific reasoning, including data selection, MCTS-based trajectory construction, model training, and output optimization. At its core is EduPRM, a process-aware reward model that critiques reasoning steps with tags and justifications. EduPRM is trained via curriculum learning on three complementary supervision sources: MCTS-guided trajectories, error-injected critiques, and teacher-student dialogues, enabling dynamic adaptation to multi-stage problem solving and iterative refinement during inference. We further propose EduMCTS, a domain-adapted search framework that introduces bootstrapping actions specifically designed for educational reasoning, such as a self-reflection mechanism that promotes reflective error correction. It further leverages EduPRM's fine-grained feedback to guide the search toward higher-quality reasoning trajectories. By applying self-consistency and rejection sampling, we constructed EduMCTS-160K, a large-scale dataset of educational reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EduFlow enhances reasoning consistency and coherence. Code, data, and models will be released.

Yalun Dai, Yangyu Huang, Xin Zhang et al.

Data is fundamental to the training of language models (LM). Recent research has been dedicated to data efficiency, which aims to maximize performance by selecting a minimal or optimal subset of training data. Techniques such as data filtering, sampling, and selection play a crucial role in this area. To complement it, we define Data Efficacy, which focuses on maximizing performance by optimizing the organization of training data and remains relatively underexplored. This work introduces a general paradigm, DELT, for considering data efficacy in LM training, which highlights the significance of training data organization. DELT comprises three components: Data Scoring, Data Selection, and Data Ordering. Among these components, we design Learnability-Quality Scoring (LQS), as a new instance of Data Scoring, which considers both the learnability and quality of each data sample from the gradient consistency perspective. We also devise Folding Ordering (FO), as a novel instance of Data Ordering, which addresses issues such as model forgetting and data distribution bias. Comprehensive experiments validate the data efficacy in LM training, which demonstrates the following: Firstly, various instances of the proposed DELT enhance LM performance to varying degrees without increasing the data scale and model size. Secondly, among these instances, the combination of our proposed LQS for data scoring and Folding for data ordering achieves the most significant improvement. Lastly, data efficacy can be achieved together with data efficiency by applying data selection. Therefore, we believe that data efficacy is a promising foundational area in LM training.

Chong Li, Jiajun Zhang, Chengqing Zong

Tokenization serves as a foundational step for Large Language Models (LLMs) to process text. In new domains or languages, the inefficiency of the tokenizer will slow down the training and generation of LLM. The mismatch in vocabulary also hinders deep knowledge transfer between LLMs like token-level distillation. To mitigate this gap, we propose an efficient method named TokAlign to replace the vocabulary of LLM from the token co-occurrences view, and further transfer the token-level knowledge between models. It first aligns the source vocabulary to the target one by learning a one-to-one mapping matrix for token IDs. Model parameters, including embeddings, are rearranged and progressively fine-tuned for the new vocabulary. Our method significantly improves multilingual text compression rates and vocabulary initialization for LLMs, decreasing the perplexity from 3.4$\text{e}^2$ of strong baseline methods to 1.2$\text{e}^2$ after initialization. Experimental results on models across multiple parameter scales demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of TokAlign, which costs as few as 5k steps to restore the performance of the vanilla model. After unifying vocabularies between LLMs, token-level distillation can remarkably boost (+4.4% than sentence-level distillation) the base model, costing only 235M tokens.

Chunyu Ye, Yunhao Zhang, Jingyuan Sun et al.

Decoding language from the human brain remains a grand challenge for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). Current approaches typically rely on unimodal brain representations, neglecting the brain's inherently multimodal processing. Inspired by the brain's associative mechanisms, where viewing an image can evoke related sounds and linguistic representations, we propose a unified framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to align brain signals with a shared semantic space encompassing text, images, and audio. A router module dynamically selects and fuses modality-specific brain features according to the characteristics of each stimulus. Experiments on various fMRI datasets with textual, visual, and auditory stimuli demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving an 8.48% improvement on the most commonly used benchmark. We further extend our framework to EEG and MEG data, demonstrating flexibility and robustness across varying temporal and spatial resolutions. To our knowledge, this is the first unified BCI architecture capable of robustly decoding multimodal brain activity across diverse brain signals and stimulus types, offering a flexible solution for real-world applications.

Chong Li, Jingyang Huo, Weikang Gong et al.

Decoding visual experiences from brain activity is a significant challenge. Existing fMRI-to-video methods often focus on semantic content while overlooking spatial and motion information. However, these aspects are all essential and are processed through distinct pathways in the brain. Motivated by this, we propose DecoFuse, a novel brain-inspired framework for decoding videos from fMRI signals. It first decomposes the video into three components - semantic, spatial, and motion - then decodes each component separately before fusing them to reconstruct the video. This approach not only simplifies the complex task of video decoding by decomposing it into manageable sub-tasks, but also establishes a clearer connection between learned representations and their biological counterpart, as supported by ablation studies. Further, our experiments show significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 82.4% accuracy for semantic classification, 70.6% accuracy in spatial consistency, a 0.212 cosine similarity for motion prediction, and 21.9% 50-way accuracy for video generation. Additionally, neural encoding analyses for semantic and spatial information align with the two-streams hypothesis, further validating the distinct roles of the ventral and dorsal pathways. Overall, DecoFuse provides a strong and biologically plausible framework for fMRI-to-video decoding. Project page: https://chongjg.github.io/DecoFuse/.

Jingyao Sun, Qilu Zhang, Di Ma et al.

Multivariate cortico-muscular analysis has recently emerged as a promising approach for evaluating the corticospinal neural pathway. However, current multivariate approaches encounter challenges such as high dimensionality and limited sample sizes, thus restricting their further applications. In this paper, we propose a structured and sparse partial least squares coherence algorithm (ssPLSC) to extract shared latent space representations related to cortico-muscular interactions. Our approach leverages an embedded optimization framework by integrating a partial least squares (PLS)-based objective function, a sparsity constraint and a connectivity-based structured constraint, addressing the generalizability, interpretability and spatial structure. To solve the optimization problem, we develop an efficient alternating iterative algorithm within a unified framework and prove its convergence experimentally. Extensive experimental results from one synthetic and several real-world datasets have demonstrated that ssPLSC can achieve competitive or better performance over some representative multivariate cortico-muscular fusion methods, particularly in scenarios characterized by limited sample sizes and high noise levels. This study provides a novel multivariate fusion method for cortico-muscular analysis, offering a transformative tool for the evaluation of corticospinal pathway integrity in neurological disorders.

Jiawei Zhang, Lei Chu, Jiahao Li et al.

We present a unified framework for reconstructing animatable 3D human avatars from a single portrait across head, half-body, and full-body inputs. Our method tackles three bottlenecks: pose- and framing-sensitive feature representations, limited scalable data, and unreliable proxy-mesh estimation. We introduce a Dual-UV representation that maps image features to a canonical UV space via Core-UV and Shell-UV branches, eliminating pose- and framing-induced token shifts. We also build a factorized synthetic data manifold combining 2D generative diversity with geometry-consistent 3D renderings, supported by a training scheme that improves realism and identity consistency. A robust proxy-mesh tracker maintains stability under partial visibility. Together, these components enable strong in-the-wild generalization. Trained only on half-body synthetic data, our model achieves state-of-the-art head and upper-body reconstruction and competitive full-body results. Extensive experiments and analyses further validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Wen Yang, Junhong Wu, Chong Li et al.

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Post-Training (RPT) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), sparking increased interest in the generalization of RL-based reasoning. While existing work has primarily focused on investigating its generalization across tasks or modalities, this study proposes a novel cross-linguistic perspective to investigate reasoning generalization. This raises a crucial question: $\textit{Does the reasoning capability achieved from English RPT effectively transfer to other languages?}$ We address this by systematically evaluating English-centric LRMs on multilingual reasoning benchmarks and introducing a metric to quantify cross-lingual transferability. Our findings reveal that cross-lingual transferability varies significantly across initial model, target language, and training paradigm. Through interventional studies, we find that models with stronger initial English capabilities tend to over-rely on English-specific patterns, leading to diminished cross-lingual generalization. To address this, we conduct a thorough parallel training study. Experimental results yield three key findings: $\textbf{First-Parallel Leap}$, a substantial leap in performance when transitioning from monolingual to just a single parallel language, and a predictable $\textbf{Parallel Scaling Law}$, revealing that cross-lingual reasoning transfer follows a power-law with the number of training parallel languages. Moreover, we identify the discrepancy between actual monolingual performance and the power-law prediction as $\textbf{Monolingual Generalization Gap}$, indicating that English-centric LRMs fail to fully generalize across languages. Our study challenges the assumption that LRM reasoning mirrors human cognition, providing critical insights for the development of more language-agnostic LRMs.

Jing Zou, Shungeng Zhang, Meikang Qiu et al.

Deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, posing critical security challenges in real-world applications. While Adversarial Training (AT ) is a widely adopted defense mechanism to enhance robustness, it often incurs a trade-off by degrading performance on unperturbed, natural data. Recent efforts have highlighted that larger models exhibit enhanced robustness over their smaller counterparts. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that such robustness can be systematically distilled from large teacher models into compact student models. To achieve better performance, we introduce Dice Adversarial Robustness Distillation (DARD), a novel method designed to transfer robustness through a tailored knowledge distillation paradigm. Additionally, we propose Dice Projected Gradient Descent (DPGD), an adversarial example generalization method optimized for effective attack. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the DARD approach consistently outperforms adversarially trained networks with the same architecture, achieving superior robustness and standard accuracy.

Zhixiang Lu, Yulong Li, Feilong Tang et al.

Large-scale tuberculosis (TB) screening is limited by the high cost and operational complexity of traditional diagnostics, creating a need for artificial-intelligence solutions. We propose DeepGB-TB, a non-invasive system that instantly assigns TB risk scores using only cough audio and basic demographic data. The model couples a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional neural network for audio processing with a gradient-boosted decision tree for tabular features. Its principal innovation is a Cross-Modal Bidirectional Cross-Attention module (CM-BCA) that iteratively exchanges salient cues between modalities, emulating the way clinicians integrate symptoms and risk factors. To meet the clinical priority of minimizing missed cases, we design a Tuberculosis Risk-Balanced Loss (TRBL) that places stronger penalties on false-negative predictions, thereby reducing high-risk misclassifications. DeepGB-TB is evaluated on a diverse dataset of 1,105 patients collected across seven countries, achieving an AUROC of 0.903 and an F1-score of 0.851, representing a new state of the art. Its computational efficiency enables real-time, offline inference directly on common mobile devices, making it ideal for low-resource settings. Importantly, the system produces clinically validated explanations that promote trust and adoption by frontline health workers. By coupling AI innovation with public-health requirements for speed, affordability, and reliability, DeepGB-TB offers a tool for advancing global TB control.

Lijun Liu, Ruiyang Li, Zhaocheng Liu et al.

Visual Information Extraction (VIE) converts unstructured document images into structured formats like JSON, critical for medical applications such as report analysis and online consultations. Traditional methods rely on OCR and language models, while end-to-end multimodal models offer direct JSON generation. However, domain-specific schemas and high annotation costs limit their effectiveness in medical VIE. We base our approach on the Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework to address these challenges using only 100 annotated samples. Our approach ensures dataset diversity, a balanced precision-recall reward mechanism to reduce hallucinations and improve field coverage, and innovative sampling strategies to enhance reasoning capabilities. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our RLVR method, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on medical VIE tasks, significantly improving F1, precision, and recall. While our models excel on tasks similar to medical datasets, performance drops on dissimilar tasks, highlighting the need for domain-specific optimization. Case studies further demonstrate the value of reasoning during training and inference for VIE.

Chong Li, Yingzhuo Deng, Jiajun Zhang et al.

The curse of multilinguality phenomenon is a fundamental problem of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), where the competition between massive languages results in inferior performance. It mainly comes from limited capacity and negative transfer between dissimilar languages. To address this issue, we propose a method to dynamically group and scale up the parameters of multilingual LLM while boosting positive transfer among similar languages. Specifically, the model is first tuned on monolingual corpus to determine the parameter deviation in each layer and quantify the similarity between languages. Layers with more deviations are extended to mixture-of-experts layers to reduce competition between languages, where one expert module serves one group of similar languages. Experimental results on 18 to 128 languages show that our method reduces the negative transfer between languages and significantly boosts multilingual performance with fewer parameters. Such language group specialization on experts benefits the new language adaptation and reduces the inference on the previous multilingual knowledge learned.

Yulong Li, Yuxuan Zhang, Feilong Tang et al.

Sign language is the primary communication mode for 72 million hearing-impaired individuals worldwide, necessitating effective bidirectional Sign Language Production and Sign Language Translation systems. However, functional bidirectional systems require a unified linguistic environment, hindered by the lack of suitable unified datasets, particularly those providing the necessary pose information for accurate Sign Language Production (SLP) evaluation. Concurrently, current SLP evaluation methods like back-translation ignore pose accuracy, and high-quality coordinated generation remains challenging. To create this crucial environment and overcome these challenges, we introduce CNText2Sign and CNSign, which together constitute the first unified dataset aimed at supporting bidirectional accessibility systems for Chinese sign language; CNText2Sign provides 15,000 natural language-to-sign mappings and standardized skeletal keypoints for 8,643 vocabulary items supporting pose assessment. Building upon this foundation, we propose the AuraLLM model, which leverages a decoupled architecture with CNText2Sign's pose data for novel direct gesture accuracy assessment. The model employs retrieval augmentation and Cascading Vocabulary Resolution to handle semantic mapping and out-of-vocabulary words and achieves all-scenario production with controllable coordination of gestures and facial expressions via pose-conditioned video synthesis. Concurrently, our Sign Language Translation model SignMST-C employs targeted self-supervised pretraining for dynamic feature capture, achieving new SOTA results on PHOENIX2014-T with BLEU-4 scores up to 32.08. AuraLLM establishes a strong performance baseline on CNText2Sign with a BLEU-4 score of 50.41 under direct evaluation.

Yangyu Huang, Hao Yang, Chong Li et al.

The recent progress of CNN has dramatically improved face alignment performance. However, few works have paid attention to the error-bias with respect to error distribution of facial landmarks. In this paper, we investigate the error-bias issue in face alignment, where the distributions of landmark errors tend to spread along the tangent line to landmark curves. This error-bias is not trivial since it is closely connected to the ambiguous landmark labeling task. Inspired by this observation, we seek a way to leverage the error-bias property for better convergence of CNN model. To this end, we propose anisotropic direction loss (ADL) and anisotropic attention module (AAM) for coordinate and heatmap regression, respectively. ADL imposes strong binding force in normal direction for each landmark point on facial boundaries. On the other hand, AAM is an attention module which can get anisotropic attention mask focusing on the region of point and its local edge connected by adjacent points, it has a stronger response in tangent than in normal, which means relaxed constraints in the tangent. These two methods work in a complementary manner to learn both facial structures and texture details. Finally, we integrate them into an optimized end-to-end training pipeline named ADNet. Our ADNet achieves state-of-the-art results on 300W, WFLW and COFW datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness.

Chong Li, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng et al.

A sequence-to-sequence learning with neural networks has empirically proven to be an effective framework for Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC), which takes a sentence with some spelling errors as input and outputs the corrected one. However, CSC models may fail to correct spelling errors covered by the confusion sets, and also will encounter unseen ones. We propose a method, which continually identifies the weak spots of a model to generate more valuable training instances, and apply a task-specific pre-training strategy to enhance the model. The generated adversarial examples are gradually added to the training set. Experimental results show that such an adversarial training method combined with the pretraining strategy can improve both the generalization and robustness of multiple CSC models across three different datasets, achieving stateof-the-art performance for CSC task.

Chong Li, Lei Zhang, Serbiao Fang

In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based computing verification protocol, called EntrapNet, for distributed shared computing networks, an emerging underlying network for many internet of things (IoT) applications. EntrapNet borrows the idea from the practice of entrapment in criminal law to reduce the possibility of receiving incorrect computing results from trustless service providers who have offered the computing resources. Furthermore, we mathematically optimize EntrapNet to deal with the fundamental tradeoff of a network: security and efficiency. We present an asymptotic optimal solution to this optimization. It will be seen that EntrapNet can be performed as an independent and low-cost layer atop any trustless network that requires outsourced computing, thus making secure computing affordable and practical.

Zhun Fan, Chong Li, Ying Chen et al.

Inspired by the development of deep learning in computer vision and object detection, the proposed algorithm considers an encoder-decoder architecture with hierarchical feature learning and dilated convolution, named U-Hierarchical Dilated Network (U-HDN), to perform crack detection in an end-to-end method. Crack characteristics with multiple context information are automatically able to learn and perform end-to-end crack detection. Then, a multi-dilation module embedded in an encoder-decoder architecture is proposed. The crack features of multiple context sizes can be integrated into the multi-dilation module by dilation convolution with different dilatation rates, which can obtain much more cracks information. Finally, the hierarchical feature learning module is designed to obtain a multi-scale features from the high to low-level convolutional layers, which are integrated to predict pixel-wise crack detection. Some experiments on public crack databases using 118 images were performed and the results were compared with those obtained with other methods on the same images. The results show that the proposed U-HDN method achieves high performance because it can extract and fuse different context sizes and different levels of feature maps than other algorithms.

Zhun Fan, Chong Li, Ying Chen et al.

Automated pavement crack detection and measurement are important road issues. Agencies have to guarantee the improvement of road safety. Conventional crack detection and measurement algorithms can be extremely time-consuming and low efficiency. Therefore, recently, innovative algorithms have received increased attention from researchers. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (without a pooling layer) based on probability fusion for automated pavement crack detection and measurement. Specifically, an ensemble of convolutional neural networks was employed to identify the structure of small cracks with raw images. Secondly, outputs of the individual convolutional neural network model for the ensemble were averaged to produce the final crack probability value of each pixel, which can obtain a predicted probability map. Finally, the predicted morphological features of the cracks were measured by using the skeleton extraction algorithm. To validate the proposed method, some experiments were performed on two public crack databases (CFD and AigleRN) and the results of the different state-of-the-art methods were compared. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the other methods. For crack measurement, the crack length and width can be measure based on different crack types (complex, common, thin, and intersecting cracks.). The results show that the proposed algorithm can be effectively applied for crack measurement.

Xin Li, Yaohua Hu, Chong Li et al.

In this paper, we discuss the statistical properties of the $\ell_q$ optimization methods $(0<q\leq 1)$, including the $\ell_q$ minimization method and the $\ell_q$ regularization method, for estimating a sparse parameter from noisy observations in high-dimensional linear regression with either a deterministic or random design. For this purpose, we introduce a general $q$-restricted eigenvalue condition (REC) and provide its sufficient conditions in terms of several widely-used regularity conditions such as sparse eigenvalue condition, restricted isometry property, and mutual incoherence property. By virtue of the $q$-REC, we exhibit the stable recovery property of the $\ell_q$ optimization methods for either deterministic or random designs by showing that the $\ell_2$ recovery bound $O(ε^2)$ for the $\ell_q$ minimization method and the oracle inequality and $\ell_2$ recovery bound $O(λ^{\frac{2}{2-q}}s)$ for the $\ell_q$ regularization method hold respectively with high probability. The results in this paper are nonasymptotic and only assume the weak $q$-REC. The preliminary numerical results verify the established statistical property and demonstrate the advantages of the $\ell_q$ regularization method over some existing sparse optimization methods.

Zhun Fan, Jiajie Mo, Benzhang Qiu et al.

Retinal vessel segmentation is a crucial step in diagnosing and screening various diseases, including diabetes, ophthalmologic diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method for vessel segmentation in color fundus images using encoder-decoder based octave convolution networks. Compared with other convolution networks utilizing standard convolution for feature extraction, the proposed method utilizes octave convolutions and octave transposed convolutions for learning multiple-spatial-frequency features, thus can better capture retinal vasculatures with varying sizes and shapes. To provide the network the capability of learning how to decode multifrequency features, we extend octave convolution and propose a new operation named octave transposed convolution. A novel architecture of convolutional neural network, named as Octave UNet integrating both octave convolutions and octave transposed convolutions is proposed based on the encoder-decoder architecture of UNet, which can generate high resolution vessel segmentation in one single forward feeding without post-processing steps. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Octave UNet outperforms the baseline UNet achieving better or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods with fast processing speed. Specifically, the proposed method achieves 0.9664 / 0.9713 / 0.9759 / 0.9698 accuracy, 0.8374 / 0.8664 / 0.8670 / 0.8076 sensitivity, 0.9790 / 0.9798 / 0.9840 / 0.9831 specificity, 0.8127 / 0.8191 / 0.8313 / 0.7963 F1 score, and 0.9835 / 0.9875 / 0.9905 / 0.9845 Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, on DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF datasets, respectively.

Mehmet Necip Kurt, Oyetunji Ogundijo, Chong Li et al.

Early detection of cyber-attacks is crucial for a safe and reliable operation of the smart grid. In the literature, outlier detection schemes making sample-by-sample decisions and online detection schemes requiring perfect attack models have been proposed. In this paper, we formulate the online attack/anomaly detection problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problem and propose a universal robust online detection algorithm using the framework of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) for POMDPs. Numerical studies illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed RL-based algorithm in timely and accurate detection of cyber-attacks targeting the smart grid.

Himani Arora, Rajath Kumar, Jason Krone et al.

Reliable and effective multi-task learning is a prerequisite for the development of robotic agents that can quickly learn to accomplish related, everyday tasks. However, in the reinforcement learning domain, multi-task learning has not exhibited the same level of success as in other domains, such as computer vision. In addition, most reinforcement learning research on multi-task learning has been focused on discrete action spaces, which are not used for robotic control in the real-world. In this work, we apply multi-task learning methods to continuous action spaces and benchmark their performance on a series of simulated continuous control tasks. Most notably, we show that multi-task learning outperforms our baselines and alternative knowledge sharing methods.