arXiv subjects

Chao Li

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Li.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Neural Dynamic GI: Random-Access Neural Compression for Temporal Lightmaps in Dynamic Lighting Environments

High-quality global illumination (GI) in real-time rendering is commonly achieved using precomputed lighting techniques, with lightmap as the standard choice. To support GI for static objects in dynamic lighting environments, multiple lightmaps at different lighting conditions need to be precomputed, which incurs substantial storage and memory overhead. To overcome this limitation, we propose Neural Dynamic GI (NDGI), a novel compression technique specifically designed for temporal lightmap sets. Our method utilizes multi-dimensional feature maps and lightweight neural networks to integrate the temporal information instead of storing multiple sets explicitly, which significantly reduces the storage size of lightmaps. Additionally, we introduce a block compression (BC) simulation strategy during the training process, which enables BC compression on the final generated feature maps and further improves the compression ratio. To enable efficient real-time decompression, we also integrate a virtual texturing (VT) system with our neural representation. Compared with prior methods, our approach achieves high-quality dynamic GI while maintaining remarkably low storage and memory requirements, with only modest real-time decompression overhead. To facilitate further research in this direction, we will release our temporal lightmap dataset precomputed in multiple scenes featuring diverse temporal variations.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

Fully Decentralized Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning is A Context Modeling Problem

This paper studies fully decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, where each agent solely observes the states, its local actions, and the shared rewards. The inability to access other agents' actions often leads to non-stationarity during value function updates and relative overgeneralization during value function estimation, hindering effective cooperative policy learning. However, existing works fail to address both issues simultaneously, due to their inability to model the joint policy of other agents in a fully decentralized setting. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method named Dynamics-Aware Context (DAC), which formalizes the task, as locally perceived by each agent, as an Contextual Markov Decision Process, and further addresses both non-stationarity and relative overgeneralization through dynamics-aware context modeling. Specifically, DAC attributes the non-stationary local task dynamics of each agent to switches between unobserved contexts, each corresponding to a distinct joint policy. Then, DAC models the step-wise dynamics distribution using latent variables and refers to them as contexts. For each agent, DAC introduces a context-based value function to address the non-stationarity issue during value function update. For value function estimation, an optimistic marginal value is derived to promote the selection of cooperative actions, thereby addressing the relative overgeneralization issue. Experimentally, we evaluate DAC on various cooperative tasks (including matrix game, predator and prey, and SMAC), and its superior performance against multiple baselines validates its effectiveness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Toward Web 4.0: Bidirectional Trust between AI Agents and Blockchain

Autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed on blockchain platforms, yet the design space that governs their interaction remains poorly understood. This convergence, where autonomous agents operate on and within decentralized systems, is a defining feature of the emerging Web~4.0 paradigm. This paper presents a Systematization of Knowledge organized around a bidirectional trust framework. In the B $\boldsymbol{\rightarrow}$ A direction, we examine how blockchain provides trust infrastructure for agents, spanning identity and account abstraction, permission and delegation, intent-centric execution, and tokenized agent economies. In the A $\boldsymbol{\rightarrow}$ B direction, we examine the reverse: how AI agents participate in core blockchain mechanisms including security auditing, consensus, and governance. A Trust Foundation of verifiable computation underpins both directions, with each primitive offering different trade-offs between trust minimality, computational overhead, and deployment readiness. We formalize the interaction as an Agent-Blockchain Interaction Model (ABIM), catalog 70 Ethereum EIPs/ERCs, examine 20 representative industry projects, and review 118 academic papers, applying a five-dimensional framework assessing Verifiability, Minimality of Trust, Expressiveness, Composability, and Maturity. Our analysis uncovers significant gaps: the agent-specific standards ecosystem is overwhelmingly immature, intent architectures lack formal analysis, and while isolated works have begun to explore AI participation in consensus and governance, a unified security framing that treats AI as a first-class actor at the protocol layer remains absent. We propose a three-dimensional taxonomy, identify nine concrete open problems, and highlight the sharpest research opportunities at this intersection.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

CROP: Expert-Aligned Image Cropping via Compositional Reasoning and Optimizing Preference

Aesthetic image cropping aims to enhance the aesthetic quality of an image by improving its composition through spatial cropping. Previous methods often rely on saliency prediction or retrieval augmentation, ignoring the task's core requirement: a deep understanding of composition and aesthetics. Consequently, saliency-based methods struggle to make compositional trade-offs in complex scenes, while retrieval-based methods blindly refer to similar cases, lacking adaptive reasoning for unique scenes. Both approaches fail to align their automated cropping results with those of human experts. To address the above issues, we propose a novel paradigm that reformulates aesthetic cropping as a multimodal reasoning task, aiming to activate the VLM's analytical and comprehension capabilities in aesthetics. We design a Compositional Reasoning and Optimizing Preference method (CROP) that directs the VLM to think like a professional photographer. It deconstructs a complex and subjective aesthetic problem into an "analysis-proposal-decision" process, reasoning step by step through the analysis of scene elements and compositional principles. Meanwhile, our expert preference alignment module makes the model's decision consistent with human expert aesthetics. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate our method's superiority and component effectiveness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Clouds to Hallucinations: Atmospheric Retrieval Hijacking in Remote Sensing Vision-Language RAG

Multimodal RAG systems increasingly rely on vision-language retrievers to ground visual queries in external textual evidence. Existing adversarial studies on RAG mainly manipulate the retrieval corpus or memory, while attacks on vision-language and remote sensing models typically target end-task predictions. Input-space threats to the evidence retrieval stage of remote sensing multimodal RAG remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CloudWeb, an atmospheric retrieval hijacking attack that modifies only the input image while keeping the retriever, generator, and knowledge base fixed at deployment. CloudWeb overlays parameterized cloud- and haze-like patterns on remote sensing images and optimizes them with a retrieval-oriented objective that pulls adversarial image embeddings toward target atmospheric evidence, suppresses source-scene evidence, enforces rank separation, and regularizes naturalness and coverage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of retrieval-stage atmospheric evidence hijacking in remote sensing multimodal RAG. We evaluate CloudWeb on a seven-dataset remote sensing RAG benchmark with five CLIP-style retrievers, including GeoRSCLIP, RemoteCLIP, OpenAI CLIP, and OpenCLIP, together with downstream vision-language generators. Across retrievers, CloudWeb consistently outperforms clean retrieval, handcrafted atmospheric baselines, random cloud perturbations, and fixed variants in injecting weather-related evidence into top-ranked results. On GeoRSCLIP ViT-B/32, Weather@5 increases from 0.71\% to 43.29\%. Downstream generation further shows measurable weather hallucination and semantic shift, indicating that retrieval-stage hijacking can propagate to the final RAG response. These findings reveal a practical failure mode: natural-looking atmospheric changes can compromise evidence retrieval before generation begins.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Contrast-X: A Multi-Modal Contrast Image Synthesis Benchmark and Universal Modality Flow Matching

Contrast-enhanced imaging is central to oncologic diagnosis, but contrast agents can be contraindicated for many of the patients who need them most. Synthesizing contrast scans from non-contrast inputs is the natural response. Two obstacles stand in the way: no benchmark provides paired contrast data with lesion-level evaluation, and no single model handles the arbitrary missing patterns seen in practice. We introduce Contrast-X, a benchmark of paired contrast-enhanced and non-contrast imaging spanning 10 organs in CT (1{,}526 patients) and multi-phase breast DCE-MRI (1116 patients). Every case carries radiologist-verified phase labels and tumor masks. We further propose FlowMI, a single model that handles arbitrary subsets of available modalities through a unified multi-modal latent space and flow matching. We benchmark a range of missing-modality configurations, reporting standard image-quality metrics, radiologist reader studies, and downstream lesion analysis on the synthesized scans. We further evaluate cross-organ generalization to test whether the model has learned a transferable contrast-enhancement operation. Dataset, code, and leaderboard will be released. Our code are available at https://github.com/YifanChen02/Contrast-X.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

VisMMOE: Exploiting Visual-Expert Affinity for Efficient Visual-Language MoE Offloading

Large-scale vision-language mixture-of-experts (VL-MoE) models provide strong multimodal capability, but efficient deployment on memory-constrained platforms remains difficult. Existing MoE offloading systems are largely designed for text-centric workloads and become much less effective for visual-heavy inputs, where large numbers of visual tokens induce broader and less predictable expert accesses. We present VisMMoE, a VL-MoE offloading system built on a single systems insight: pruning redundant visual tokens can improve offloading not only by reducing computation, but also by reshaping expert demand. We refer to this effect as \textit{visual-expert affinity}: token pruning makes expert accesses more concentrated within layers and more stable across layers, producing a smaller and more predictable expert working set. Guided by this insight, VisMMoE combines affinity-aware token compression, lookahead expert prediction, and cache/pipeline orchestration to improve expert locality and prefetch effectiveness under tight memory budgets. We implement VisMMoE on multiple frameworks and evaluate it on representative VL-MoE models and benchmarks. VisMMoE improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 2.68x and 1.61x, respectively, over strong baselines for today's VL-MoE deployments while maintaining competitive accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

A cross-modal network for facial expression recognition

Deep neural networks enriched with structural information have been widely employed for facial expression recognition tasks. However, these methods often depend on hierarchical information rather than face property to finish expression recognition. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal network with strong biological and structural information for facial expression recognition (CMNet). CMNet can respectively learn expression information via face symmetry on a whole face, left and right half faces to extract complementary facial features. To prevent negative effect of biological and structural information fusion, a salient facial information refinement module can obtain salient facial expression information to improve stability of an obtained facial expression classifier. To reduce reliance on unilateral facial features, a half-face alignment optimization mechanism is designed to align obtained expression information of learned left and right half faces. Our experimental results demonstrate that CMNet outperforms several novel methods, i.e., SCN and LAENet-SA for facial expression recognition. Codes can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/CMNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Regularized Centered Emphatic Temporal Difference Learning

Off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning with function approximation faces a structural tradeoff among stability, projection geometry, and variance control. Emphatic TD (ETD) improves the off-policy projection geometry through follow-on emphasis, but the follow-on trace can have high variance. We revisit this tradeoff through Bellman-error centering. Although centering naturally removes a common drift term from TD errors, we show that a naive centered emphatic extension introduces an auxiliary coupling that can destroy the positive-definiteness of the ETD key matrix. We propose \emph{Regularized Emphatic Temporal-Difference Learning} (RETD), which preserves the follow-on trace and regularizes only the auxiliary centering recursion, corresponding to lifting the lower-right block of the coupled key matrix from $1$ to $1+c$. We derive the RETD core matrix, prove convergence under a conservative sufficient regularization condition, and evaluate the method on diagnostic linear off-policy prediction tasks. The experiments show that RETD avoids the instability of naive centered emphatic learning, preserves favorable emphatic geometry, and exhibits a robust intermediate regime for the regularization parameter $c$ across the diagnostics.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Quasi-canonical AFL and Arithmetic Transfer conjectures at parahoric levels

In the first part of the paper, we formulate several arithmetic transfer conjectures, which are variants of the arithmetic fundamental lemma conjecture in the presence of ramification. The ramification comes from the choice of non-hyperspecial parahoric level structure. We prove a graph version of these arithmetic transfer conjectures, by relating it to the quasi-canonical arithmetic fundamental lemma, which we also establish. We relate some of the arithmetic transfer conjectures to the arithmetic fundamental lemma conjecture for the whole Hecke algebra in our recent paper arXiv:2305.14465. As a consequence, we prove these conjectures in some simple cases. In the second part of the paper, we elucidate the structure of an integral model of a certain member of the almost selfdual Rapoport-Zink tower, thereby proving conjectures of Kudla and the second author. This result allows us verify the hypotheses of the graph version of the arithmetic transfer conjectures in a particular case.

math.NT↗

arXiv2026

Structural Dissolution: How Artificial Intelligence Dismantles Coordination Architecture and Reconfigures the Political Economy of Production

This paper introduces the Structural Dissolution Framework to explain how artificial intelligence restructures the coordination architecture of traditional industries. We argue that AI dissolves the boundaries that once separated firms, markets, experts, and consumers by internalizing human multimodal interfaces, including language, vision, and behavioral data, into computational systems. This process is not merely an efficiency gain but a qualitative transformation of production relations. It generates four major shifts: the erosion of firm and industry boundaries; the movement of value creation from physical resources and human collaboration to continuous token flows produced through data refinement loops; the rise of domain-specific data refinement infrastructure as the new basis of positional control; and the emergence of regional data sovereignty entities as organizational forms that replace the coordinating role of firms and markets. We define this mechanism as Interface Internalization, through which inter-agent coordination is absorbed into intra-system computation. The framework challenges the Coasian view that organizational boundaries are determined by transaction cost minimization, arguing instead that AI makes such boundaries economically obsolete. Firms may continue to exist as legal and physical entities, but their coordinating function is displaced as they become data nodes within regionally governed AI infrastructure. Using resource-dependent regional economies as an illustrative case, the paper shows how AI adoption can both transform seasonal industries into continuous economic infrastructure and replace intermediate coordination roles and traditional employment structures.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Ternary Memristive Logic: Hardware for Reasoning Realized via Domain Algebra

Memristive crossbars store numerical weights needing aggregation and decoding; a single junction means nothing alone. This paper presents a fundamentally different use: each junction stores a complete, domain-scoped logical assertion (holds/negated/undefined). Ternary resistance states encode these values directly. We establish a structure-preserving mapping from a domain algebra to crossbar topology: domains become isolated arrays, specialization becomes directed wiring, relation typing controls inheritance gates, and cross-domain links become explicit registers. The physical layout thus embodies the algebra; changing wiring changes reasoning semantics. We detail an ICD-11 respiratory disease classification chip (1,247 entities, ~136k 1T1R junctions) enabling domain scoping, three-valued logic, transitive cascade, typed inheritance, and cross-axis queries. Behavioral simulation (sigma_log=0.15, SNR=20dB) shows error-free operation across 100,000 trials per task with wide tolerance margins. Where prior work unified representation and computation in software, this work unifies them in hardware: reading one junction answers one question, without symbolic interpretation.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

FSFM: A Biologically-Inspired Framework for Selective Forgetting of Agent Memory

For LLM agents, memory management critically impacts efficiency, quality, and security. While much research focuses on retention, selective forgetting--inspired by human cognitive processes (hippocampal indexing/consolidation theory and Ebbinghaus forgetting curve)--remains underexplored. We argue that in resource-constrained environments, a well-designed forgetting mechanism is as crucial as remembering, delivering benefits across three dimensions: (1) efficiency via intelligent memory pruning, (2) quality by dynamically updating outdated preferences and context, and (3) security through active forgetting of malicious inputs, sensitive data, and privacy-compromising content. Our framework establishes a taxonomy of forgetting mechanisms: passive decay-based, active deletion-based, safety-triggered, and adaptive reinforcement-based. Building on advances in LLM agent architectures and vector databases, we present detailed specifications, implementation strategies, and empirical validation from controlled experiments. Results show significant improvements: access efficiency (+8.49%), content quality (+29.2% signal-to-noise ratio), and security performance (100% elimination of security risks). Our work bridges cognitive neuroscience and AI systems, offering practical solutions for real-world deployment while addressing ethical and regulatory compliance. The paper concludes with challenges and future directions, establishing selective forgetting as a fundamental capability for next-generation LLM agents operating in real-world, resource-constrained scenarios. Our contributions align with AI-native memory systems and responsible AI development.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

End-to-End Optimization of LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Search Systems via Heterogeneous-Group-Based Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are versatile, yet their deployment in complex real-world settings is limited by static knowledge cutoffs and the difficulty of producing controllable behavior within a single inference. Multi-agent search systems (MASS), which coordinate specialized LLM agents equipped with search tools, mitigate these issues via task decomposition and retrieval-augmented problem solving. However, optimizing LLMs for agent-specific roles remains labor-intensive with prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning, motivating automated end-to-end training. Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods such as Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) typically depend on large critic networks to evaluate joint actions, leading to instability and high memory costs. We introduce Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Group Policy Optimization (MHGPO), which updates policies by estimating relative advantages across heterogeneous groups of multi-agent rollouts, shifting the optimization focus from local agent performance to global system success. We further study three group rollout sampling strategies to trade off sample efficiency and optimization quality. Experiments show that MHGPO captures implicit inter-agent dependencies and consistently outperforms strong baselines in both task performance and computational efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

DALM: A Domain-Algebraic Language Model via Three-Phase Structured Generation

Large language models compress heterogeneous knowledge into a single parameter space, allowing facts from different domains to interfere during generation. We propose DALM, a Domain-Algebraic Language Model that replaces unconstrained token generation with structured denoising over a domain lattice. DALM follows a three-phase generation path: it first resolves domain uncertainty, then relation uncertainty, and finally concept uncertainty, so each stage operates under explicit algebraic constraints. The framework requires only three ingredients: a lattice of domains with computable meet, join, and implication; a typing function over relations that controls inheritance across domains; and a fiber partition that localizes knowledge to domain-specific subsets. Given these ingredients, DALM yields a three-phase encoder-decoder architecture in which generation is confined to a domain fiber, cross-domain contamination is structurally prevented in closed-vocabulary mode and auditably bounded in open-vocabulary mode, and a single query can produce a domain-indexed multi-perspective answer space. We instantiate the framework with the CDC knowledge representation system and outline training and evaluation on validated domain-annotated crystal libraries. DALM reframes language generation as algebraically constrained structured denoising rather than unconstrained decoding over a flat token space.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

AGMA: Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Anchors for Prior-Guided Multimodal Human Trajectory Forecasting

Human trajectory forecasting requires capturing the multimodal nature of pedestrian behavior. However, existing approaches suffer from prior misalignment. Their learned or fixed priors often fail to capture the full distribution of plausible futures, limiting both prediction accuracy and diversity. We theoretically establish that prediction error is lower-bounded by prior quality, making prior modeling a key performance bottleneck. Guided by this insight, we propose AGMA (Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Anchors), which constructs expressive priors through two stages: extracting diverse behavioral patterns from training data and distilling them into a scene-adaptive global prior for inference. Extensive experiments on ETH-UCY, Stanford Drone, and JRDB datasets demonstrate that AGMA achieves state-of-the-art performance, confirming the critical role of high-quality priors in trajectory forecasting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Chain-of-Models Pre-Training: Rethinking Training Acceleration of Vision Foundation Models

In this paper, we present Chain-of-Models Pre-Training (CoM-PT), a novel performance-lossless training acceleration method for vision foundation models (VFMs). This approach fundamentally differs from existing acceleration methods in its core motivation: rather than optimizing each model individually, CoM-PT is designed to accelerate the training pipeline at the model family level, scaling efficiently as the model family expands. Specifically, CoM-PT establishes a pre-training sequence for the model family, arranged in ascending order of model size, called model chain. In this chain, only the smallest model undergoes standard individual pre-training, while the other models are efficiently trained through sequential inverse knowledge transfer from their smaller predecessors by jointly reusing the knowledge in the parameter space and the feature space. As a result, CoM-PT enables all models to achieve performance that is mostly superior to standard individual training while significantly reducing training cost, and this is extensively validated across 45 datasets spanning zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. Notably, its efficient scaling property yields a remarkable phenomenon: training more models even results in higher efficiency. For instance, when pre-training on CC3M: i) given ViT-L as the largest model, progressively prepending smaller models to the model chain reduces computational complexity by up to 72%; ii) within a fixed model size range, as the VFM family scales across 3, 4, and 7 models, the acceleration ratio of CoM-PT exhibits a striking leap: from 4.13X to 5.68X and 7.09X. Since CoM-PT is naturally agnostic to specific pre-training paradigms, we open-source the code to spur further extensions in more computationally intensive scenarios, such as large language model pre-training.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CODO: An Automated Compiler for Comprehensive Dataflow Optimization

FPGAs are well-suited for dataflow architectures that process data in a streaming or pipelined manner, thus satisfying the high computational and communication demands of emerging applications. However, manually implementing an efficient dataflow architecture for large-scale applications is still challenging, even for specialists who use high-level synthesis (HLS) to simplify FPGA programming. To address this, we introduce CODO, an automated compiler that generates feasible and efficient dataflow accelerators on FPGAs. CODO features a systematic method for detecting and eliminating both coarse-grained and fine-grained dataflow violations. Building on this, CODO performs both on- and off-chip data movement optimizations to maximize transfer efficiency. To guarantee a higher design quality, CODO performs automatic scheduling to generate high-performance dataflow accelerators, ensuring a balanced performance-resource trade-off. Synthesis results show that CODO delivers $1.45\times$ to $4.52\times$ latency speedups on typical computation kernels and $3.7\times$ to $33.8\times$ speedups on DNN models compared to SOTA frameworks. In on-board evaluations, CODO achieves $7.3\times$ average speedup on CNN models and $2.07\times$ average speedup on the GPT-2 model over SOTA frameworks. The compiler is open-sourced at https://github.com/sjtu-zhao-lab/codo-artifact.

cs.AR↗