arXiv subjects

Ao Li

Publications and source records attributed to Ao Li.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Video-XL-Pro: Reconstructive Token Compression for Extremely Long Video Understanding

Despite advanced token compression techniques, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still struggle with hour-long video understanding. In this work, we propose Video-XL-Pro, an efficient method for extremely long video understanding, built upon Reconstructive Compression of Tokens (ReCoT), a learnable module that leverages self-supervised learning to generate comprehensive and compact video tokens. ReCoT introduces two key components: (i) Dynamic Token Synthesizer (DTS): DTS generates pseudo-video tokens from static image tokens by learning intra-token relationships, which are then used in masked video modeling. (ii) Semantic-Guided Masking (SGM): SGM adaptively masks redundant visual tokens to facilitate more effective reconstructive learning. To improve training efficiency in MLLMs fine-tuning, we introduce a video-specific dataset pruning strategy and design a simple yet Query-aware Selector that enables the model to precisely locate query-relevant video tokens. With only 3B parameters, Video-XL-Pro outperforms most 7B models trained on larger datasets across multiple long video understanding benchmarks. Moreover, it can process over 8K frames on a single A100 GPU while maintaining high-quality performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

InstaRevive: One-Step Image Enhancement via Dynamic Score Matching

Image enhancement finds wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios due to complex environments and the inherent limitations of imaging devices. Recent diffusion-based methods yield promising outcomes but necessitate prolonged and computationally intensive iterative sampling. In response, we propose InstaRevive, a straightforward yet powerful image enhancement framework that employs score-based diffusion distillation to harness potent generative capability and minimize the sampling steps. To fully exploit the potential of the pre-trained diffusion model, we devise a practical and effective diffusion distillation pipeline using dynamic control to address inaccuracies in updating direction during score matching. Our control strategy enables a dynamic diffusing scope, facilitating precise learning of denoising trajectories within the diffusion model and ensuring accurate distribution matching gradients during training. Additionally, to enrich guidance for the generative power, we incorporate textual prompts via image captioning as auxiliary conditions, fostering further exploration of the diffusion model. Extensive experiments substantiate the efficacy of our framework across a diverse array of challenging tasks and datasets, unveiling the compelling efficacy and efficiency of InstaRevive in delivering high-quality and visually appealing results. Code is available at https://github.com/EternalEvan/InstaRevive.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Deep Inverse Design for High-Level Synthesis

High-level synthesis (HLS) has significantly advanced the automation of digital circuits design, yet the need for expertise and time in pragma tuning remains challenging. Existing solutions for the design space exploration (DSE) adopt either heuristic methods, lacking essential information for further optimization potential, or predictive models, missing sufficient generalization due to the time-consuming nature of HLS and the exponential growth of the design space. To address these challenges, we propose Deep Inverse Design for HLS (DID4HLS), a novel approach that integrates graph neural networks and generative models. DID4HLS iteratively optimizes hardware designs aimed at compute-intensive algorithms by learning conditional distributions of design features from post-HLS data. Compared to four state-of-the-art DSE baselines, our method achieved an average improvement of 42.8% on average distance to reference set (ADRS) compared to the best-performing baselines across six benchmarks, while demonstrating high robustness and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/PingChang818/DID4HLS.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

EmoVerse: Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Sentiment and Emotion Understanding

Sentiment and emotion understanding are essential to applications such as human-computer interaction and depression detection. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust general capabilities, they face considerable challenges in the field of affective computing, particularly in detecting subtle facial expressions and handling complex emotion-related tasks, such as emotion reason inference and understanding emotions in long-context scenarios. Furthermore, there is a lack of a unified MLLM that can effectively handle both sentiment and emotion-related tasks. To address these challenges, we explore multi-task training strategies for MLLMs in affective computing and introduce Emotion Universe (EmoVerse), an MLLM designed to handle a broad spectrum of sentiment and emotion-related tasks. In addition, EmoVerse is capable of deeply analyzing the underlying causes of emotional states. We also introduce the Affective Multitask (AMT) Dataset, which supports multimodal sentiment analysis, multimodal emotion recognition, facial expression recognition, emotion reason inference, and emotion cause-pair extraction tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoVerse outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in sentiment and emotion-related tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/liaolea/EmoVerse.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

FB$^+$-tree: A Memory-Optimized B$^+$-tree with Latch-Free Update

B$^+$-trees are prevalent in traditional database systems due to their versatility and balanced structure. While binary search is typically utilized for branch operations, it may lead to inefficient cache utilization in main-memory scenarios. In contrast, trie-based index structures drive branch operations through prefix matching. While these structures generally produce fewer cache misses and are thus increasingly popular, they may underperform in range scans because of frequent pointer chasing. This paper proposes a new high-performance B$^+$-tree variant called \textbf{Feature B$^+$-tree (FB$^+$-tree)}. Similar to employing bit or byte for branch operation in tries, FB$^+$-tree progressively considers several bytes following the common prefix on each level of its inner nodes\textemdash referred to as features, which allows FB$^+$-tree to benefit from prefix skewness. FB$^+$-tree blurs the lines between B$^+$-trees and tries, while still retaining balance. In the best case, FB$^+$-tree almost becomes a trie, whereas in the worst case, it continues to function as a B$^+$-tree. Meanwhile, a crafted synchronization protocol that combines the link technique and optimistic lock is designed to support efficient concurrent index access. Distinctively, FB$^+$-tree leverages subtle atomic operations seamlessly coordinated with optimistic lock to facilitate latch-free updates, which can be easily extended to other structures. Intensive experiments on multiple workload-dataset combinations demonstrate that FB$^+$-tree shows comparable lookup performance to state-of-the-art trie-based indexes and outperforms popular B$^+$-trees by 2.3x$\ \sim\ $3.7x under 96 threads. FB$^+$-tree also exhibits significant potential on other workloads, especially update workloads under contention and scan workloads.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

MaRS: A Fast Sampler for Mean Reverting Diffusion based on ODE and SDE Solvers

In applications of diffusion models, controllable generation is of practical significance, but is also challenging. Current methods for controllable generation primarily focus on modifying the score function of diffusion models, while Mean Reverting (MR) Diffusion directly modifies the structure of the stochastic differential equation (SDE), making the incorporation of image conditions simpler and more natural. However, current training-free fast samplers are not directly applicable to MR Diffusion. And thus MR Diffusion requires hundreds of NFEs (number of function evaluations) to obtain high-quality samples. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm named MaRS (MR Sampler) to reduce the sampling NFEs of MR Diffusion. We solve the reverse-time SDE and the probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE) associated with MR Diffusion, and derive semi-analytical solutions. The solutions consist of an analytical function and an integral parameterized by a neural network. Based on this solution, we can generate high-quality samples in fewer steps. Our approach does not require training and supports all mainstream parameterizations, including noise prediction, data prediction and velocity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MR Sampler maintains high sampling quality with a speedup of 10 to 20 times across ten different image restoration tasks. Our algorithm accelerates the sampling procedure of MR Diffusion, making it more practical in controllable generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Modeling Variants of Prompts for Vision-Language Models

Large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to leveraging human language for enhancing downstream tasks. However, VLMs such as CLIP face significant limitation: its performance is highly sensitive to prompt template design. Although prompt learning methods can address the sensitivity issue by replacing natural language prompts with learnable ones, they are incomprehensible to humans. Ensuring consistent performance across various prompt templates enables models to adapt seamlessly to diverse phrasings, enhancing their ability to handle downstream tasks without requiring extensive prompt engineering. In this work, we introduce the RobustPrompt Benchmark, a systematic benchmark to evaluate robustness to different prompt templates for VLMs. It includes a dataset with hundreds of carefully designed prompt templates, divided into six types, covering a wide variety of commonly used templates. Beside the benchmark, we propose Modeling Variants of Prompts (MVP), a simple yet effective method that mitigates sensitivity by modeling variants of prompt structures. The innovation of MVP lies in decoupling prompts into templates and class names, and using Variational Autoencoders (VAE) to model the distribution of diverse prompt structures. Experiments across 11 datasets demonstrate that MVP can greatly enhance model robustness to variations in input prompts without a drop in performance. The code is available at https://github.com/liaolea/MVP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Agent-Oriented Planning in Multi-Agent Systems

Through the collaboration of multiple LLM-empowered agents possessing diverse expertise and tools, multi-agent systems achieve impressive progress in solving real-world problems. Given the user queries, the meta-agents, serving as the brain within multi-agent systems, are required to decompose the queries into multiple sub-tasks that can be allocated to suitable agents capable of solving them, so-called agent-oriented planning. In this study, we identify three critical design principles of agent-oriented planning, including solvability, completeness, and non-redundancy, to ensure that each sub-task can be effectively resolved, resulting in satisfactory responses to user queries. These principles further inspire us to propose AOP, a novel framework for agent-oriented planning in multi-agent systems, leveraging a fast task decomposition and allocation process followed by an effective and efficient evaluation via a reward model. According to the evaluation results, the meta-agent is also responsible for promptly making necessary adjustments to sub-tasks and scheduling. Besides, we integrate a feedback loop into AOP to further enhance the effectiveness and robustness of such a problem-solving process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancement of AOP in solving real-world problems compared to both single-agent systems and existing planning strategies for multi-agent systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/lalaliat/Agent-Oriented-Planning

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

High-accuracy disposable micro-optical anti-counterfeiting labels based on single-molecule quantum coherence

In this work we introduce an innovative approach to single-molecule quantum coherence (SMQC)-based disposable micro-optical anti-counterfeiting labels. This method facilitates the editing and reading of anti-counterfeiting with single molecules used as the anti-counterfeiting information labels. The label is meticulously crafted through inkjet printing technology, while its authentication is achieved via frequency domain imaging. Through a validation process including experimental demonstration, numerical simulation, and neural network analysis, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, further validate the integrity of the miniature anti-counterfeiting information storage, and verify the signal extraction accuracy with the recognition accuracy of the labels is consistently above 99.995%. The combination of SMQC-based disposable micro-optical anti-counterfeiting technology is expected to enable more precise preparation of single-molecule-array chips, thus providing a crucial foundation for the advancement of high-tech and smart manufacturing industries.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

SPIDER: Fuzzing for Stateful Performance Issues in the ONOS Software-Defined Network Controller

Performance issues in software-defined network (SDN) controllers can have serious impacts on the performance and availability of networks. In this paper, we consider a special class of SDN vulnerabilities called stateful performance issues (SPIs), where a sequence of initial input messages drives the controller into a state such that its performance degrades pathologically when processing subsequent messages. Uncovering SPIs in large complex software such as the widely used ONOS SDN controller is challenging because of the large state space of input sequences and the complex software architecture of inter-dependent network services. We present SPIDER, a practical fuzzing framework for identifying SPIs in this setting. The key contribution in our work is to leverage the event-driven modular software architecture of the SDN controller to (a) separately target each network service for SPIs and (b) use static analysis to identify all services whose event handlers can affect the state of the target service directly or indirectly. SPIDER implements this novel dependency-aware modular performance fuzzing approach for 157 network services in ONOS and successfully identifies 10 new performance issues. We present an evaluation of SPIDER against prior work, a sensitivity analysis of design decisions, and case studies of two uncovered SPIs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Frequency-Inspired Optimization in Transformer for Efficient Single Image Super-Resolution

Transformer-based methods have exhibited remarkable potential in single image super-resolution (SISR) by effectively extracting long-range dependencies. However, most of the current research in this area has prioritized the design of transformer blocks to capture global information, while overlooking the importance of incorporating high-frequency priors, which we believe could be beneficial. In our study, we conducted a series of experiments and found that transformer structures are more adept at capturing low-frequency information, but have limited capacity in constructing high-frequency representations when compared to their convolutional counterparts. Our proposed solution, the cross-refinement adaptive feature modulation transformer (CRAFT), integrates the strengths of both convolutional and transformer structures. It comprises three key components: the high-frequency enhancement residual block (HFERB) for extracting high-frequency information, the shift rectangle window attention block (SRWAB) for capturing global information, and the hybrid fusion block (HFB) for refining the global representation. To tackle the inherent intricacies of transformer structures, we introduce a frequency-guided post-training quantization (PTQ) method aimed at enhancing CRAFT's efficiency. These strategies incorporate adaptive dual clipping and boundary refinement. To further amplify the versatility of our proposed approach, we extend our PTQ strategy to function as a general quantization method for transformer-based SISR techniques. Our experimental findings showcase CRAFT's superiority over current state-of-the-art methods, both in full-precision and quantization scenarios. These results underscore the efficacy and universality of our PTQ strategy. The source code is available at: https://github.com/AVC2-UESTC/Frequency-Inspired-Optimization-for-EfficientSR.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Nested Graph Reinforcement Learning-based Decision-making Strategy for Eco-platooning

Platooning technology is renowned for its precise vehicle control, traffic flow optimization, and energy efficiency enhancement. However, in large-scale mixed platoons, vehicle heterogeneity and unpredictable traffic conditions lead to virtual bottlenecks. These bottlenecks result in reduced traffic throughput and increased energy consumption within the platoon. To address these challenges, we introduce a decision-making strategy based on nested graph reinforcement learning. This strategy improves collaborative decision-making, ensuring energy efficiency and alleviating congestion. We propose a theory of nested traffic graph representation that maps dynamic interactions between vehicles and platoons in non-Euclidean spaces. By incorporating spatio-temporal weighted graph into a multi-head attention mechanism, we further enhance the model's capacity to process both local and global data. Additionally, we have developed a nested graph reinforcement learning framework to enhance the self-iterative learning capabilities of platooning. Using the I-24 dataset, we designed and conducted comparative algorithm experiments, generalizability testing, and permeability ablation experiments, thereby validating the proposed strategy's effectiveness. Compared to the baseline, our strategy increases throughput by 10% and decreases energy use by 9%. Specifically, increasing the penetration rate of CAVs significantly enhances traffic throughput, though it also increases energy consumption.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

Improving GPU Multi-Tenancy Through Dynamic Multi-Instance GPU Reconfiguration

Continuous learning (CL) has emerged as one of the most popular deep learning paradigms deployed in modern cloud GPUs. Specifically, CL has the capability to continuously update the model parameters (through model retraining) and use the updated model (if available) to serve overtime arriving inference requests. It is generally beneficial to co-locate the retraining and inference together to enable timely model updates and avoid model transfer overheads. This brings the need for GPU sharing among retraining and inferences. Meanwhile, multiple CL workloads can share the modern GPUs in the cloud, leading to multi-tenancy execution. In this paper, we observe that prior GPU-sharing techniques are not optimized for multi-tenancy CL workloads. Specifically, they do not coherently consider the accuracy of the retraining model and the inference service level objective (SLO) attainment. Moreover, they cannot accommodate the overtime dynamics (e.g., inference arrival intensity) in CL execution. In this paper, we propose MIGRator, a novel GPU reconfiguration runtime that dynamically performs GPU reconfiguration for multi-tenancy CL workloads. MIGRator is based on the recent NVIDIA multi-instance GPU (MIG) to mitigate resource contention and formulates the reconfiguration optimization into Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to dynamically identify, reconfigure, and allocate the GPU instances. MIGRator leverages the "Goodput" metric in the ILP objective function to consider both inference SLO attainment and model accuracy in the reconfiguration exploration. We evaluate MIGRator using representative multi-tenancy CL workloads. The results show our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art GPU sharing techniques (i.e., Ekya, Astraea, and PARIS) by 17\%, 21\%, and 20\%, respectively.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Benchmarking Fish Dataset and Evaluation Metric in Keypoint Detection -- Towards Precise Fish Morphological Assessment in Aquaculture Breeding

Accurate phenotypic analysis in aquaculture breeding necessitates the quantification of subtle morphological phenotypes. Existing datasets suffer from limitations such as small scale, limited species coverage, and inadequate annotation of keypoints for measuring refined and complex morphological phenotypes of fish body parts. To address this gap, we introduce FishPhenoKey, a comprehensive dataset comprising 23,331 high-resolution images spanning six fish species. Notably, FishPhenoKey includes 22 phenotype-oriented annotations, enabling the capture of intricate morphological phenotypes. Motivated by the nuanced evaluation of these subtle morphologies, we also propose a new evaluation metric, Percentage of Measured Phenotype (PMP). It is designed to assess the accuracy of individual keypoint positions and is highly sensitive to the phenotypes measured using the corresponding keypoints. To enhance keypoint detection accuracy, we further propose a novel loss, Anatomically-Calibrated Regularization (ACR), that can be integrated into keypoint detection models, leveraging biological insights to refine keypoint localization. Our contributions set a new benchmark in fish phenotype analysis, addressing the challenges of precise morphological quantification and opening new avenues for research in sustainable aquaculture and genetic studies. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WeizhenLiuBioinform/Fish-Phenotype-Detect.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

FlowIE: Efficient Image Enhancement via Rectified Flow

Image enhancement holds extensive applications in real-world scenarios due to complex environments and limitations of imaging devices. Conventional methods are often constrained by their tailored models, resulting in diminished robustness when confronted with challenging degradation conditions. In response, we propose FlowIE, a simple yet highly effective flow-based image enhancement framework that estimates straight-line paths from an elementary distribution to high-quality images. Unlike previous diffusion-based methods that suffer from long-time inference, FlowIE constructs a linear many-to-one transport mapping via conditioned rectified flow. The rectification straightens the trajectories of probability transfer, accelerating inference by an order of magnitude. This design enables our FlowIE to fully exploit rich knowledge in the pre-trained diffusion model, rendering it well-suited for various real-world applications. Moreover, we devise a faster inference algorithm, inspired by Lagrange's Mean Value Theorem, harnessing midpoint tangent direction to optimize path estimation, ultimately yielding visually superior results. Thanks to these designs, our FlowIE adeptly manages a diverse range of enhancement tasks within a concise sequence of fewer than 5 steps. Our contributions are rigorously validated through comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, unveiling the compelling efficacy and efficiency of our proposed FlowIE. Code is available at https://github.com/EternalEvan/FlowIE.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Heterophilous Distribution Propagation for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various graph mining tasks by aggregating information from neighborhoods for representation learning. The success relies on the homophily assumption that nearby nodes exhibit similar behaviors, while it may be violated in many real-world graphs. Recently, heterophilous graph neural networks (HeterGNNs) have attracted increasing attention by modifying the neural message passing schema for heterophilous neighborhoods. However, they suffer from insufficient neighborhood partition and heterophily modeling, both of which are critical but challenging to break through. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose heterophilous distribution propagation (HDP) for graph neural networks. Instead of aggregating information from all neighborhoods, HDP adaptively separates the neighbors into homophilous and heterphilous parts based on the pseudo assignments during training. The heterophilous neighborhood distribution is learned with orthogonality-oriented constraint via a trusted prototype contrastive learning paradigm. Both the homophilous and heterophilous patterns are propagated with a novel semantic-aware message passing mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on 9 benchmark datasets with different levels of homophily. Experimental results show that our method outperforms representative baselines on heterophilous datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Revealing Hierarchical Structure of Leaf Venations in Plant Science via Label-Efficient Segmentation: Dataset and Method

Hierarchical leaf vein segmentation is a crucial but under-explored task in agricultural sciences, where analysis of the hierarchical structure of plant leaf venation can contribute to plant breeding. While current segmentation techniques rely on data-driven models, there is no publicly available dataset specifically designed for hierarchical leaf vein segmentation. To address this gap, we introduce the HierArchical Leaf Vein Segmentation (HALVS) dataset, the first public hierarchical leaf vein segmentation dataset. HALVS comprises 5,057 real-scanned high-resolution leaf images collected from three plant species: soybean, sweet cherry, and London planetree. It also includes human-annotated ground truth for three orders of leaf veins, with a total labeling effort of 83.8 person-days. Based on HALVS, we further develop a label-efficient learning paradigm that leverages partial label information, i.e. missing annotations for tertiary veins. Empirical studies are performed on HALVS, revealing new observations, challenges, and research directions on leaf vein segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 low light image enhancement challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to discover an effective network design or solution capable of generating brighter, clearer, and visually appealing results when dealing with a variety of conditions, including ultra-high resolution (4K and beyond), non-uniform illumination, backlighting, extreme darkness, and night scenes. A notable total of 428 participants registered for the challenge, with 22 teams ultimately making valid submissions. This paper meticulously evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in enhancing low-light images, reflecting the significant progress and creativity in this field.

cs.CV↗