Faisal Nadeem Khan

Fanding Huang, Jingyan Jiang, Qinting Jiang et al.

Recent vision-language models (VLMs) face significant challenges in test-time adaptation to novel domains. While cache-based methods show promise by leveraging historical information, they struggle with both caching unreliable feature-label pairs and indiscriminately using single-class information during querying, significantly compromising adaptation accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose COSMIC (Clique-Oriented Semantic Multi-space Integration for CLIP), a robust test-time adaptation framework that enhances adaptability through multi-granular, cross-modal semantic caching and graph-based querying mechanisms. Our framework introduces two key innovations: Dual Semantics Graph (DSG) and Clique Guided Hyper-class (CGH). The Dual Semantics Graph constructs complementary semantic spaces by incorporating textual features, coarse-grained CLIP features, and fine-grained DINOv2 features to capture rich semantic relationships. Building upon these dual graphs, the Clique Guided Hyper-class component leverages structured class relationships to enhance prediction robustness through correlated class selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate COSMIC's superior performance across multiple benchmarks, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods: 15.81% gain on out-of-distribution tasks and 5.33% on cross-domain generation with CLIP RN-50. Code is available at github.com/hf618/COSMIC.

Fanding Huang, Guanbo Huang, Xiao Fan et al.

A prevailing view in Reinforcement Learning for Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) interprets recent progress through the lens of an exploration-exploitation trade-off, a perspective largely shaped by token-level metrics. We re-examine this perspective, proposing that this perceived trade-off may not be a fundamental constraint but rather an artifact of the measurement level. To investigate this, we shift the analysis to the semantically rich hidden-state space, adopting Effective Rank (ER) to quantify exploration and proposing its novel first- and second-order derivatives, named Effective Rank Velocity (ERV) and Effective Rank Acceleration (ERA), to capture exploitation dynamics. Our analysis reveals that at the hidden-state level, exploration and exploitation could be decoupled (Sec. 4). This finding reveals an opportunity to enhance both capacities simultaneously. This insight motivates our method, Velocity-Exploiting Rank-Learning (VERL), the first to operationalize the principle of synergistic exploration-exploitation enhancement by directly shaping the RL advantage function. The key innovation is leveraging the theoretically stable ERA as a predictive meta-controller to create a synergistic, dual-channel incentive structure. Instead of forcing a trade-off, VERL prospectively amplifies rewards for exploration to preempt overconfidence and reinforces exploitative gains to consolidate reasoning. Experiments across diverse LLMs and reasoning benchmarks show consistent gains, including up to 21.4% absolute accuracy improvement on the challenging Gaokao 2024 dataset.