Meng Zhang

Pengfei Li, Liangyou Li, Meng Zhang et al.

Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models have significantly improved Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Different from prior works where pre-trained models usually adopt an unidirectional decoder, this paper demonstrates that pre-training a sequence-to-sequence model but with a bidirectional decoder can produce notable performance gains for both Autoregressive and Non-autoregressive NMT. Specifically, we propose CeMAT, a conditional masked language model pre-trained on large-scale bilingual and monolingual corpora in many languages. We also introduce two simple but effective methods to enhance the CeMAT, aligned code-switching & masking and dynamic dual-masking. We conduct extensive experiments and show that our CeMAT can achieve significant performance improvement for all scenarios from low- to extremely high-resource languages, i.e., up to +14.4 BLEU on low resource and +7.9 BLEU improvements on average for Autoregressive NMT. For Non-autoregressive NMT, we demonstrate it can also produce consistent performance gains, i.e., up to +5.3 BLEU. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to pre-train a unified model for fine-tuning on both NMT tasks. Code, data, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model/tree/master/CeMAT.

Yan Chen, Taojie Zhu, Meng Zhang et al.

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy signals -- training on the model's own outputs -- reduce forgetting more reliably than off-policy supervision. Existing on-policy methods route this signal through a new training objective (e.g., self-distillation losses with a teacher copy), inheriting an extra forward pass, schedule sensitivity, and stylistic drift from the teacher.We instead route the on-policy signal through the training data source. Our method, On-Policy Replay (OPR), rolls out the most recent checkpoint on a small budget of historical prompts, filters the generations by a task reward, and replays the surviving (prompt, model response) pairs as ordinary SFT examples. There is no teacher, no auxiliary loss, and no on-the-fly distillation. Across three 7--8B instruction-tuned backbones (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen3-8B, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct) on the TRACE continual-learning benchmark, OPR consistently reduces forgetting; on the sharpest stress test (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Sequential SFT BWT -13.93), OPR lifts BWT to -0.65 at a 10% replay budget and to -2.29 at a 1% budget -- a 46% reduction in |BWT| over a tuned Vanilla Replay baseline, with 42--46% reductions observed across all three backbones. We give a KL-shrinkage interpretation that places OPR and prior on-policy distillation methods on a single axis, and we present a counterintuitive finding that explains why Vanilla Replay is already a strong baseline: low-score replay is uniformly worse than Vanilla Replay, demonstrating that the active ingredient in OPR is the on-policy distribution, not the response quality alone.Our code is available at https://github.com/Yancey2024/OnPolicyReplay.

Yufei Jia, Zhanxiang Cao, Mingrui Yu et al.

Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, SAC, FlashSAC, TD3, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://github.com/unilabsim/UniLab.

Meng Zhang, Duygu Ceylan, Niloy J. Mitra

Realistic dynamic garments on animated characters have many AR/VR applications. While authoring such dynamic garment geometry is still a challenging task, data-driven simulation provides an attractive alternative, especially if it can be controlled simply using the motion of the underlying character. In this work, we focus on motion guided dynamic 3D garments, especially for loose garments. In a data-driven setup, we first learn a generative space of plausible garment geometries. Then, we learn a mapping to this space to capture the motion dependent dynamic deformations, conditioned on the previous state of the garment as well as its relative position with respect to the underlying body. Technically, we model garment dynamics, driven using the input character motion, by predicting per-frame local displacements in a canonical state of the garment that is enriched with frame-dependent skinning weights to bring the garment to the global space. We resolve any remaining per-frame collisions by predicting residual local displacements. The resultant garment geometry is used as history to enable iterative rollout prediction. We demonstrate plausible generalization to unseen body shapes and motion inputs, and show improvements over multiple state-of-the-art alternatives.

Meng Zhang, Jinzhong Ning, Xiaolong Wu et al.

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) aims to jointly identify named entity mentions in text, predict their semantic types, and ground each entity to a corresponding visual region in an associated image. Existing approaches predominantly adopt pipeline-based architectures that decouple textual entity recognition and visual grounding, leading to error accumulation and suboptimal joint optimization. In this paper, we propose E2E-GMNER, a fully end-to-end generative framework that unifies entity recognition, semantic typing, visual grounding, and implicit knowledge reasoning within a single multimodal large language model. We formulate GMNER as an instruction-tuned conditional generation task and incorporate chain-of-thought reasoning to enable the model to adaptively determine when visual evidence or background knowledge is informative, reducing reliance on noisy cues. To further address the instability of generative bounding box prediction, we introduce Gaussian Risk-Aware Box Perturbation (GRBP), which replaces hard box supervision with probabilistically perturbed soft targets to improve robustness against annotation noise and discretization errors. Extensive experiments on the Twitter-GMNER and Twitter-FMNERG benchmarks demonstrate that E2E-GMNER achieves highly competitive performance compared with state of the art methods, validating the effectiveness of unified end-to-end optimization and noise-aware grounding supervision. Code is available at:https://github.com/Finch-coder/E2E-GMNER

Ning Yang, Junrui Wen, Meng Zhang et al.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is essential for next-generation mobile network applications that prioritize various performance metrics, including delays and energy consumption. However, conventional single-objective scheduling solutions cannot be directly applied to practical systems in which the preferences of these applications (i.e., the weights of different objectives) are often unknown or challenging to specify in advance. In this study, we address this issue by formulating a multi-objective offloading problem for MEC with multiple edges to minimize expected long-term energy consumption and transmission delay while considering unknown preferences as parameters. To address the challenge of unknown preferences, we design a multi-objective (deep) reinforcement learning (MORL)-based resource scheduling scheme with proximal policy optimization (PPO). In addition, we introduce a well-designed state encoding method for constructing features for multiple edges in MEC systems, a sophisticated reward function for accurately computing the utilities of delay and energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed MORL scheme enhances the hypervolume of the Pareto front by up to 233.1% compared to benchmarks. Our full framework is available at https://github.com/gracefulning/mec_morl_multipolicy.

Sicong Liu, Xiaochen Li, Zimu Zhou et al.

The ubiquity of camera-embedded devices and the advances in deep learning have stimulated various intelligent mobile video applications. These applications often demand on-device processing of video streams to deliver real-time, high-quality services for privacy and robustness concerns. However, the performance of these applications is constrained by the raw video streams, which tend to be taken with small-aperture cameras of ubiquitous mobile platforms in dim light. Despite extensive low-light video enhancement solutions, they are unfit for deployment to mobile devices due to their complex models and and ignorance of system dynamics like energy budgets. In this paper, we propose AdaEnlight, an energy-aware low-light video stream enhancement system on mobile devices. It achieves real-time video enhancement with competitive visual quality while allowing runtime behavior adaptation to the platform-imposed dynamic energy budgets. We report extensive experiments on diverse datasets, scenarios, and platforms and demonstrate the superiority of AdaEnlight compared with state-of-the-art low-light image and video enhancement solutions.

Yang Li, Ruinong Wang, Yuanzheng Li et al.

In a modern power system with an increasing proportion of renewable energy, wind power prediction is crucial to the arrangement of power grid dispatching plans due to the volatility of wind power. However, traditional centralized forecasting methods raise concerns regarding data privacy-preserving and data islands problem. To handle the data privacy and openness, we propose a forecasting scheme that combines federated learning and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for ultra-short-term wind power forecasting, called federated deep reinforcement learning (FedDRL). Firstly, this paper uses the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm as the basic forecasting model to improve prediction accuracy. Secondly, we integrate the DDPG forecasting model into the framework of federated learning. The designed FedDRL can obtain an accurate prediction model in a decentralized way by sharing model parameters instead of sharing private data which can avoid sensitive privacy issues. The simulation results show that the proposed FedDRL outperforms the traditional prediction methods in terms of forecasting accuracy. More importantly, while ensuring the forecasting performance, FedDRL can effectively protect the data privacy and relieve the communication pressure compared with the traditional centralized forecasting method. In addition, a simulation with different federated learning parameters is conducted to confirm the robustness of the proposed scheme.

Renke Wang, Meng Zhang, Jun Li et al.

Generating high-fidelity garment animations through traditional workflows, from modeling to rendering, is both tedious and expensive. These workflows often require repetitive steps in response to updates in character motion, rendering viewpoint changes, or appearance edits. Although recent neural rendering offers an efficient solution for computationally intensive processes, it struggles with rendering complex garment animations containing fine wrinkle details and realistic garment-and-body occlusions, while maintaining structural consistency across frames and dense view rendering. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to directly synthesize garment animations from body motion sequences without the need for an explicit garment proxy. Our approach infers garment dynamic features from body motion, providing a preliminary overview of garment structure. Simultaneously, we capture detailed features from synthesized reference images of the garment's front and back, generated by a pre-trained image model. These features are then used to construct a neural radiance field that renders the garment animation video. Additionally, our technique enables garment recoloring by decomposing its visual elements. We demonstrate the generalizability of our method across unseen body motions and camera views, ensuring detailed structural consistency. Furthermore, we showcase its applicability to color editing on both real and synthetic garment data. Compared to existing neural rendering techniques, our method exhibits qualitative and quantitative improvements in garment dynamics and wrinkle detail modeling. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/wrk226/GarmentAnimationNeRF}.

Meng Zhang, Qinghao Hu, Peng Sun et al.

Training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs is challenging due to the conflict between the high memory demand and limited GPU memory. Recently, distributed full-graph GNN training has been widely adopted to tackle this problem. However, the substantial inter-GPU communication overhead can cause severe throughput degradation. Existing communication compression techniques mainly focus on traditional DNN training, whose bottleneck lies in synchronizing gradients and parameters. We find they do not work well in distributed GNN training as the barrier is the layer-wise communication of features during the forward pass & feature gradients during the backward pass. To this end, we propose an efficient distributed GNN training framework Sylvie, which employs one-bit quantization technique in GNNs and further pipelines the curtailed communication with computation to enormously shrink the overhead while maintaining the model quality. In detail, Sylvie provides a lightweight Low-bit Module to quantize the sent data and dequantize the received data back to full precision values in each layer. Additionally, we propose a Bounded Staleness Adaptor to control the introduced staleness to achieve further performance enhancement. We conduct theoretical convergence analysis and extensive experiments on various models & datasets to demonstrate Sylvie can considerably boost the training throughput by up to 28.1x.

Meng Zhang, Liangyou Li, Qun Liu

Triangular machine translation is a special case of low-resource machine translation where the language pair of interest has limited parallel data, but both languages have abundant parallel data with a pivot language. Naturally, the key to triangular machine translation is the successful exploitation of such auxiliary data. In this work, we propose a transfer-learning-based approach that utilizes all types of auxiliary data. As we train auxiliary source-pivot and pivot-target translation models, we initialize some parameters of the pivot side with a pre-trained language model and freeze them to encourage both translation models to work in the same pivot language space, so that they can be smoothly transferred to the source-target translation model. Experiments show that our approach can outperform previous ones.

Meng Zhang, Jie Sun, Qinghao Hu et al.

Graph Transformer is a new architecture that surpasses GNNs in graph learning. While there emerge inspiring algorithm advancements, their practical adoption is still limited, particularly on real-world graphs involving up to millions of nodes. We observe existing graph transformers fail on large-scale graphs mainly due to heavy computation, limited scalability and inferior model quality. Motivated by these observations, we propose TorchGT, the first efficient, scalable, and accurate graph transformer training system. TorchGT optimizes training at different levels. At algorithm level, by harnessing the graph sparsity, TorchGT introduces a Dual-interleaved Attention which is computation-efficient and accuracy-maintained. At runtime level, TorchGT scales training across workers with a communication-light Cluster-aware Graph Parallelism. At kernel level, an Elastic Computation Reformation further optimizes the computation by reducing memory access latency in a dynamic way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TorchGT boosts training by up to 62.7x and supports graph sequence lengths of up to 1M.

Chaoyao Shen, Linfeng Jiang, Yixian Shen et al.

Deep learning (DL) compilers rely on cost models and auto-tuning to optimize tensor programs for target hardware. However, existing approaches depend on large offline datasets, incurring high collection costs and offering suboptimal transferability across platforms. In this paper, we introduce TCL, a novel efficient and transferable compiler framework for fast tensor program optimization across diverse hardware platforms to address these challenges. Specifically, TCL is built on three core enablers: (1) the RDU Sampler, a data-efficient active learning strategy that selects only 10% of tensor programs by jointly optimizing Representativeness, Diversity, and Uncertainty, substantially reducing data collection costs while maintaining near-original model accuracy; (2) a new Mamba-based cost model that efficiently captures long-range schedule dependencies while achieving a favorable trade-off between prediction accuracy and computational cost through reduced parameterization and lightweight sequence modeling; and (3) a continuous knowledge distillation framework that effectively and progressively transfers knowledge across multiple hardware platforms while avoiding the parameter explosion and data dependency issues typically caused by traditional multi-task learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of each individual enabler and the holistic TCL framework. When optimizing a range of mainstream DL models on both CPU and GPU platforms, TCL achieves, on average, 16.8x and 12.48x faster tuning time, and 1.20x and 1.13x lower inference latency, respectively, compared to Tenset-MLP.

Meng Zhang, Wenxuan Guo, Bohao Fan et al.

Multi-view imaging systems enable uniform coverage of 3D space and reduce the impact of occlusion, which is beneficial for 3D object detection and tracking accuracy. However, existing imaging systems built with multi-view cameras or depth sensors are limited by the small applicable scene and complicated composition. In this paper, we propose a wireless multi-view multi-modal 3D imaging system generally applicable to large outdoor scenes, which consists of a master node and several slave nodes. Multiple spatially distributed slave nodes equipped with cameras and LiDARs are connected to form a wireless sensor network. While providing flexibility and scalability, the system applies automatic spatio-temporal calibration techniques to obtain accurate 3D multi-view multi-modal data. This system is the first imaging system that integrates mutli-view RGB cameras and LiDARs in large outdoor scenes among existing 3D imaging systems. We perform point clouds based 3D object detection and long-term tracking using the 3D imaging dataset collected by this system. The experimental results show that multi-view point clouds greatly improve 3D object detection and tracking accuracy regardless of complex and various outdoor environments.

Wenxuan Guo, Ziyuan Li, Meng Zhang et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robot manipulation by unifying perception and action. However, existing VLA systems primarily rely on textual instructions and struggle to resolve spatial ambiguity in complex scenes with multiple similar objects. To address this limitation, we introduce gesture as a parallel instruction modality and propose a Gesture-aware Vision-Language-Action model (GesVLA). Our approach encodes gesture features directly into the latent space, enabling them to participate in both high-level reasoning and low-level action generation, and adopts a dual-VLM architecture to achieve tight coupling between gesture representations and action policies. At the data level, we construct a scalable gesture data generation pipeline by rendering hand models onto real-world scene images. This reduces the sim-to-real visual gap while producing rich data with diverse motion patterns and corresponding pointing annotations. In addition, we employ a two-stage training strategy to equip the model with both gesture perception and action prediction capabilities. We evaluate our approach on multiple real-world robotic tasks, including a controlled block manipulation task for validation and more practical scenarios such as product and produce selection. Experimental results show that incorporating gesture consistently improves target grounding accuracy and human-robot interaction efficiency, especially in complex and cluttered environments. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/GesVLA/.

Chengan He, Xin Sun, Zhixin Shu et al.

We present Perm, a learned parametric representation of human 3D hair designed to facilitate various hair-related applications. Unlike previous work that jointly models the global hair structure and local curl patterns, we propose to disentangle them using a PCA-based strand representation in the frequency domain, thereby allowing more precise editing and output control. Specifically, we leverage our strand representation to fit and decompose hair geometry textures into low- to high-frequency hair structures, termed guide textures and residual textures, respectively. These decomposed textures are later parameterized with different generative models, emulating common stages in the hair grooming process. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the architecture design of Perm, and finally deploy the trained model as a generic prior to solve task-agnostic problems, further showcasing its flexibility and superiority in tasks such as single-view hair reconstruction, hairstyle editing, and hair-conditioned image generation. More details can be found on our project page: https://cs.yale.edu/homes/che/projects/perm/.

Dominique Briechle, Raj Chanchad, Tobias Geger et al.

Explicit software architecture models are essential artifacts for communicating, analyzing, and evolving complex software-intensive systems. In ROS~2-based robotic systems, however, structural (de-)composition and integration semantics are often only implicitly encoded across distributed artifacts such as source code and launch files, making recovery of hierarchical architecture particularly difficult. Existing approaches mainly focus on node-level entities and communication wiring, while providing limited support for recovering hierarchical structural (de-)composition across multiple abstraction levels. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed blueprint-guided LLM-assisted architecture recovery pipeline for ROS~2 systems through two major enhancements: (1) refined prompting to improve the consistency and controllability of architecture synthesis, and (2) a staged recovery strategy based on multi-level intermediate architectural representations that incorporate the atomic ROS node list and launch file dependencies, thereby enabling structurally constrained reconstruction across multiple abstraction levels. The approach is evaluated on a real-world automated product disassembly system based on cooperative robotic arms and heterogeneous ROS~2 artifacts. Compared to our previous work, the considered case study exhibits substantially higher integration complexity and richer functionality. The results demonstrate improved structural consistency, scalability, and robustness of architecture recovery, while also revealing remaining challenges related to dynamic integration semantics in large-scale ROS~2 systems.

Yusheng Zhao, Hourun Li, Bohan Wu et al.

The attention mechanism has been the core component in modern transformer architectures. However, the computation of standard full attention scales quadratically with the sequence length, serving as a major bottleneck in long-context language modeling. Sliding window attention restricts the context length for better efficiency at the cost of narrower receptive fields. While existing efforts attempt to take the benefits from both sides by building hybrid models, they often resort to static, heuristically designed alternating patterns that limit efficient allocation of computation in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose Switch Attention (SwiAttn), a novel hybrid transformer that enables dynamic and fine-grained routing between full attention and sliding window attention. For each token at each transformer layer, SwiAttn dynamically routes the computation to either a full-attention branch for global information aggregation or a sliding-window branch for efficient local pattern matching. An adaptive regularization objective is designed to encourage the model towards efficiency. Moreover, we adopt continual pretraining to optimize the model, transferring the full attention architecture to the hybrid one. Extensive experiments are conducted on twenty-three benchmark datasets across both regular (4K) and long (32K) context lengths, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Shuo Chen, Ning Yang, Meng Zhang et al.

Exploiting the computational heterogeneity of mobile devices and edge nodes, mobile edge computation (MEC) provides an efficient approach to achieving real-time applications that are sensitive to information freshness, by offloading tasks from mobile devices to edge nodes. We use the metric Age-of-Information (AoI) to evaluate information freshness. An efficient solution to minimize the AoI for the MEC system with multiple users is non-trivial to obtain due to the random computing time. In this paper, we consider multiple users offloading tasks to heterogeneous edge servers in a MEC system. We first reformulate the problem as a Restless Multi-Arm-Bandit (RMAB) problem and establish a hierarchical Markov Decision Process (MDP) to characterize the updating of AoI for the MEC system. Based on the hierarchical MDP, we propose a nested index framework and design a nested index policy with provably asymptotic optimality. Finally, the closed form of the nested index is obtained, which enables the performance tradeoffs between computation complexity and accuracy. Our algorithm leads to an optimality gap reduction of up to 40%, compared to benchmarks. Our algorithm asymptotically approximates the lower bound as the system scalar gets large enough.

Ruidi He, Vaibhav Tiwari, Mohanad Al-Ghobari et al.

High-definition (HD) maps are core artifacts for automated driving systems, but their generation commonly relies on sensor-intensive mobile mapping campaigns, while quality assessment often depends on high-precision reference data. These dependencies make HD map engineering costly and difficult to apply in settings where specialised measurement data or independently measured reference maps are unavailable. This paper presents an engineering-oriented geo-data-driven workflow for HD map generation with integrated representation-level verification. The workflow uses openly available geo-engineering datasets as the primary input source and transforms them into lane-level HD map representations of existing road environments through explicit intermediate representations and processing stages. To assess the generated representations without external reference maps, the workflow integrates executable constraint-based verification into the engineering process. Selected constraints are derived from specifications relevant to automated driving and road-design guidelines. They are evaluated directly on the generated lanelet-based representation to detect geometric, topological, and elevation-related inconsistencies. The workflow is evaluated using real-world shapefile-based road-network data from four cities in Lower Saxony, Germany, and controlled defect-injection scenarios. The real-world evaluation shows that the generated map representations satisfy the selected constraints in the evaluated scenarios, while the defect-injection study demonstrates complete detection of the considered defect types without observed false positives. The results indicate that geo-data-driven HD map generation with integrated executable verification can provide a modular and inspectable complement to sensor-intensive mapping workflows under reduced sensing and reference-data availability.

Jinyu Xu, Tianqi Hu, Xiaonan Hu et al.

Visually cataloging and quantifying the natural world requires pushing the boundaries of both detailed visual classification and counting at scale. Despite significant progress, particularly in crowd and traffic analysis, the fine-grained, taxonomy-aware plant counting remains underexplored in vision. In contrast to crowds, plants exhibit nonrigid morphologies and physical appearance variations across growth stages and environments. To fill this gap, we present TPC-268, the first plant counting benchmark incorporating plant taxonomy. Our dataset couples instance-level point annotations with Linnaean labels (kingdom -> species) and organ categories, enabling hierarchical reasoning and species-aware evaluation. The dataset features 10,000 images with 678,050 point annotations, includes 268 countable plant categories over 242 plant species in Plantae and Fungi, and spans observation scales from canopy-level remote sensing imagery to tissue-level microscopy. We follow the problem setting of class-agnostic counting (CAC), provide taxonomy-consistent, scale-aware data splits, and benchmark state-of-the-art regression- and detection-based CAC approaches. By capturing the biodiversity, hierarchical structure, and multi-scale nature of botanical and mycological taxa, TPC-268 provides a biologically grounded testbed to advance fine-grained class-agnostic counting. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/TPC-268.

Daniel Bogdoll, Meng Zhang, Maximilian Nitsche et al.

Great progress has been achieved in the community of autonomous driving in the past few years. As a safety-critical problem, however, anomaly detection is a huge hurdle towards a large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles in the real world. While many approaches, such as uncertainty estimation or segmentation-based image resynthesis, are extremely promising, there is more to be explored. Especially inspired by works on anomaly detection based on image resynthesis, we propose a novel approach for anomaly detection through style transfer. We leverage generative models to map an image from its original style domain of road traffic to an arbitrary one and back to generate pixelwise anomaly scores. However, our experiments have proven our hypothesis wrong, and we were unable to produce significant results. Nevertheless, we want to share our findings, so that others can learn from our experiments.

Ziang Yin, Nicholas Gangi, Meng Zhang et al.

Photonic computing has emerged as a promising solution for accelerating computation-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. However, limited reconfigurability, high electrical-optical conversion cost, and thermal sensitivity limit the deployment of current optical analog computing engines to support power-restricted, performance-sensitive AI workloads at scale. Sparsity provides a great opportunity for hardware-efficient AI accelerators. However, current dense photonic accelerators fail to fully exploit the power-saving potential of algorithmic sparsity. It requires sparsity-aware hardware specialization with a fundamental re-design of photonic tensor core topology and cross-layer device-circuit-architecture-algorithm co-optimization aware of hardware non-ideality and power bottleneck. To trim down the redundant power consumption while maximizing robustness to thermal variations, we propose SCATTER, a novel algorithm-circuit co-sparse photonic accelerator featuring dynamically reconfigurable signal path via thermal-tolerant, power-efficient in-situ light redistribution and power gating. A power-optimized, crosstalk-aware dynamic sparse training framework is introduced to explore row-column structured sparsity and ensure marginal accuracy loss and maximum power efficiency. The extensive evaluation shows that our cross-stacked optimized accelerator SCATTER achieves a 511X area reduction and 12.4X power saving with superior crosstalk tolerance that enables unprecedented circuit layout compactness and on-chip power efficiency.

Ziang Yin, Meng Zhang, Amir Begovic et al.

Electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs) offer transformative potential for next-generation high-performance AI but require interdisciplinary advances across devices, circuits, architecture, and design automation. The complexity of hybrid systems makes it challenging even for domain experts to understand distinct behaviors and interactions across design stack. The lack of a flexible, accurate, fast, and easy-to-use EPIC AI system simulation framework significantly limits the exploration of hardware innovations and system evaluations on common benchmarks. To address this gap, we propose SimPhony, a cross-layer modeling and simulation framework for heterogeneous electronic-photonic AI systems. SimPhony offers a platform that enables (1) generic, extensible hardware topology representation that supports heterogeneous multi-core architectures with diverse photonic tensor core designs; (2) optics-specific dataflow modeling with unique multi-dimensional parallelism and reuse beyond spatial/temporal dimensions; (3) data-aware energy modeling with realistic device responses, layout-aware area estimation, link budget analysis, and bandwidth-adaptive memory modeling; and (4) seamless integration with model training framework for hardware/software co-simulation. By providing a unified, versatile, and high-fidelity simulation platform, SimPhony enables researchers to innovate and evaluate EPIC AI hardware across multiple domains, facilitating the next leap in emerging AI hardware. We open-source our codes at https://github.com/ScopeX-ASU/SimPhony

Wei Peng, Kang Liu, Jianchen Hu et al.

Prompt learning is one of the most effective paradigms for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to the biomedical image classification tasks in few shot scenarios. However, most of the current prompt learning methods only used the text prompts and ignored the particular structures (such as the complex anatomical structures and subtle pathological features) in the biomedical images. In this work, we propose Biomed-DPT, a knowledge-enhanced dual modality prompt tuning technique. In designing the text prompt, Biomed-DPT constructs a dual prompt including the template-driven clinical prompts and the large language model (LLM)-driven domain-adapted prompts, then extracts the clinical knowledge from the domain-adapted prompts through the knowledge distillation technique. In designing the vision prompt, Biomed-DPT introduces the zero vector as a soft prompt to leverage attention re-weighting so that the focus on non-diagnostic regions and the recognition of non-critical pathological features are avoided. Biomed-DPT achieves an average classification accuracy of 66.14\% across 11 biomedical image datasets covering 9 modalities and 10 organs, with performance reaching 78.06\% in base classes and 75.97\% in novel classes, surpassing the Context Optimization (CoOp) method by 6.20\%, 3.78\%, and 8.04\%, respectively. Our code are available at \underline{https://github.com/Kanyooo/Biomed-DPT}.

Pingchuan Ma, Zhengqi Gao, Meng Zhang et al.

Inverse design has emerged as a transformative approach for photonic device optimization, enabling the exploration of high-dimensional, non-intuitive design spaces to create ultra-compact devices and advance photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in computing and interconnects. However, practical challenges, such as suboptimal device performance, limited manufacturability, high sensitivity to variations, computational inefficiency, and lack of interpretability, have hindered its adoption in commercial hardware. Recent advancements in AI-assisted photonic simulation and design offer transformative potential, accelerating simulations and design generation by orders of magnitude over traditional numerical methods. Despite these breakthroughs, the lack of an open-source, standardized infrastructure and evaluation benchmark limits accessibility and cross-disciplinary collaboration. To address this, we introduce MAPS, a multi-fidelity AI-augmented photonic simulation and inverse design infrastructure designed to bridge this gap. MAPS features three synergistic components: (1) MAPS-Data: A dataset acquisition framework for generating multi-fidelity, richly labeled devices, providing high-quality data for AI-for-optics research. (2) MAPS-Train: A flexible AI-for-photonics training framework offering a hierarchical data loading pipeline, customizable model construction, support for data- and physics-driven losses, and comprehensive evaluations. (3) MAPS-InvDes: An advanced adjoint inverse design toolkit that abstracts complex physics but exposes flexible optimization steps, integrates pre-trained AI models, and incorporates fabrication variation models. This infrastructure MAPS provides a unified, open-source platform for developing, benchmarking, and advancing AI-assisted photonic design workflows, accelerating innovation in photonic hardware optimization and scientific machine learning.

Lyudong Jin, Ming Tang, Jiayu Pan et al.

In the realm of emerging real-time networked applications such as cyber-physical systems (CPS), the Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a pivotal metric for evaluating timeliness. To meet the high computational demands, such as those in smart manufacturing within CPS, mobile edge computing (MEC) presents a promising solution for optimizing computing and reducing AoI. In this work, we study the timeliness of compute-intensive updates and explore jointly optimizing the task updating (when to generate a task) and offloading (where to process a task) policies to minimize AoI. Specifically, we consider edge load dynamics and formulate a task scheduling problem to minimize the expected time-average AoI. Solving this problem is challenging due to the fractional objective introduced by AoI and the asynchronous decision-making of the semi-Markov game (SMG). To this end, we propose a fractional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. We begin by introducing a fractional single-agent RL framework and establish its linear convergence rate. Building on this, we develop a fractional multi-agent RL framework, extend Dinkelbach's method, and demonstrate its equivalence to the inexact Newton's method. Furthermore, we provide the conditions under which the framework achieves linear convergence to the Nash equilibrium (NE). To tackle the challenge of asynchronous decision-making in the SMG, we further design an asynchronous model-free fractional multi-agent RL algorithm, where each mobile device can determine the task updating and offloading decisions without knowing the real-time system dynamics and decisions of other devices. Experimental results show that when compared with the best existing baseline algorithm, our proposed algorithm reduces the average AoI by up to 50.6%.

Ruofan Lu, Yintong Huo, Meng Zhang et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread adoption of AI-powered coding assistants integrated into a development environment. On one hand, low-latency code completion offers completion suggestions but is fundamentally constrained to the cursor's current position. On the other hand, chat-based editing can perform complex modifications, yet forces developers to stop their work, describe the intent in natural language, which causes a context-switch away from the code. This creates a suboptimal user experience, as neither paradigm proactively predicts the developer's next edit in a sequence of related edits. To bridge this gap and provide the seamless code edit suggestion, we introduce the task of Next Edit Prediction, a novel task designed to infer developer intent from recent interaction history to predict both the location and content of the subsequent edit. Specifically, we curate a high-quality supervised fine-tuning dataset and an evaluation benchmark for the Next Edit Prediction task. Then, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on a series of models and performed a comprehensive evaluation of both the fine-tuned models and other baseline models, yielding several novel findings. This work lays the foundation for a new interaction paradigm that proactively collaborate with developers by anticipating their following action, rather than merely reacting to explicit instructions. The code is available at https://github.com/lurf21/NextEditPrediction.

Junkai Li, Yunghwei Lai, Weitao Li et al.

The recent rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a new wave of technological revolution in medical artificial intelligence (AI). While LLMs are designed to understand and generate text like a human, autonomous agents that utilize LLMs as their "brain" have exhibited capabilities beyond text processing such as planning, reflection, and using tools by enabling their "bodies" to interact with the environment. We introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness, in which all patients, nurses, and doctors are LLM-powered autonomous agents. Within the simulacrum, doctor agents are able to evolve by treating a large number of patient agents without the need to label training data manually. After treating tens of thousands of patient agents in the simulacrum (human doctors may take several years in the real world), the evolved doctor agents outperform state-of-the-art medical agent methods on the MedQA benchmark comprising US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) test questions. Our methods of simulacrum construction and agent evolution have the potential in benefiting a broad range of applications beyond medical AI.

Zhaoli Deng, Fanyi Wang, Junkang Zhang et al.

Portrait Fidelity Generation is a prominent research area in generative models.Current methods face challenges in generating full-body images with low-resolution faces, especially in multi-ID photo phenomenon.To tackle these issues, we propose a comprehensive system called FPGA and construct a million-level multi-modal dataset IDZoom for training.FPGA consists of Multi-Mode Fusion training strategy (MMF) and DDIM Inversion based ID Restoration inference framework (DIIR). The MMF aims to activate the specified ID in the specified facial region. The DIIR aims to address the issue of face artifacts while keeping the background.Furthermore, DIIR is plug-and-play and can be applied to any diffusion-based portrait generation method to enhance their performance. DIIR is also capable of performing face-swapping tasks and is applicable to stylized faces as well.To validate the effectiveness of FPGA, we conducted extensive comparative and ablation experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that FPGA has significant advantages in both subjective and objective metrics, and achieves controllable generation in multi-ID scenarios. In addition, we accelerate the inference speed to within 2.5 seconds on a single L20 graphics card mainly based on our well designed reparameterization method, RepControlNet.

Yuan Zang, Fanchao Qi, Chenghao Yang et al.

Adversarial attacks are carried out to reveal the vulnerability of deep neural networks. Textual adversarial attacking is challenging because text is discrete and a small perturbation can bring significant change to the original input. Word-level attacking, which can be regarded as a combinatorial optimization problem, is a well-studied class of textual attack methods. However, existing word-level attack models are far from perfect, largely because unsuitable search space reduction methods and inefficient optimization algorithms are employed. In this paper, we propose a novel attack model, which incorporates the sememe-based word substitution method and particle swarm optimization-based search algorithm to solve the two problems separately. We conduct exhaustive experiments to evaluate our attack model by attacking BiLSTM and BERT on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model consistently achieves much higher attack success rates and crafts more high-quality adversarial examples as compared to baseline methods. Also, further experiments show our model has higher transferability and can bring more robustness enhancement to victim models by adversarial training. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained on https://github.com/thunlp/SememePSO-Attack.

Qinghao Hu, Zhisheng Ye, Zerui Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have presented impressive performance across several transformative tasks. However, it is non-trivial to efficiently utilize large-scale cluster resources to develop LLMs, often riddled with numerous challenges such as frequent hardware failures, intricate parallelization strategies, and imbalanced resource utilization. In this paper, we present an in-depth characterization study of a six-month LLM development workload trace collected from our GPU datacenter Acme. Specifically, we investigate discrepancies between LLMs and prior task-specific Deep Learning (DL) workloads, explore resource utilization patterns, and identify the impact of various job failures. Our analysis summarizes hurdles we encountered and uncovers potential opportunities to optimize systems tailored for LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce our system efforts: (1) fault-tolerant pretraining, which enhances fault tolerance through LLM-involved failure diagnosis and automatic recovery. (2) decoupled scheduling for evaluation, which achieves timely performance feedback via trial decomposition and scheduling optimization.

Meng Zhang, Yu Xin, Feiya Guo et al.

Garment refitting, the task of adapting a garment from a source to a target avatar, must preserve the original design features and fine-scale wrinkles, a challenge exacerbated by significant shape variations and varying poses without registration to a shared canonical pose. Existing methods struggle to balance robustness, efficiency, and fidelity of detail: physics-based simulation is costly, data-driven approaches lack generalizability, and geometry optimization in the full vertex space is often ill-conditioned and prone to local minima with unsatisfactory quality. We identify that a fundamental limitation lies in the representation: deforming garments directly in global coordinates couples vertices non-locally, creating a complex and poorly-structured optimization landscape. Therefore, we introduce LoBoFit, a robust refitting method built upon a novel Local Bone Mapping Blending (LoBoMap Blending) representation. Instead of manipulating global vertex positions, LoBoMap Blending expresses garment geometry as a linear blend of its mappings into local bone coordinate frames. This representation is highly expressive and flexible: local bone mappings yield a pose-robust initialization and a well-conditioned parameterization, while blending weights smooth the optimization landscape and broaden the space of plausible solutions for stable convergence with fine-scale detail preservation. The subsequent refinement efficiently resolves collisions and preserves details by optimizing localized residuals, effectively decomposing the complex global deformation into manageable subproblems. Our experiments demonstrate that LoBoFit reliably refits high-resolution, single- and multi-layer garments across avatars with large shape and topological differences, while faithfully preserving intricate wrinkles and the intended fit style, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in robustness and output quality.

Ziang Yin, Hongjian Zhou, Nicholas Gangi et al.

In this work, we identify three considerations that are essential for realizing practical photonic AI systems at scale: (1) dynamic tensor operation support for modern models rather than only weight-static kernels, especially for attention/Transformer-style workloads; (2) systematic management of conversion, control, and data-movement overheads, where multiplexing and dataflow must amortize electronic costs instead of letting ADC/DAC and I/O dominate; and (3) robustness under hardware non-idealities that become more severe as integration density grows. To study these coupled tradeoffs quantitatively, and to ensure they remain meaningful under real implementation constraints, we build a cross-layer toolchain that supports photonic AI design from early exploration to physical realization. SimPhony provides implementation-aware modeling and rapid cross-layer evaluation, translating physical costs into system-level metrics so architectural decisions are grounded in realistic assumptions. ADEPT and ADEPT-Z enable end-to-end circuit and topology exploration, connecting system objectives to feasible photonic fabrics under practical device and circuit constraints. Finally, Apollo and LiDAR provide scalable photonic physical design automation, turning candidate circuits into manufacturable layouts while accounting for routing, thermal, and crosstalk constraints.

Fu Wang, Qifeng Lu, Xinyu Long et al.

Accurate forecasting of three-dimensional (3D) cloud fields is important for atmospheric analysis and short-range numerical weather prediction, yet it remains challenging because cloud evolution involves cross-layer interactions, nonlocal dependencies, and multiscale spatiotemporal dynamics. Existing spatiotemporal prediction models based on convolutions, recurrence, or attention often rely on locality-biased representations and therefore struggle to preserve fine cloud structures in volumetric forecasting tasks. To address this issue, we propose QENO, a hybrid quantum-inspired spatiotemporal forecasting framework for 3D cloud fields. The proposed architecture consists of four components: a classical spatiotemporal encoder for compact latent representation, a topology-aware quantum enhancement block for modeling nonlocal couplings in latent space, a dynamic fusion temporal unit for integrating measurement-derived quantum features with recurrent memory, and a decoder for reconstructing future cloud volumes. Experiments on CMA-MESO 3D cloud fields show that QENO consistently outperforms representative baselines, including ConvLSTM, PredRNN++, Earthformer, TAU, and SimVP variants, in terms of MSE, MAE, RMSE, SSIM, and threshold-based detection metrics. In particular, QENO achieves an MSE of 0.2038, an RMSE of 0.4514, and an SSIM of 0.6291, while also maintaining a compact parameter budget. These results indicate that topology-aware hybrid quantum-classical feature modeling is a promising direction for 3D cloud structure forecasting and atmospheric Earth observation data analysis.

Ruidi He, Yu Zhang, Meng Zhang et al.

High-definition map transformations are essential in autonomous driving systems, enabling interoperability across tools. Ensuring their semantic correctness is challenging, since existing rule-based frameworks rely on manually written formulas and domain-specific functions, limiting scalability. In this paper, We present an LLM-assisted pipeline that jointly generates logical formulas and corresponding executable predicates within a computational FOL framework, extending the map verifier in CommonRoad scenario designer with elevation support. The pipeline leverages prompt-based LLM generation to produce grammar-compliant rules and predicates that integrate directly into the existing system. We implemented a prototype and evaluated it on synthetic bridge and slope scenarios. The results indicate reduced manual engineering effort while preserving correctness, demonstrating the feasibility of a scalable, semi-automated human-in-the-loop approach to map-transformation verification.

Zhuang Jia, Wenkai Lu, Meng Zhang et al.

Ground-roll wave is a common coherent noise in land field seismic data. This Rayleigh-type surface wave usually has low frequency, low apparent velocity, and high amplitude, therefore obscures the reflection events of seismic shot gathers. Commonly used techniques focus on the differences of ground-roll and reflection in transformed domain such as $f-k$ domain, wavelet domain, or curvelet domain. These approaches use a series of fixed atoms or bases to transform the data in time-space domain into transformed domain to separate different waveforms, thus tend to suffer from the complexity for a delicate design of the parameters of the transform domain filter. To deal with these problems, a novel way is proposed to separate ground-roll from reflections using convolutional neural network (CNN) model based method to learn to extract the features of ground-roll and reflections automatically based on training data. In the proposed method, low-pass filtered seismic data which is contaminated by ground-roll wave is used as input of CNN, and then outputs both ground-roll component and low-frequency part of reflection component simultaneously. Discriminative loss is applied together with similarity loss in the training process to enhance the similarity to their train labels as well as the difference between the two outputs. Experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real data, showing that CNN based method can separate ground roll from reflections effectively, and has generalization ability to a certain extent.

Mengqiu Zhou, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Meng Zhang

Real-time status updating applications increasingly rely on networks of devices and edge nodes to maintain data freshness, as quantified by the age of information (AoI) metric. Given that edge computing nodes exhibit uncertain and time-varying dynamics, it is essential to identify the optimal edge node with high confidence and sample efficiency, even without prior knowledge of these dynamics, to ensure timely updates. To address this challenge, we introduce the first best arm identification (BAI) problem aimed at minimizing the long-term average AoI under a fixed confidence setting, framed within the context of a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) model. In this model, each arm evolves independently according to an unknown Markov chain over time, regardless of whether it is selected. To capture the temporal trajectories of AoI in the presence of unknown restless dynamics, we develop an age-aware LUCB algorithm that incorporates Markovian sampling. Additionally, we establish an instance-dependent upper bound on the sample complexity, which captures the difficulty of the problem as a function of the underlying Markov mixing behavior. Moreover, we derive an information-theoretic lower bound to characterize the fundamental challenges of the problem. We show that the sample complexity is influenced by the temporal correlation of the Markov dynamics, aligning with the intuition offered by the upper bound. Our numerical results show that, compared to existing benchmarks, the proposed scheme significantly reduces sampling costs, particularly under more stringent confidence levels.

Xiaodi Chen, Meng Zhang, Zhengguang Wu et al.

Load frequency control (LFC) is widely employed in power systems to stabilize frequency fluctuation and guarantee power quality. However, most existing LFC methods rely on accurate power system modeling and usually ignore the nonlinear characteristics of the system, limiting controllers' performance. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a model-free LFC method for nonlinear power systems based on deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) framework. The proposed method establishes an emulator network to emulate power system dynamics. After defining the action-value function, the emulator network is applied for control actions evaluation instead of the critic network. Then the actor network controller is effectively optimized by estimating the policy gradient based on zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) and backpropagation algorithm. Simulation results and corresponding comparisons demonstrate the designed controller can generate appropriate control actions and has strong adaptability for nonlinear power systems.

Xin Li, Yeying Jin, Xin Jin et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

Iqra Aslam, Nour Habib, Abhishek Buragohain et al.

The advancement of automated vehicles introduces complex safety challenges, particularly in dynamic and unpredictable environments where AI-enabled perception systems must operate reliably. Ensuring compliance with safety standards such as ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 (SOTIF) is essential for addressing system malfunctions and mitigating unsafe behavior in unknown scenarios. However, as automation levels increase, vehicles must go beyond conventional functional safety by incorporating fail-operational capabilities that enable continued safe operation during system or component failures and the handling of unfamiliar or degraded operational conditions. To address these safety concerns, we propose the Connected Dependability Cage, an architectural framework designed to enable hierarchical fail-operational behavior in AI-enabled perception systems. This framework integrates two complementary monitoring mechanisms: a Function Monitor that oversees multiple heterogeneous AI-based perception pipelines and detects inconsistencies through a voting mechanism, and an Anomaly Monitor that evaluates the reliability of AI perception by detecting unknown or novel objects in scenes that may be excluded from the training dataset. In the presence of critical discrepancies, the system supports graceful degradation, ultimately enabling a transition to a minimal-risk maneuver strategy. Furthermore, whenever either monitor raises a safety flag, an automated data recording process is initiated to facilitate iterative system development and continuous improvement. Both monitors have been implemented and validated through extensive vehicle testing, demonstrating their practical effectiveness in real-world applications.

Meng Zhang, Dennis Yin, Nicholas Gangi et al.

Electronic-photonic computing systems offer immense potential in energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration tasks due to the superior computing speed and efficiency of optics, especially for real-time, low-energy deep neural network (DNN) inference tasks on resource-restricted edge platforms. However, current optical neural accelerators based on foundry-available devices and conventional system architecture still encounter a performance gap compared to highly customized electronic counterparts. To bridge the performance gap due to lack of domain specialization, we present a time-multiplexed dynamic photonic tensor accelerator, dubbed TeMPO, with cross-layer device/circuit/architecture customization. At the device level, we present foundry-compatible, customized photonic devices, including a slow-light electro-optic modulator with experimental demonstration, optical splitters, and phase shifters that significantly reduce the footprint and power in input encoding and dot-product calculation. At the circuit level, partial products are hierarchically accumulated via parallel photocurrent aggregation, lightweight capacitive temporal integration, and sequential digital summation, considerably relieving the analog-to-digital conversion bottleneck. We also employ a multi-tile, multi-core architecture to maximize hardware sharing for higher efficiency. Across diverse edge AI workloads, TeMPO delivers digital-comparable task accuracy with superior quantization/noise tolerance. We achieve a 368.6 TOPS peak performance, 22.3 TOPS/W energy efficiency, and 1.2 TOPS/mm$^2$ compute density, pushing the Pareto frontier in edge AI hardware. This work signifies the power of cross-layer co-design and domain-specific customization, paving the way for future electronic-photonic accelerators with even greater performance and efficiency.

Desen Meng, Rui Huang, Zhilin Dai et al.

While recent advances in reinforcement learning have significantly enhanced reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), these techniques remain underexplored in multi-modal LLMs for video captioning. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of GRPO-based RL post-training for video MLLMs, with the goal of enhancing video MLLMs' capability of describing actions in videos. Specifically, we develop the VideoCap-R1, which is prompted to first perform structured thinking that analyzes video subjects with their attributes and actions before generating complete captions, supported by two specialized reward mechanisms: a LLM-free think scorer evaluating the structured thinking quality and a LLM-assisted caption scorer assessing the output quality. The RL training framework effectively establishes the connection between structured reasoning and comprehensive description generation, enabling the model to produce captions with more accurate actions. Our experiments demonstrate that VideoCap-R1 achieves substantial improvements over the Qwen2VL-7B baseline using limited samples (1.5k) across multiple video caption benchmarks (DREAM1K: +4.4 event F1, VDC: +4.2 Acc, CAREBENCH: +3.1 action F1, +6.9 object F1) while consistently outperforming the SFT-trained counterparts, confirming GRPO's superiority in enhancing MLLMs' captioning capabilities.

Lyudong Jin, Ming Tang, Meng Zhang et al.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm for real-time applications with intensive computational needs (e.g., autonomous driving), as it can reduce the processing delay. In this work, we focus on the timeliness of computational-intensive updates, measured by Age-ofInformation (AoI), and study how to jointly optimize the task updating and offloading policies for AoI with fractional form. Specifically, we consider edge load dynamics and formulate a task scheduling problem to minimize the expected time-average AoI. The uncertain edge load dynamics, the nature of the fractional objective, and hybrid continuous-discrete action space (due to the joint optimization) make this problem challenging and existing approaches not directly applicable. To this end, we propose a fractional reinforcement learning(RL) framework and prove its convergence. We further design a model-free fractional deep RL (DRL) algorithm, where each device makes scheduling decisions with the hybrid action space without knowing the system dynamics and decisions of other devices. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms reduce the average AoI by up to 57.6% compared with several non-fractional benchmarks.

Jianyuan Zhang, Zhiliu Yang, Meng Zhang

Large-scale semantic mapping is crucial for outdoor autonomous agents to fulfill high-level tasks such as planning and navigation. This paper proposes a novel method for large-scale 3D semantic reconstruction through implicit representations from posed LiDAR measurements alone. We first leverage an octree-based and hierarchical structure to store implicit features, then these implicit features are decoded to semantic information and signed distance value through shallow Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). We adopt off-the-shelf algorithms to predict the semantic labels and instance IDs of point clouds. We then jointly optimize the feature embeddings and MLPs parameters with a self-supervision paradigm for point cloud geometry and a pseudo-supervision paradigm for semantic and panoptic labels. Subsequently, categories and geometric structures for novel points are regressed, and marching cubes are exploited to subdivide and visualize the scenes in the inferring stage. For scenarios with memory constraints, a map stitching strategy is also developed to merge sub-maps into a complete map. Experiments on two real-world datasets, SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS, demonstrate the superior segmentation efficiency and mapping effectiveness of our framework compared to current state-of-the-art 3D LiDAR mapping methods.

Yaozu Wu, Jizhou Guo, Dongyuan Li et al.

Effective guardrails are essential for safely deploying LLM-based agents in critical applications. Despite recent advances, existing guardrails suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) they apply uniform guardrail policies to all users, ignoring that the same agent behavior can harm some users while being safe for others; (ii) they check each response in isolation, missing how risks evolve and accumulate across multiple interactions. To solve these issues, we propose PSG-Agent, a personalized and dynamic system for LLM-based agents. First, PSG-Agent creates personalized guardrails by mining the interaction history for stable traits and capturing real-time states from current queries, generating user-specific risk thresholds and protection strategies. Second, PSG-Agent implements continuous monitoring across the agent pipeline with specialized guards, including Plan Monitor, Tool Firewall, Response Guard, Memory Guardian, that track cross-turn risk accumulation and issue verifiable verdicts. Finally, we validate PSG-Agent in multiple scenarios including healthcare, finance, and daily life automation scenarios with diverse user profiles. It significantly outperform existing agent guardrails including LlamaGuard3 and AGrail, providing an executable and auditable path toward personalized safety for LLM-based agents.

Xinbao Qiao, Meng Zhang, Ming Tang et al.

Machine unlearning strives to uphold the data owners' right to be forgotten by enabling models to selectively forget specific data. Recent advances suggest pre-computing and storing statistics extracted from second-order information and implementing unlearning through Newton-style updates. However, the Hessian matrix operations are extremely costly and previous works conduct unlearning for empirical risk minimizer with the convexity assumption, precluding their applicability to high-dimensional over-parameterized models and the nonconvergence condition. In this paper, we propose an efficient Hessian-free unlearning approach. The key idea is to maintain a statistical vector for each training data, computed through affine stochastic recursion of the difference between the retrained and learned models. We prove that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the unlearning and generalization guarantees, the deletion capacity, and the time/storage complexity, under the same regularity conditions. Through the strategy of recollecting statistics for removing data, we develop an online unlearning algorithm that achieves near-instantaneous data removal, as it requires only vector addition. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme surpasses existing results by orders of magnitude in terms of time/storage costs with millisecond-level unlearning execution, while also enhancing test accuracy.

Fu Peng, Meng Zhang, Ming Tang

Recent studies in federated learning (FL) commonly train models on static datasets. However, real-world data often arrives as streams with shifting distributions, causing performance degradation known as concept drift. This paper analyzes FL performance under concept drift using information theory and proposes an algorithm to mitigate the performance degradation. We model concept drift as a Markov chain and introduce the \emph{Stationary Generalization Error} to assess a model's capability to capture characteristics of future unseen data. Its upper bound is derived using KL divergence and mutual information. We study three drift patterns (periodic, gradual, and random) and their impact on FL performance. Inspired by this, we propose an algorithm that regularizes the empirical risk minimization approach with KL divergence and mutual information, thereby enhancing long-term performance. We also explore the performance-cost tradeoff by identifying a Pareto front. To validate our approach, we build an FL testbed using Raspberry Pi4 devices. Experimental results corroborate with theoretical findings, confirming that drift patterns significantly affect performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing approaches for these three patterns, demonstrating its effectiveness in adapting concept drift in FL.

Iqra Aslam, Abhishek Buragohain, Daniel Bamal et al.

Environment perception is a fundamental part of the dynamic driving task executed by Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches have prevailed over classical techniques for realizing the environment perception. Current safety-relevant standards for automotive systems, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26262 and ISO 21448, assume the existence of comprehensive requirements specifications. These specifications serve as the basis on which the functionality of an automotive system can be rigorously tested and checked for compliance with safety regulations. However, AI-based perception systems do not have complete requirements specification. Instead, large datasets are used to train AI-based perception systems. This paper presents a function monitor for the functional runtime monitoring of a two-folded AI-based environment perception for ADS, based respectively on camera and LiDAR sensors. To evaluate the applicability of the function monitor, we conduct a qualitative scenario-based evaluation in a controlled laboratory environment using a model car. The evaluation results then are discussed to provide insights into the monitor's performance and its suitability for real-world applications.

Meng Zhang, Jun Li

Achieving efficient, high-fidelity, high-resolution garment simulation is challenging due to its computational demands. Conversely, low-resolution garment simulation is more accessible and ideal for low-budget devices like smartphones. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight, learning-based method for garment dynamic super-resolution, designed to efficiently enhance high-resolution, high-frequency details in low-resolution garment simulations. Starting with low-resolution garment simulation and underlying body motion, we utilize a mesh-graph-net to compute super-resolution features based on coarse garment dynamics and garment-body interactions. These features are then used by a hyper-net to construct an implicit function of detailed wrinkle residuals for each coarse mesh triangle. Considering the influence of coarse garment shapes on detailed wrinkle performance, we correct the coarse garment shape and predict detailed wrinkle residuals using these implicit functions. Finally, we generate detailed high-resolution garment geometry by applying the detailed wrinkle residuals to the corrected coarse garment. Our method enables roll-out prediction by iteratively using its predictions as input for subsequent frames, producing fine-grained wrinkle details to enhance the low-resolution simulation. Despite training on a small dataset, our network robustly generalizes to different body shapes, motions, and garment types not present in the training data. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art alternatives, particularly in enhancing the quality of high-frequency, fine-grained wrinkle details.