Zhuofan Chen

AI
h-index27
14papers
126citations
Novelty47%
AI Score59

14 Papers

AIMay 27Code
DiagramRAG: A Lightweight Framework to Retrieve Scientific Diagram for Figure Generation

Xinjiang Yu, Junyi Han, Zhuofan Chen et al.

Scientific diagrams are essential for communicating complex methodologies in academic papers. A natural way for researchers to specify such diagrams is through rough sketches, where text labels, connectors, and spatial arrangements express early semantic and topological intentions. However, sketches are usually incomplete, making them insufficient for directly producing publication-quality diagrams. Existing sketch-based generation methods mainly reconstruct the sketch itself, while recent text-driven diagram generation frameworks rely on textual semantics and do not fully exploit the topological structure contained in sketches. In this paper, we introduce DiagramRAG, a lightweight retrieval-augmented framework for sketch-based scientific diagram completion. Given a user sketch, DiagramRAG retrieves reference diagrams that are both semantically relevant to the sketch content and topologically compatible with its structure, and uses them to guide downstream diagram generation. To enable efficient structure-aware retrieval, we represent diagrams as knowledge graphs, synthesize sketch variants at different simplification levels, and train an embedding model to align sketches with compatible diagrams in a shared space. The retrieved references further provide content, topology, and visual priors for completing and rendering the final diagram. Experiments show that DiagramRAG achieves F1-scores of 0.848 and 0.802 on DiagramBank and FigureBench, respectively, and improves generation quality with the best VLM-as-a-Judge score of 7.170, while reducing inference latency to 35.48 seconds per sample. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DiagramRAG-A262 and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous-review-a262/DiagramSketch.

AIMay 28
Xetrieval: Mechanistically Explaining Dense Retrieval

Zhixin Cai, Jun Bai, Yang Liu et al.

Explaining why dense retrievers assign high relevance scores remains challenging because retrieval decisions are made through opaque high-dimensional embeddings. Existing explanations often focus on surface signals, such as lexical matches, token alignments, or post-hoc textual rationales, and thus provide limited insight into the latent factors that shape dense retrieval behavior at the embedding level. We propose \textit{Xetrieval}, an embedding-level mechanistic framework for explaining dense retrieval. \textit{Xetrieval} first introduces a lightweight reasoning internalizer that approximates Chain-of-Thought reasoning directly in the embedding space with a single forward pass, enriching sentence embeddings with reasoning-oriented information while avoiding expensive autoregressive generation. It then decomposes these reasoning-enhanced embeddings into sparse, human-interpretable features, each associated with a coherent natural language description. By aggregating sparse feature overlaps across multiple document-side views, \textit{Xetrieval} provides feature-level explanations of individual retrieval decisions. Experiments on diverse retrievers and benchmarks show that \textit{Xetrieval} uncovers coherent interpretable features, yields stronger pair-level intervention effects, and supports task-level feature steering. The project page and source code are available at https://hihiczx.github.io/Xetrieval .

AIJan 23Code
LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601 Technical Report

Meituan LongCat Team, Anchun Gui, Bei Li et al.

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601, a 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) reasoning model with superior agentic reasoning capability. LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601 achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on a wide range of agentic benchmarks, including agentic search, agentic tool use, and tool-integrated reasoning. Beyond benchmark performance, the model demonstrates strong generalization to complex tool interactions and robust behavior under noisy real-world environments. Its advanced capability stems from a unified training framework that combines domain-parallel expert training with subsequent fusion, together with an end-to-end co-design of data construction, environments, algorithms, and infrastructure spanning from pre-training to post-training. In particular, the model's strong generalization capability in complex tool-use are driven by our in-depth exploration of environment scaling and principled task construction. To optimize long-tailed, skewed generation and multi-turn agentic interactions, and to enable stable training across over 10,000 environments spanning more than 20 domains, we systematically extend our asynchronous reinforcement learning framework, DORA, for stable and efficient large-scale multi-environment training. Furthermore, recognizing that real-world tasks are inherently noisy, we conduct a systematic analysis and decomposition of real-world noise patterns, and design targeted training procedures to explicitly incorporate such imperfections into the training process, resulting in improved robustness for real-world applications. To further enhance performance on complex reasoning tasks, we introduce a Heavy Thinking mode that enables effective test-time scaling by jointly expanding reasoning depth and width through intensive parallel thinking.

CVDec 29, 2025Code
CME-CAD: Heterogeneous Collaborative Multi-Expert Reinforcement Learning for CAD Code Generation

Ke Niu, Haiyang Yu, Zhuofan Chen et al.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is essential in industrial design, but the complexity of traditional CAD modeling and workflows presents significant challenges for automating the generation of high-precision, editable CAD models. Existing methods that reconstruct 3D models from sketches often produce non-editable and approximate models that fall short of meeting the stringent requirements for precision and editability in industrial design. Moreover, the reliance on text or image-based inputs often requires significant manual annotation, limiting their scalability and applicability in industrial settings. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Heterogeneous Collaborative Multi-Expert Reinforcement Learning (CME-CAD) paradigm, a novel training paradigm for CAD code generation. Our approach integrates the complementary strengths of these models, facilitating collaborative learning and improving the model's ability to generate accurate, constraint-compatible, and fully editable CAD models. We introduce a two-stage training process: Multi-Expert Fine-Tuning (MEFT), and Multi-Expert Reinforcement Learning (MERL). Additionally, we present CADExpert, an open-source benchmark consisting of 17,299 instances, including orthographic projections with precise dimension annotations, expert-generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) processes, executable CADQuery code, and rendered 3D models.

CLSep 1, 2025Code
LongCat-Flash Technical Report

Meituan LongCat Team, Bayan, Bei Li et al.

We introduce LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed for both computational efficiency and advanced agentic capabilities. Stemming from the need for scalable efficiency, LongCat-Flash adopts two novel designs: (a) Zero-computation Experts, which enables dynamic computational budget allocation and activates 18.6B-31.3B (27B on average) per token depending on contextual demands, optimizing resource usage. (b) Shortcut-connected MoE, which enlarges the computation-communication overlap window, demonstrating notable gains in inference efficiency and throughput compared to models of a comparable scale. We develop a comprehensive scaling framework for large models that combines hyperparameter transfer, model-growth initialization, a multi-pronged stability suite, and deterministic computation to achieve stable and reproducible training. Notably, leveraging the synergy among scalable architectural design and infrastructure efforts, we complete model training on more than 20 trillion tokens within 30 days, while achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for inference at a cost of \$0.70 per million output tokens. To cultivate LongCat-Flash towards agentic intelligence, we conduct a large-scale pre-training on optimized mixtures, followed by targeted mid- and post-training on reasoning, code, and instructions, with further augmentation from synthetic data and tool use tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, as a non-thinking foundation model, LongCat-Flash delivers highly competitive performance among other leading models, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks. The model checkpoint of LongCat-Flash is open-sourced to foster community research. LongCat Chat: https://longcat.ai Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat

AISep 24, 2024
Leveraging Estimated Transferability Over Human Intuition for Model Selection in Text Ranking

Jun Bai, Zhuofan Chen, Zhenzi Li et al.

Text ranking has witnessed significant advancements, attributed to the utilization of dual-encoder enhanced by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Given the proliferation of available PLMs, selecting the most effective one for a given dataset has become a non-trivial challenge. As a promising alternative to human intuition and brute-force fine-tuning, Transferability Estimation (TE) has emerged as an effective approach to model selection. However, current TE methods are primarily designed for classification tasks, and their estimated transferability may not align well with the objectives of text ranking. To address this challenge, we propose to compute the expected rank as transferability, explicitly reflecting the model's ranking capability. Furthermore, to mitigate anisotropy and incorporate training dynamics, we adaptively scale isotropic sentence embeddings to yield an accurate expected rank score. Our resulting method, Adaptive Ranking Transferability (AiRTran), can effectively capture subtle differences between models. On challenging model selection scenarios across various text ranking datasets, it demonstrates significant improvements over previous classification-oriented TE methods, human intuition, and ChatGPT with minor time consumption.

CVMay 31, 2025Code
CReFT-CAD: Boosting Orthographic Projection Reasoning for CAD via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Ke Niu, Zhuofan Chen, Haiyang Yu et al.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a pivotal role in industrial manufacturing. Orthographic projection reasoning underpins the entire CAD workflow, encompassing design, manufacturing, and simulation. However, prevailing deep-learning approaches employ standard 3D reconstruction pipelines as an alternative, which often introduce imprecise dimensions and limit the parametric editability required for CAD workflows. Recently, some researchers adopt vision-language models (VLMs), particularly supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to tackle CAD-related challenges. SFT shows promise but often devolves into pattern memorization, yielding poor out-of-distribution performance on complex reasoning tasks. To address these gaps, we introduce CReFT-CAD, a two-stage fine-tuning paradigm that first employs a curriculum-driven reinforcement learning stage with difficulty-aware rewards to build reasoning ability steadily, and then applies supervised post-tuning to hone instruction following and semantic extraction. Complementing this, we release TriView2CAD, the first large-scale, open-source benchmark for orthographic projection reasoning, comprising 200,000 synthetic and 3,000 real-world orthographic projections with precise dimension annotations and six interoperable data modalities. We benchmark leading VLMs on orthographic projection reasoning and demonstrate that CReFT-CAD substantially improves reasoning accuracy and out-of-distribution generalizability in real-world scenarios, offering valuable insights for advancing CAD reasoning research.

LGDec 21, 2025
The Interaction Bottleneck of Deep Neural Networks: Discovery, Proof, and Modulation

Huiqi Deng, Qihan Ren, Zhuofan Chen et al.

Understanding what kinds of cooperative structures deep neural networks (DNNs) can represent remains a fundamental yet insufficiently understood problem. In this work, we treat interactions as the fundamental units of such structure and investigate a largely unexplored question: how DNNs encode interactions under different levels of contextual complexity, and how these microscopic interaction patterns shape macroscopic representation capacity. To quantify this complexity, we use multi-order interactions [57], where each order reflects the amount of contextual information required to evaluate the joint interaction utility of a variable pair. This formulation enables a stratified analysis of cooperative patterns learned by DNNs. Building on this formulation, we develop a comprehensive study of interaction structure in DNNs. (i) We empirically discover a universal interaction bottleneck: across architectures and tasks, DNNs easily learn low-order and high-order interactions but consistently under-represent mid-order ones. (ii) We theoretically explain this bottleneck by proving that mid-order interactions incur the highest contextual variability, yielding large gradient variance and making them intrinsically difficult to learn. (iii) We further modulate the bottleneck by introducing losses that steer models toward emphasizing interactions of selected orders. Finally, we connect microscopic interaction structures with macroscopic representational behavior: low-order-emphasized models exhibit stronger generalization and robustness, whereas high-order-emphasized models demonstrate greater structural modeling and fitting capability. Together, these results uncover an inherent representational bias in modern DNNs and establish interaction order as a powerful lens for interpreting and guiding deep representations.

AISep 22, 2025Code
CogAtom: From Cognitive Atoms to Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Zhuofan Chen, Jiyuan He, Yichi Zhang et al.

Mathematical reasoning poses significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its demand for multi-step reasoning and abstract conceptual integration. While recent test-time scaling techniques rely heavily on high-quality, challenging problems, the scarcity of Olympiad-level math problems remains a bottleneck. We introduce CogAtom, a novel cognitive atom-based framework for synthesizing mathematically rigorous and cognitively diverse problems. Unlike prior approaches, CogAtom models problem construction as a process of selecting and recombining fundamental reasoning units, cognitive atoms, extracted from human-authored solutions. A diversity-promoting random walk algorithm enables exploration of the cognitive atom space, while a constraint-based recombination mechanism ensures logical soundness and structural validity. The combinatorial nature of the graph structure provides a near-infinite space of reasoning paths, and the walk algorithm systematically explores this space to achieve large-scale synthesis of high-quality problems; meanwhile, by controlling the number of cognitive atoms, we can precisely adjust problem difficulty, ensuring diversity, scalability, and controllability of the generated problems. Experimental results demonstrate that CogAtom outperforms existing methods in accuracy, reasoning depth, and diversity, generating problems that closely match the difficulty of AIME while exceeding it in structural variation. Our work offers a cognitively grounded pathway toward scalable, high-quality math problem generation.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Icarus-1111/CogAtom.

CVJul 3, 2025Code
CrowdTrack: A Benchmark for Difficult Multiple Pedestrian Tracking in Real Scenarios

Teng Fu, Yuwen Chen, Zhuofan Chen et al.

Multi-object tracking is a classic field in computer vision. Among them, pedestrian tracking has extremely high application value and has become the most popular research category. Existing methods mainly use motion or appearance information for tracking, which is often difficult in complex scenarios. For the motion information, mutual occlusions between objects often prevent updating of the motion state; for the appearance information, non-robust results are often obtained due to reasons such as only partial visibility of the object or blurred images. Although learning how to perform tracking in these situations from the annotated data is the simplest solution, the existing MOT dataset fails to satisfy this solution. Existing methods mainly have two drawbacks: relatively simple scene composition and non-realistic scenarios. Although some of the video sequences in existing dataset do not have the above-mentioned drawbacks, the number is far from adequate for research purposes. To this end, we propose a difficult large-scale dataset for multi-pedestrian tracking, shot mainly from the first-person view and all from real-life complex scenarios. We name it ``CrowdTrack'' because there are numerous objects in most of the sequences. Our dataset consists of 33 videos, containing a total of 5,185 trajectories. Each object is annotated with a complete bounding box and a unique object ID. The dataset will provide a platform to facilitate the development of algorithms that remain effective in complex situations. We analyzed the dataset comprehensively and tested multiple SOTA models on our dataset. Besides, we analyzed the performance of the foundation models on our dataset. The dataset and project code is released at: https://github.com/loseevaya/CrowdTrack .

CYFeb 27, 2024
A Review of Data Mining in Personalized Education: Current Trends and Future Prospects

Zhang Xiong, Haoxuan Li, Zhuang Liu et al.

Personalized education, tailored to individual student needs, leverages educational technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital age to enhance learning effectiveness. The integration of AI in educational platforms provides insights into academic performance, learning preferences, and behaviors, optimizing the personal learning process. Driven by data mining techniques, it not only benefits students but also provides educators and institutions with tools to craft customized learning experiences. To offer a comprehensive review of recent advancements in personalized educational data mining, this paper focuses on four primary scenarios: educational recommendation, cognitive diagnosis, knowledge tracing, and learning analysis. This paper presents a structured taxonomy for each area, compiles commonly used datasets, and identifies future research directions, emphasizing the role of data mining in enhancing personalized education and paving the way for future exploration and innovation.

CVMar 23, 2025
PHT-CAD: Efficient CAD Parametric Primitive Analysis with Progressive Hierarchical Tuning

Ke Niu, Yuwen Chen, Haiyang Yu et al.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a pivotal role in industrial manufacturing, yet 2D Parametric Primitive Analysis (PPA) remains underexplored due to two key challenges: structural constraint reasoning and advanced semantic understanding. To tackle these challenges, we first propose an Efficient Hybrid Parametrization (EHP) for better representing 2D engineering drawings. EHP contains four types of atomic component i.e., point, line, circle, and arc). Additionally, we propose PHT-CAD, a novel 2D PPA framework that harnesses the modality alignment and reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for precise engineering drawing analysis. In PHT-CAD, we introduce four dedicated regression heads to predict corresponding atomic components. To train PHT-CAD, a three-stage training paradigm Progressive Hierarchical Tuning (PHT) is proposed to progressively enhance PHT-CAD's capability to perceive individual primitives, infer structural constraints, and align annotation layers with their corresponding geometric representations. Considering that existing datasets lack complete annotation layers and real-world engineering drawings, we introduce ParaCAD, the first large-scale benchmark that explicitly integrates both the geometric and annotation layers. ParaCAD comprises over 10 million annotated drawings for training and 3,000 real-world industrial drawings with complex topological structures and physical constraints for test. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PHT-CAD and highlight the practical significance of ParaCAD in advancing 2D PPA research.

IRSep 27, 2025
Your Dense Retriever is Secretly an Expeditious Reasoner

Yichi Zhang, Jun Bai, Zhixin Cai et al.

Dense retrievers enhance retrieval by encoding queries and documents into continuous vectors, but they often struggle with reasoning-intensive queries. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can reformulate queries to capture complex reasoning, applying them universally incurs significant computational cost. In this work, we propose Adaptive Query Reasoning (AdaQR), a hybrid query rewriting framework. Within this framework, a Reasoner Router dynamically directs each query to either fast dense reasoning or deep LLM reasoning. The dense reasoning is achieved by the Dense Reasoner, which performs LLM-style reasoning directly in the embedding space, enabling a controllable trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Experiments on large-scale retrieval benchmarks BRIGHT show that AdaQR reduces reasoning cost by 28% while preserving-or even improving-retrieval performance by 7%.

LGAug 13, 2025
From Intent to Execution: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reinforcement Learning for Precise CAD Code Generation

Ke Niu, Haiyang Yu, Zhuofan Chen et al.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a vital role in engineering and manufacturing, yet current CAD workflows require extensive domain expertise and manual modeling effort. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to generate code from natural language, opening new opportunities for automating parametric 3D modeling. However, directly translating human design intent into executable CAD code remains highly challenging, due to the need for logical reasoning, syntactic correctness, and numerical precision. In this work, we propose CAD-RL, a multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) guided reinforcement learning post training framework for CAD modeling code generation. Our method combines CoT-based Cold Start with goal-driven reinforcement learning post training using three task-specific rewards: executability reward, geometric accuracy reward, and external evaluation reward. To ensure stable policy learning under sparse and high-variance reward conditions, we introduce three targeted optimization strategies: Trust Region Stretch for improved exploration, Precision Token Loss for enhanced dimensions parameter accuracy, and Overlong Filtering to reduce noisy supervision. To support training and benchmarking, we release ExeCAD, a noval dataset comprising 16,540 real-world CAD examples with paired natural language and structured design language descriptions, executable CADQuery scripts, and rendered 3D models. Experiments demonstrate that CAD-RL achieves significant improvements in reasoning quality, output precision, and code executability over existing VLMs.