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Chang Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Chang Xu.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Behavior of Gauss curvatures and mean curvatures of Lightcone framed surfaces in the Lorentz-Minkowski 3-space

In this paper, we investigate the differential geometric properties of lightcone framed surfaces in Lorentz-Minkowski 3-space. In general, a mixed type surface is a connected regular surface with non-empty spacelike and timelike point sets. While a lightcone framed surface is a mixed type surface with singular points at least locally. We introduce a useful tool, so called modified frame along the lightcone framed surface, to study the differential geometric properties of the lightcone framed surface. As results, we show the behavior of the Gaussian curvature and mean curvature of the lightcone framed surface at not only lightlike points but also singular points.

math.DG↗

SRSR: Enhancing Semantic Accuracy in Real-World Image Super-Resolution with Spatially Re-Focused Text-Conditioning

Existing diffusion-based super-resolution approaches often exhibit semantic ambiguities due to inaccuracies and incompleteness in their text conditioning, coupled with the inherent tendency for cross-attention to divert towards irrelevant pixels. These limitations can lead to semantic misalignment and hallucinated details in the generated high-resolution outputs. To address these, we propose a novel, plug-and-play spatially re-focused super-resolution (SRSR) framework that consists of two core components: first, we introduce Spatially Re-focused Cross-Attention (SRCA), which refines text conditioning at inference time by applying visually-grounded segmentation masks to guide cross-attention. Second, we introduce a Spatially Targeted Classifier-Free Guidance (STCFG) mechanism that selectively bypasses text influences on ungrounded pixels to prevent hallucinations. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that SRSR consistently outperforms seven state-of-the-art baselines in standard fidelity metrics (PSNR and SSIM) across all datasets, and in perceptual quality measures (LPIPS and DISTS) on two real-world benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness in achieving both high semantic fidelity and perceptual quality in super-resolution.

cs.CV↗

Versatile tunable optical injection of chiral polarized Weyl fermions in a magnetic Weyl semimetal Co3Sn2S2

Precise probe and control of various quantum degrees of freedom in novel quantum matter are central to understanding fundamental quantum physics and hold promise for innovative routes to encode and process information. Chirality is one such degree of freedom that has recently attracted intense research interest, especially for Weyl fermions in topological Weyl semimetals. The coupling of chiral degrees of freedom through light-matter interactions and the versatile control of these couplings through external fields can lead to precise quantum control of Weyl fermions. In this work, we demonstrate the observation of light chirality-dependent photocurrent in the mid-infrared regime. Excitation wavelength-dependent measurements reveal that the photocurrent originates from the injection of chiral polarized Weyl fermions by chiral polarized mid-infrared photons. The optical process that generates unbalanced chiral polarized Weyl fermions is determined to be a third-order nonlinear photocurrent process. Compared with nonmagnetic Weyl semimetals, such coupling is versatilely tunable in magnetic Weyl semimetals with the magnetization direction and external electric field in addition to the chirality of light. Our results are not only directly applicable to tunable circular-polarization-sensitive photodetection in the mid-infrared regime, but also pave the way toward functional quantum devices that utilize the chiral quantum degrees of freedom of Weyl fermions.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Graph Unlearning Meets Influence-aware Negative Preference Optimization

Recent advancements in graph unlearning models have enhanced model utility by preserving the node representation essentially invariant, while using gradient ascent on the forget set to achieve unlearning. However, this approach causes a drastic degradation in model utility during the unlearning process due to the rapid divergence speed of gradient ascent. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{INPO}, an \textbf{I}nfluence-aware \textbf{N}egative \textbf{P}reference \textbf{O}ptimization framework that focuses on slowing the divergence speed and improving the robustness of the model utility to the unlearning process. Specifically, we first analyze that NPO has slower divergence speed and theoretically propose that unlearning high-influence edges can reduce impact of unlearning. We design an influence-aware message function to amplify the influence of unlearned edges and mitigate the tight topological coupling between the forget set and the retain set. The influence of each edge is quickly estimated by a removal-based method. Additionally, we propose a topological entropy loss from the perspective of topology to avoid excessive information loss in the local structure during unlearning. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world datasets demonstrate that INPO-based model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all forget quality metrics while maintaining the model's utility. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/sh-qiangchen/INPO}{https://github.com/sh-qiangchen/INPO}.

cs.LG↗

VLA-Cache: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation via Adaptive Token Caching

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong multi-modal reasoning capabilities, enabling direct action generation from visual perception and language instructions in an end-to-end manner. However, their substantial computational cost poses a challenge for real-time robotic control, where rapid decision-making is essential. This paper introduces VLA-Cache, a training-free inference acceleration method that reduces computational overhead by adaptively caching and reusing static visual tokens across frames. Exploiting the temporal continuity in robotic manipulation, VLA-Cache identifies minimally changed tokens between adjacent frames and reuses their cached key-value representations, thereby circumventing redundant computations. Additionally, to maintain action precision, VLA-Cache selectively re-computes task-relevant tokens that are environmentally sensitive, ensuring the fidelity of critical visual information. To further optimize efficiency, we introduce a layer adaptive token reusing strategy that dynamically adjusts the reuse ratio based on attention concentration across decoder layers, prioritizing critical tokens for recomputation. Extensive experiments on two simulation platforms (LIBERO and SIMPLER) and a real-world robotic system demonstrate that VLA-Cache achieves up to 1.7x speedup in CUDA latency and a 15% increase in control frequency, with negligible loss on task success rate. The code and videos can be found at our project page: https://vla-cache.github.io.

cs.RO↗

From Language to Locomotion: Retargeting-free Humanoid Control via Motion Latent Guidance

Natural language offers a natural interface for humanoid robots, but existing language-guided humanoid locomotion pipelines remain cumbersome and untrustworthy. They typically decode human motion, retarget it to robot morphology, and then track it with a physics-based controller. However, this multi-stage process is prone to cumulative errors, introduces high latency, and yields weak coupling between semantics and control. These limitations call for a more direct pathway from language to action, one that eliminates fragile intermediate stages. Therefore, we present RoboGhost, a retargeting-free framework that directly conditions humanoid policies on language-grounded motion latents. By bypassing explicit motion decoding and retargeting, RoboGhost enables a diffusion-based policy to denoise executable actions directly from noise, preserving semantic intent and supporting fast, reactive control. A hybrid causal transformer-diffusion motion generator further ensures long-horizon consistency while maintaining stability and diversity, yielding rich latent representations for precise humanoid behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboGhost substantially reduces deployment latency, improves success rates and tracking precision, and produces smooth, semantically aligned locomotion on real humanoids. Beyond text, the framework naturally extends to other modalities such as images, audio, and music, providing a universal foundation for vision-language-action humanoid systems.

cs.RO↗

OmniMotion: Multimodal Motion Generation with Continuous Masked Autoregression

Whole-body multi-modal human motion generation poses two primary challenges: creating an effective motion generation mechanism and integrating various modalities, such as text, speech, and music, into a cohesive framework. Unlike previous methods that usually employ discrete masked modeling or autoregressive modeling, we develop a continuous masked autoregressive motion transformer, where a causal attention is performed considering the sequential nature within the human motion. Within this transformer, we introduce a gated linear attention and an RMSNorm module, which drive the transformer to pay attention to the key actions and suppress the instability caused by either the abnormal movements or the heterogeneous distributions within multi-modalities. To further enhance both the motion generation and the multimodal generalization, we employ the DiT structure to diffuse the conditions from the transformer towards the targets. To fuse different modalities, AdaLN and cross-attention are leveraged to inject the text, speech, and music signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous methods across all modalities, including text-to-motion, speech-to-gesture, and music-to-dance. The code of our method will be made public.

cs.CV↗

Agent-Based Modelling for Real-World Stock Markets under Behavioral Economic Principles

The reproduction of realistic dynamics in financial markets is of great significance, as it enhances our understanding of market evolution beyond other physical processes, and facilitates the development and backtesting of investment strategies. Most existing literature approaches this issue as a time series forecasting problem, which often faces challenges such as 1) overfitting historical data, 2) failing to reconstruct stylized facts, and 3) limiting users' ability to conduct counterfactual analyses. To address these limitations, we employ agent-based modeling (ABM) for market simulation, where each trader acts as an autonomous agent guided by established behavioral-economic principles. The parameters of the agent model are subsequently calibrated using deep learning techniques. Additionally, we align our agent model with publicly available economic indices, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), to enhance the explainability of our system's outcomes. Our experiments demonstrate that the ABM method effectively reproduces market dynamics with a confidence level of 90%, accurately reflecting well-known stylized facts. Furthermore, the calibration process proves to be more computationally efficient compared to other existing methods that perform simulation-based inference. We also present case studies illustrating the correlation between agent parameters and economic indices.

cs.MA↗

Efficient Conditional Generation on Scale-based Visual Autoregressive Models

Recent advances in autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated their potential to rival diffusion models in image synthesis. However, for complex spatially-conditioned generation, current AR approaches rely on fine-tuning the pre-trained model, leading to significant training costs. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Control Model (ECM), a plug-and-play framework featuring a lightweight control module that introduces control signals via a distributed architecture. This architecture consists of context-aware attention layers that refine conditional features using real-time generated tokens, and a shared gated feed-forward network (FFN) designed to maximize the utilization of its limited capacity and ensure coherent control feature learning. Furthermore, recognizing the critical role of early-stage generation in determining semantic structure, we introduce an early-centric sampling strategy that prioritizes learning early control sequences. This approach reduces computational cost by lowering the number of training tokens per iteration, while a complementary temperature scheduling during inference compensates for the resulting insufficient training of late-stage tokens. Extensive experiments on scale-based AR models validate that our method achieves high-fidelity and diverse control over image generation, surpassing existing baselines while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency.

cs.CV↗

Lumina-DiMOO: An Omni Diffusion Large Language Model for Multi-Modal Generation and Understanding

We introduce Lumina-DiMOO, an open-source foundational model for seamless multi-modal generation and understanding. Lumina-DiMOO sets itself apart from prior unified models by utilizing a fully discrete diffusion modeling to handle inputs and outputs across various modalities. This innovative approach allows Lumina-DiMOO to achieve higher sampling efficiency compared to previous autoregressive (AR) or hybrid AR-Diffusion paradigms and adeptly support a broad spectrum of multi-modal tasks, including text-to-image generation, image-to-image generation (e.g., image editing, subject-driven generation, and image inpainting, etc.), as well as image understanding. Lumina-DiMOO achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, surpassing existing open-source unified multi-modal models. To foster further advancements in multi-modal and discrete diffusion model research, we release our code and checkpoints to the community. Project Page: https://synbol.github.io/Lumina-DiMOO.

cs.CV↗

Can Large Language Models Express Uncertainty Like Human?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face practical barriers: logits are often hidden, multi-sampling is computationally expensive, and verbalized numerical uncertainty (e.g., giving a 0-100 score) deviates from natural communication. We revisit linguistic confidence (LC), where models express uncertainty through hedging language (e.g., probably, might), offering a lightweight and human-centered alternative. To advance this direction, we (1) release the first diverse, large-scale dataset of hedging expressions with human-annotated confidence scores, and (2) propose a lightweight mapper that converts hedges into confidence scores at near-zero cost. Building on these resources, we (3) conduct the first systematic study of LC across modern LLMs and QA benchmarks, revealing that while most LLMs underperform in expressing reliable LC, carefully designed prompting achieves competitive calibration and discriminability. Finally, we (4) introduce a fine-tuning framework that further improves LC reliability. Taken together, our work positions linguistic confidence as a scalable, efficient, and human-aligned approach to LLM uncertainty estimation, and calls for deeper exploration of this promising yet underexplored direction.

cs.CL↗

Action-aware Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

Robotic manipulation with Vision-Language-Action models requires efficient inference over long-horizon multi-modal context, where attention to dense visual tokens dominates computational cost. Existing methods optimize inference speed by reducing visual redundancy within VLA models, but they overlook the varying redundancy across robotic manipulation stages. We observe that the visual token redundancy is higher in coarse manipulation phase than in fine-grained operations, and is strongly correlated with the action dynamic. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{A}ction-aware \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{ADP}), a multi-modal pruning framework that integrates text-driven token selection with action-aware trajectory gating. Our method introduces a gating mechanism that conditions the pruning signal on recent action trajectories, using past motion windows to adaptively adjust token retention ratios in accordance with dynamics, thereby balancing computational efficiency and perceptual precision across different manipulation stages. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO suites and diverse real-world scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly reduces FLOPs and action inference latency (\textit{e.g.} $1.35 \times$ speed up on OpenVLA-OFT) while maintaining competitive success rates (\textit{e.g.} 25.8\% improvements with OpenVLA) compared to baselines, thereby providing a simple plug-in path to efficient robot policies that advances the efficiency and performance frontier of robotic manipulation. Our project website is: \href{https://vla-adp.github.io/}{ADP.com}.

cs.RO↗

DeCoP: Enhancing Self-Supervised Time Series Representation with Dependency Controlled Pre-training

Modeling dynamic temporal dependencies is a critical challenge in time series pre-training, which evolve due to distribution shifts and multi-scale patterns. This temporal variability severely impairs the generalization of pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Existing frameworks fail to capture the complex interactions of short- and long-term dependencies, making them susceptible to spurious correlations that degrade generalization. To address these limitations, we propose DeCoP, a Dependency Controlled Pre-training framework that explicitly models dynamic, multi-scale dependencies by simulating evolving inter-patch dependencies. At the input level, DeCoP introduces Instance-wise Patch Normalization (IPN) to mitigate distributional shifts while preserving the unique characteristics of each patch, creating a robust foundation for representation learning. At the latent level, a hierarchical Dependency Controlled Learning (DCL) strategy explicitly models inter-patch dependencies across multiple temporal scales, with an Instance-level Contrastive Module (ICM) enhances global generalization by learning instance-discriminative representations from time-invariant positive pairs. DeCoP achieves state-of-the-art results on ten datasets with lower computing resources, improving MSE by 3% on ETTh1 over PatchTST using only 37% of the FLOPs.

cs.LG↗

Rest2Visual: Predicting Visually Evoked fMRI from Resting-State Scans

Understanding how spontaneous brain activity relates to stimulus-driven neural responses is a fundamental challenge in cognitive neuroscience. While task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures localized stimulus-evoked brain activation, its acquisition is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale across populations. In contrast, resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) is task-free and abundant, but lacks direct interpretability. We introduce Rest2Visual, a conditional generative model that predicts visually evoked fMRI (ve-fMRI) from resting-state input and 2D visual stimuli. It follows a volumetric encoder--decoder design, where multiscale 3D features from rs-fMRI are modulated by image embeddings via adaptive normalization, enabling spatially accurate, stimulus-specific activation synthesis. To enable model training, we construct a large-scale triplet dataset from the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), aligning each rs-fMRI volume with stimulus images and their corresponding ve-fMRI activation maps. Quantitative evaluation shows that the predicted activations closely match ground truth across standard similarity and representational metrics, and support successful image reconstruction in downstream decoding. Notably, the predicted maps preserve subject-specific structure, demonstrating the model's capacity to generate individualized functional surrogates. Our results provide compelling evidence that individualized spontaneous neural activity can be transformed into stimulus-aligned representations, opening new avenues for scalable, task-free functional brain modeling.

q-bio.NC↗

FinMultiTime: A Four-Modal Bilingual Dataset for Financial Time-Series Analysis

Pure time series forecasting tasks typically focus exclusively on numerical features; however, real-world financial decision-making demands the comparison and analysis of heterogeneous sources of information. Recent advances in deep learning and large scale language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in capturing sentiment and other qualitative signals, thereby enhancing the accuracy of financial time series predictions. Despite these advances, most existing datasets consist solely of price series and news text, are confined to a single market, and remain limited in scale. In this paper, we introduce FinMultiTime, the first large scale, multimodal financial time series dataset. FinMultiTime temporally aligns four distinct modalities financial news, structured financial tables, K-line technical charts, and stock price time series across both the S&P 500 and HS 300 universes. Covering 5,105 stocks from 2009 to 2025 in the United States and China, the dataset totals 112.6 GB and provides minute-level, daily, and quarterly resolutions, thus capturing short, medium, and long term market signals with high fidelity. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) scale and data quality markedly boost prediction accuracy; (2) multimodal fusion yields moderate gains in Transformer models; and (3) a fully reproducible pipeline enables seamless dataset updates.

cs.CE↗

BRIDGE: Bootstrapping Text to Control Time-Series Generation via Multi-Agent Iterative Optimization and Diffusion Modeling

Time-series Generation (TSG) is a prominent research area with broad applications in simulations, data augmentation, and counterfactual analysis. While existing methods have shown promise in unconditional single-domain TSG, real-world applications demand for cross-domain approaches capable of controlled generation tailored to domain-specific constraints and instance-level requirements. In this paper, we argue that text can provide semantic insights, domain information and instance-specific temporal patterns, to guide and improve TSG. We introduce ``Text-Controlled TSG'', a task focused on generating realistic time series by incorporating textual descriptions. To address data scarcity in this setting, we propose a novel LLM-based Multi-Agent framework that synthesizes diverse, realistic text-to-TS datasets. Furthermore, we introduce BRIDGE, a hybrid text-controlled TSG framework that integrates semantic prototypes with text description for supporting domain-level guidance. This approach achieves state-of-the-art generation fidelity on 11 of 12 datasets, and improves controllability by up to 12% on MSE and 6% MAE compared to no text input generation, highlighting its potential for generating tailored time-series data.

cs.LG↗

Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful yet computationally intensive for widespread practical deployments. To address such challenge without costly re-training, post-training acceleration techniques like quantization and token reduction are extensively explored. However, current acceleration evaluations primarily target minimal overall performance degradation, overlooking a crucial question: does the accelerated model still give the same answers to the same questions as it did before acceleration? This is vital for stability-centered industrial applications where consistently correct answers for specific, known situations are paramount, such as in AI-based disease diagnosis. We systematically investigate this for accelerated VLMs, testing four leading models (LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-Next, Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL) with eight acceleration methods on ten multi-modal benchmarks. Our findings are stark: despite minimal aggregate performance drops, accelerated models changed original answers up to 20% of the time. Critically, up to 6.5% of these changes converted correct answers to incorrect. Input perturbations magnified these inconsistencies, and the trend is confirmed by case studies with the medical VLM LLaVA-Med. This research reveals a significant oversight in VLM acceleration, stressing an urgent need for instance-level stability checks to ensure trustworthy real-world deployment.

cs.CV↗

Mechanical non-reciprocity programmed by shear jamming in soft composite solids

Mechanical non-reciprocity-manifested as asymmetric responses to opposing mechanical stimuli-has traditionally been achieved through intricate structural nonlinearities in metamaterials. However, continuum solids with inherent non-reciprocal mechanics remain underexplored, despite their promising potential for applications such as wave guiding, robotics, and adaptive materials. Here, we introduce a design principle by employing the shear jamming transition from granular physics to engineer non-reciprocal mechanics in soft composite solids. Through the control of the interplay between inclusion contact networks and matrix elasticity, we achieve tunable, direction-dependent asymmetry in both shear and normal mechanical responses. In addition to static regimes, we demonstrate programmable non-reciprocal dynamics by combining responsive magnetic profiles with the anisotropic characteristics of shear-jammed systems. This strategy enables asymmetric spatiotemporal control over motion transmission, a previously challenging feat in soft materials. Our work establishes a novel paradigm for designing non-reciprocal matter, bridging granular physics with soft material engineering to realize functionalities essential for mechano-intelligent systems.

cond-mat.soft↗