Hongyang He

Guohui Cai, Ruicheng Zhang, Hongyang He et al.

Pulmonary nodules are critical indicators for the early diagnosis of lung cancer, making their detection essential for timely treatment. However, traditional CT imaging methods suffered from cumbersome procedures, low detection rates, and poor localization accuracy. The subtle differences between pulmonary nodules and surrounding tissues in complex lung CT images, combined with repeated downsampling in feature extraction networks, often lead to missed or false detections of small nodules. Existing methods such as FPN, with its fixed feature fusion and limited receptive field, struggle to effectively overcome these issues. To address these challenges, our paper proposed three key contributions: Firstly, we proposed MSDet, a multiscale attention and receptive field network for detecting tiny pulmonary nodules. Secondly, we proposed the extended receptive domain (ERD) strategy to capture richer contextual information and reduce false positives caused by nodule occlusion. We also proposed the position channel attention mechanism (PCAM) to optimize feature learning and reduce multiscale detection errors, and designed the tiny object detection block (TODB) to enhance the detection of tiny nodules. Lastly, we conducted thorough experiments on the public LUNA16 dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP improvement of 8.8% over the previous state-of-the-art method YOLOv8. These advancements significantly boosted detection accuracy and reliability, providing a more effective solution for early lung cancer diagnosis. The code will be available at https://github.com/CaiGuoHui123/MSDet

Liuzhou Zhang, Zeyu Zhang, Biao Wu et al.

Sign language plays a crucial role in bridging communication gaps between the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. However, existing sign language video generation models often rely on complex intermediate representations, which limits their flexibility and efficiency. In this work, we propose a novel pose-free framework for real-time sign language video generation. Our method eliminates the need for intermediate pose representations by directly mapping natural language text to sign language videos using a diffusion-based approach. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a pose-free generative model based on the a state-of-the-art diffusion backbone, which learns implicit text-to-gesture alignments without pose estimation, and (2) a Trainable Sliding Tile Attention (T-STA) mechanism that accelerates inference by exploiting spatio-temporal locality patterns. Unlike previous training-free sparsity approaches, T-STA integrates trainable sparsity into both training and inference, ensuring consistency and eliminating the train-test gap. This approach significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining high generation quality, making real-time deployment feasible. Our method increases video generation speed by 3.07x without compromising video quality. Our contributions open new avenues for real-time, high-quality, pose-free sign language synthesis, with potential applications in inclusive communication tools for diverse communities. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/FlashSign.

Chak-Wing Mak, Guanyu Zhu, Boyi Zhang et al.

Modern foundational Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and video world models have advanced significantly in mathematical, common-sense, and visual reasoning, but their grasp of the underlying physics remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks attempting to measure this matter rely on synthetic, Visual Question Answer templates or focus on perceptual video quality that is tangential to measuring how well the video abides by physical laws. To address this fragmentation, we introduce PhysicsMind, a unified benchmark with both real and simulation environments that evaluates law-consistent reasoning and generation over three canonical principles: Center of Mass, Lever Equilibrium, and Newton's First Law. PhysicsMind comprises two main tasks: i) VQA tasks, testing whether models can reason and determine physical quantities and values from images or short videos, and ii) Video Generation(VG) tasks, evaluating if predicted motion trajectories obey the same center-of-mass, torque, and inertial constraints as the ground truth. A broad range of recent models and video generation models is evaluated on PhysicsMind and found to rely on appearance heuristics while often violating basic mechanics. These gaps indicate that current scaling and training are still insufficient for robust physical understanding, underscoring PhysicsMind as a focused testbed for physics-aware multimodal models. Our data will be released upon acceptance.

Qiang Yi, Yangfan He, Jianhui Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate creative and engaging narratives from user-specified input, but maintaining coherence and emotional depth throughout these AI-generated stories remains a challenge. In this work, we propose SCORE, a framework for Story Coherence and Retrieval Enhancement, designed to detect and resolve narrative inconsistencies. By tracking key item statuses and generating episode summaries, SCORE uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to identify related episodes and enhance the overall story structure. Experimental results from testing multiple LLM-generated stories demonstrate that SCORE significantly improves the consistency and stability of narrative coherence compared to baseline GPT models, providing a more robust method for evaluating and refining AI-generated narratives.

Hongyang Xie, Hongyang He, Victor Sanchez

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) remains a long-standing challenge due to weak signal contrast, limited spatial extent, and cluttered backgrounds. Despite performance improvements from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs), current models lack a mechanism to trace how small targets trigger directional, layer-wise perturbations in the feature space, which is an essential cue for distinguishing signal from structured noise in infrared scenes. To address this limitation, we propose the Trajectory-Aware Mamba Propagation Network (TAPM-Net), which explicitly models the spatial diffusion behavior of target-induced feature disturbances. TAPM-Net is built upon two novel components: a Perturbation-guided Path Module (PGM) and a Trajectory-Aware State Block (TASB). The PGM constructs perturbation energy fields from multi-level features and extracts gradient-following feature trajectories that reflect the directionality of local responses. The resulting feature trajectories are fed into the TASB, a Mamba-based state-space unit that models dynamic propagation along each trajectory while incorporating velocity-constrained diffusion and semantically aligned feature fusion from word-level and sentence-level embeddings. Unlike existing attention-based methods, TAPM-Net enables anisotropic, context-sensitive state transitions along spatial trajectories while maintaining global coherence at low computational cost. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1K demonstrate that TAPM-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in ISTD.

Yangfan He, Jianhui Wang, Yijin Wang et al.

Current image generation systems produce high-quality images but struggle with ambiguous user prompts, making interpretation of actual user intentions difficult. Many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our dataset and annotation tools will be available.

Yanshu Li, Yi Cao, Hongyang He et al.

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) equips Large Vision-language Models (LVLMs) with the ability to adapt to new tasks via multiple user-provided demonstrations, without requiring any model parameter updates. However, its effectiveness is constrained by the token-intensive nature of multimodal inputs and the complexity of cross-modal few-shot reasoning, which together hinder LVLMs from extracting useful patterns from demonstrations. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{M$^2$IV}, a novel representation engineering approach that replaces explicit token-level demonstrations with a set of learnable Multimodal In-context Vectors directly injected into the residual streams of LVLMs. By analyzing the distinct roles of multi-head attention (MHA) and multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) in the ICL process, we design a training strategy that enables M$^2$IV to perform fine-grained semantic distillation and robust cross-modal representation learning. M$^2$IV not only improves performance across diverse tasks and LVLMs but also significantly reduces token overhead, enabling graceful scaling to many-shot scenarios. To further enhance usability, we introduce \textbf{VLibrary}, a repository that stores trained M$^2$IVs for flexible retrieval and injection. With VLibrary, users can steer pre-trained LVLMs in a customized manner that meets diverse requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that M$^2$IV consistently outperforms vanilla ICL and prior representation engineering baselines, achieving an average accuracy gain of 3.74\% with substantial improvements in overall efficiency.

Yanshu Li, Jianjiang Yang, Ziteng Yang et al.

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) is emerging as a key capability that enables large vision-language models (LVLMs) to adapt to novel tasks without parameter updates, expanding their utility across various real-world applications. However, ICL remains unstable, even with well-matched in-context demonstrations (ICDs), suggesting that LVLMs struggle to fully utilize the provided context. While existing efforts focus on prompt engineering or post-hoc logit calibration, we instead investigate the underlying attention dynamics to overcome LVLMs' inherent limitations. We identify two critical deficits in their self-attention that impair effective ICL. To bridge the gap, we propose \textbf{Context-Aware Modulated Attention} (CAMA), a plug-and-play and training-free method that dynamically modulates LVLM's attention logits based on the input in-context sequence. CAMA employs a two-stage attention modulation to address both identified deficits, enhancing the focus on semantically significant tokens, particularly visual ones. Across four LVLMs and seven benchmarks, CAMA consistently outperforms vanilla models and baselines, demonstrating great effectiveness and generalization. It can also activate the desired effects of prompt engineering methods and remains robust under diverse sequence configurations. Thus, CAMA paves the way for deeper explorations of attention dynamics to advance multimodal reasoning.

Jianhui Wang, Yangfan He, Yan Zhong et al.

Modern text-to-image generation systems have enabled the creation of remarkably realistic and high-quality visuals, yet they often falter when handling the inherent ambiguities in user prompts. In this work, we present Twin-Co, a framework that leverages synchronized, co-adaptive dialogue to progressively refine image generation. Instead of a static generation process, Twin-Co employs a dynamic, iterative workflow where an intelligent dialogue agent continuously interacts with the user. Initially, a base image is generated from the user's prompt. Then, through a series of synchronized dialogue exchanges, the system adapts and optimizes the image according to evolving user feedback. The co-adaptive process allows the system to progressively narrow down ambiguities and better align with user intent. Experiments demonstrate that Twin-Co not only enhances user experience by reducing trial-and-error iterations but also improves the quality of the generated images, streamlining the creative process across various applications.

Haochen You, Baojing Liu, Hongyang He

One-step generative modeling seeks to generate high-quality data samples in a single function evaluation, significantly improving efficiency over traditional diffusion or flow-based models. In this work, we introduce Modular MeanFlow (MMF), a flexible and theoretically grounded approach for learning time-averaged velocity fields. Our method derives a family of loss functions based on a differential identity linking instantaneous and average velocities, and incorporates a gradient modulation mechanism that enables stable training without sacrificing expressiveness. We further propose a curriculum-style warmup schedule to smoothly transition from coarse supervision to fully differentiable training. The MMF formulation unifies and generalizes existing consistency-based and flow-matching methods, while avoiding expensive higher-order derivatives. Empirical results across image synthesis and trajectory modeling tasks demonstrate that MMF achieves competitive sample quality, robust convergence, and strong generalization, particularly under low-data or out-of-distribution settings.

Yanbin Li, Canran Xiao, Hongyang He et al.

Particle filter-based 2D-SLAM is widely used in indoor localization tasks due to its efficiency. However, indoor environments such as long straight corridors can cause severe degeneracy problems in SLAM. In this paper, we use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to train an adaptive degeneracy optimization agent (DOA) to address degeneracy problem. We propose a systematic methodology to address three critical challenges in traditional supervised learning frameworks: (1) data acquisition bottlenecks in degenerate dataset, (2) inherent quality deterioration of training samples, and (3) ambiguity in annotation protocol design. We design a specialized reward function to guide the agent in developing perception capabilities for degenerate environments. Using the output degeneracy factor as a reference weight, the agent can dynamically adjust the contribution of different sensors to pose optimization. Specifically, the observation distribution is shifted towards the motion model distribution, with the step size determined by a linear interpolation formula related to the degeneracy factor. In addition, we employ a transfer learning module to endow the agent with generalization capabilities across different environments and address the inefficiency of training in degenerate environments. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate the rationality of our model design and the role of transfer learning. We also compare the proposed DOA with SOTA methods to prove its superior degeneracy detection and optimization capabilities across various environments.

Yang Dai, Jianxiang An, Tianwei Lin et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved success across various domains. However, their applicability tends to degrade when confronted with different types of data inputs, especially for MLLMs that have been fine-tuned for specific tasks. Despite its importance, the study of knowledge sharing among domain-specific MLLMs--such as those trained for mathematics or code--remains largely underexplored. To address the fragmentation of knowledge across domain-specialized MLLMs, we propose a unified parameter integration framework that enables modular composition of expert capabilities. Our method is grounded in a novel Compatibility-Aware Parameter Splicing (CAPS) strategy, which leverages both local functional attribution and global information-theoretic signals to guide selective parameter fusion. By extending this mechanism to the low-rank adaptation layer granularity, we ensure efficient integration with minimal inference overhead. Furthermore, we introduce a domain compatibility scoring mechanism that quantifies inter-expert alignment at the activation level and correlates with downstream task utility. This principled fusion protocol allows the final model to synergize heterogeneous expertise while preserving structural modularity. Extensive evaluations across diverse multimodal benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our framework, offering a scalable path toward compositional, domain-adaptive MLLMs.

Haochen You, Heng Zhang, Hongyang He et al.

Vector quantization (VQ) underpins modern generative and representation models by turning continuous latents into discrete tokens. Yet hard nearest-neighbor assignments are non-differentiable and are typically optimized with heuristic straight-through estimators, which couple the update step size to the quantization gap and train each code in isolation, leading to unstable gradients and severe codebook under-utilization at scale. In this paper, we introduce GRIT-VQ (Generalized Radius and Integrated Transform-Vector Quantization), a unified surrogate framework that keeps hard assignments in the forward pass while making VQ fully differentiable. GRIT-VQ replaces the straight-through estimator with a radius-based update that moves latents along the quantization direction with a controllable, geometry-aware step, and applies a data-agnostic integrated transform to the codebook so that all codes are updated through shared parameters instead of independently. Our theoretical analysis clarifies the fundamental optimization dynamics introduced by GRIT-VQ, establishing conditions for stable gradient flow, coordinated codebook evolution, and reliable avoidance of collapse across a broad family of quantizers. Across image reconstruction, image generation, and recommendation tokenization benchmarks, GRIT-VQ consistently improves reconstruction error, generative quality, and recommendation accuracy while substantially increasing codebook utilization compared to existing VQ variants.

Guilin Zhang, Wulan Guo, Ziqi Tan et al.

Quantum machine learning (QML) promises compact and expressive representations, but suffers from the measurement bottleneck - a narrow quantum-to-classical readout that limits performance and amplifies privacy risk. We propose a lightweight residual hybrid architecture that concatenates quantum features with raw inputs before classification, bypassing the bottleneck without increasing quantum complexity. Experiments show our model outperforms pure quantum and prior hybrid models in both centralized and federated settings. It achieves up to +55% accuracy improvement over quantum baselines, while retaining low communication cost and enhanced privacy robustness. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the residual connection at the quantum-classical interface. Our method offers a practical, near-term pathway for integrating quantum models into privacy-sensitive, resource-constrained settings like federated edge learning.

Haoyu Zheng, Zhuonan Wang, Yuqian Yuan et al.

Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on generating explicit tokens step by step, and their effectiveness typically hinges on large-scale supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques substantially enhance performance on complex reasoning tasks, they remain inefficient, requiring long reasoning traces that increase latency and token usage. In this work, we introduce Latent Codebooks for Fast Thinking, a framework that uses concise CoT sketches only during training to learn a codebook of discrete strategy priors. At inference, the model conditions on a handful of continuous thinking vectors distilled from the codebook in a single pass, enabling strategy-level guidance without producing explicit reasoning tokens. To complement this design, we propose GainRouter, a lightweight routing mechanism that adaptively switches between fast codebook guided inference and slow explicit reasoning, thereby suppressing overthinking and reducing unnecessary token generation. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that our approach achieves competitive or superior accuracy while substantially lowering inference cost, offering a practical path toward efficient and controllable reasoning in large language models.

Hongyang He, Xinyuan Song, Yangfan He et al.

We introduce TRiCo, a novel triadic game-theoretic co-training framework that rethinks the structure of semi-supervised learning by incorporating a teacher, two students, and an adversarial generator into a unified training paradigm. Unlike existing co-training or teacher-student approaches, TRiCo formulates SSL as a structured interaction among three roles: (i) two student classifiers trained on frozen, complementary representations, (ii) a meta-learned teacher that adaptively regulates pseudo-label selection and loss balancing via validation-based feedback, and (iii) a non-parametric generator that perturbs embeddings to uncover decision boundary weaknesses. Pseudo-labels are selected based on mutual information rather than confidence, providing a more robust measure of epistemic uncertainty. This triadic interaction is formalized as a Stackelberg game, where the teacher leads strategy optimization and students follow under adversarial perturbations. By addressing key limitations in existing SSL frameworks, such as static view interactions, unreliable pseudo-labels, and lack of hard sample modeling, TRiCo provides a principled and generalizable solution. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, SVHN, STL-10, and ImageNet demonstrate that TRiCo consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in low-label regimes, while remaining architecture-agnostic and compatible with frozen vision backbones.

Kun Li, Jianhui Wang, Yangfan He et al.

Generative AI has significantly changed industries by enabling text-driven image generation, yet challenges remain in achieving high-resolution outputs that align with fine-grained user preferences. Consequently, multi-round interactions are necessary to ensure the generated images meet expectations. Previous methods enhanced prompts via reward feedback but did not optimize over a multi-round dialogue dataset. In this work, we present a Visual Co-Adaptation (VCA) framework incorporating human-in-the-loop feedback, leveraging a well-trained reward model aligned with human preferences. Using a diverse multi-turn dialogue dataset, our framework applies multiple reward functions, such as diversity, consistency, and preference feedback, while fine-tuning the diffusion model through LoRA, thus optimizing image generation based on user input. We also construct multi-round dialogue datasets of prompts and image pairs aligned with user intent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly improving image consistency and alignment with user intent. Our approach consistently surpasses competing models in user satisfaction, especially in multi-turn dialogue scenarios.

Xinyuan Song, Yangfan He, Sida Li et al.

Adapter-based methods are commonly used to enhance model performance with minimal additional complexity, especially in video editing tasks that require frame-to-frame consistency. By inserting small, learnable modules into pretrained diffusion models, these adapters can maintain temporal coherence without extensive retraining. Approaches that incorporate prompt learning with both shared and frame-specific tokens are particularly effective in preserving continuity across frames at low training cost. In this work, we want to provide a general theoretical framework for adapters that maintain frame consistency in DDIM-based models under a temporal consistency loss. First, we prove that the temporal consistency objective is differentiable under bounded feature norms, and we establish a Lipschitz bound on its gradient. Second, we show that gradient descent on this objective decreases the loss monotonically and converges to a local minimum if the learning rate is within an appropriate range. Finally, we analyze the stability of modules in the DDIM inversion procedure, showing that the associated error remains controlled. These theoretical findings will reinforce the reliability of diffusion-based video editing methods that rely on adapter strategies and provide theoretical insights in video generation tasks.