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Chen Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Chen Feng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence

We launch SenseNova-U1.5, an 8B-MoT native unified multimodal model that understands, reasons about, and generates visual content within an encoder-free and VAE-free architecture. We strengthen its visual interface through spatially coherent patch reconstruction and scale its training with carefully curated generation and editing data, improved task formulation, structural prompt enhancement, and native resolutions of up to 4K. For post-training, we optimize specialized experts for visual aesthetics, bilingual text rendering, infographic generation, and image editing, and consolidate their capabilities through multi-expert on-policy distillation. Across extensive evaluations, SenseNova-U1.5 largely advances image fidelity, text rendering, complex composition, multi-reference editing, and interleaved generation, while improving instruction following and preserving subject identity, geometry, and unmodified regions. Despite limited exposure to structured formats in its generation data, SenseNova-U1.5 generalizes effectively to long, complex, and structured visual instructions, further proving that multimodal understanding can transfer to visual planning and creation. Together, these findings position native unified modelling as a promising path towards systems that perceive, reason and create within a fully end-to-end framework. We will open-source training code, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation.

cs.CV

Breaking Fault Lines: Unifying TEE-Assisted BFT Consensus in Partially Trusted Worlds

This paper revisits TEE-assisted BFT under a universal partial-TEE model, where an arbitrary subset of replicas execute inside TEEs while the remaining replicas operate without hardware trust guarantees. We show that heterogeneous trust changes the structure of quorum formation and fault tolerance. In particular, we derive a tight resilience bound f < max {n/3, m/2}, where n is the total number of replicas and m is the number of TEE-enabled replicas. The result reveals a sharp threshold phenomenon: TEEs improve fault tolerance only once they exceed two-thirds of the deployment. Guided by this characterization, we introduce two protocol principles: (1) a dual-quorum construction that safely combines TEE-only and mixed quorums, and (2) a TEE-leader fast path that leverages hardware-enforced non-equivocation to reduce both consensus and view-change latency. We realize these ideas in Raftel, which is, to our knowledge, the first HotStuff-style BFT protocol designed explicitly for arbitrary partial-TEE deployments, and in chained-Raftel, a pipelined variant that further accelerates mixed-trust execution. We implement both protocols atop Intel SGX and evaluate them in LAN and WAN environments. Our results show that Raftel achieves up to 625 TPS with sub-670 ms latency in WAN settings, outperforming HotStuff by up to 308 TPS in throughput while approaching the performance of fully TEE-assisted protocols.

cs.DC

Accuracy and Order Sensitivity Diverge Under Label-Free Strategies

Multiple-choice benchmarks are widely used to evaluate large language models, but MCQ scores conflate knowledge with sensitivity to option order, which makes them unreliable measures of model knowledge. In this paper, we test whether preventing a model from seeing option labels while committing to an answer removes positional influence and, in turn, improves performance. We evaluate two different strategies for mitigating bias. The first uses a generation-then-matching approach, and the second scores options in isolation, which is positionally unbiased by construction. Neither reliably improves accuracy. A complete decomposition shows that the bottleneck is withholding options, not the matching step. The only configuration that consistently matches the baseline is the one that shows the model all options paired with an LLM matcher. However, eliminating positional influence entirely still does not reliably yield accuracy gains, while cyclic permutation often improves them. For two-stage prompting, an aggregate measure of recall imbalance and a direct per-question measure of order sensitivity both fail to show reliable debiasing.

cs.CL

Observation Quality Matters: Robust Multi-Fisheye Calibration via Failure-Oriented Analysis

Reliable calibration of multi-fisheye camera systems remains challenging as rig size, camera arrangement diversity, and field of view increase. Existing pipelines can jointly optimize intrinsics, extrinsics, and target poses, but their success still depends heavily on empirical capture rules and the quality of the observations supplied to the solver. This paper studies this dependency through a failure-oriented analysis. We reveal that calibration failures are not sufficiently explained by detector recall loss or global image-plane distribution imbalance. Instead, the dominant failure factor lies in intrinsic initialization: observations with limited radial span couple focal scale with fisheye projection-shape parameters, producing ill-conditioned updates. Guided by this insight, we propose CO-Calib, a plug-in calibration-data construction framework that combines a robust learning-based target detector with an error-analysis-guided frame selector. CO-Calib constructs initialization-friendly anchors, co-visible multi-camera constraints, and coverage-completion frames without changing the existing calibration workflow or optimization backend. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real multi-fisheye systems demonstrate that CO-Calib improves the overall success rate from 68.1% to 99.3%, increases extrinsic accuracy, and augments real-world calibration stability. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/CO-Calib.

cs.RO

WildCity: A Real-World City-Scale Testbed for Rendering, Simulation, and Spatial Intelligence

Humans can navigate an unfamiliar city and gradually form a coherent spatial mental map spanning tens of square kilometers. Can AI build spatial representations at a comparable scale? Although recent foundation models have advanced scene reconstruction and embodied intelligence, scaling to entire cities remains an open challenge, primarily due to the lack of city-scale data. To bridge the gap, we introduce WildCity, a real-world multimodal dataset collected by autonomous fleets traversing complex urban environments. Our dataset includes 18 trajectories, each averaging 83.7 kilometers in length, and preserves the core challenges of in-the-wild perception, e.g., dynamic objects, lighting variations, and imperfect camera poses. We further establish an urban-tailored reconstruction baseline and convert the reconstructed environments into a closed-loop simulator. Beyond the dataset and baseline, we systematically analyze the key challenges on the path to simulation-ready urban digital twins: scalability, extrapolation, and uncertainty. Ultimately, WildCity aims to catalyze progress not only in city-scale rendering, but more broadly in the pursuit of AI that can perceive, remember, and reason across space at a scale comparable to human cognition. Project page: https://han-xiangyu.github.io/Wild-City/

cs.CV

SAVMap: Structure-Aided Visual Mapping of Large-Scale 2.5D Manhattan Wireframes from Panoramic Video

Precise 3D representations of industrial environments enable tasks such as robot localization and digital twin generation. We propose SAVMap, a method for generating a semantic wireframe map of warehouse shelf and light structures using only a panoramic video camera as the sensor input. Sequences of rectified images with shelf and ceiling-facing views are extracted from a panoramic video captured along the warehouse aisles. Using a semantic segmentation network front end, a set of sparse, semantic structure feature points (e.g., corners of shelf structures, centers of lights) are extracted from each image and tracked across the sequences. By accounting for real-world geometric relationships among the points such as Manhattan grids, a constrained structure-from-motion algorithm yields the 3D points that form a wireframe map. We demonstrate the scalability and accuracy of our proposal in a warehouse with 46 shelving rows, each with faces spanning 55\,m by 7\,m. From an hour of panoramic video content, we create wireframe maps for over 5000 shelf elements across the rows, achieving an aggregate mean absolute error of 4.8\,cm with respect to ground-truth.

cs.CV

ViewSAM: Learning View-aware Cross-modal Semantics for Weakly Supervised Cross-view Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Cross-view Referring Multi-Object Tracking (CRMOT) aims to track multiple objects specified by natural language across multiple camera views, with globally consistent identities. Despite recent progress, existing methods rely heavily on costly frame-level spatial annotations and cross-view identity supervision. To reduce such reliance, we explore CRMOT under weak supervision by leveraging the capabilities of foundation models. However, our empirical study shows that directly applying foundation models such as SAM2 and SAM3, even with task-specific modifications, fails to accurately understand referring expressions and maintain consistent identities across views. Yet, they remain effective at producing reliable object tracklets that can serve as pseudo supervision. We therefore repurpose foundation models as pseudo-label generators and propose a two-stage framework for weakly supervised CRMOT, using only object category labels as coarse-grained supervision. In the first stage, we design an Affinity-guided Cross-view Re-prompting strategy to refine and associate SAM3-generated tracklets across cameras, producing reliable cross-view pseudo labels for subsequent training. In the second stage, we introduce ViewSAM, a CRMOT model built upon SAM2 that explicitly models view-aware cross-modal semantics. By formulating view-induced variations as learnable conditions, ViewSAM bridges the gap between view-variant visual observations and view-invariant textual expressions, enabling robust cross-view referring tracking with only approximately 10% additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViewSAM achieves SOTA performance under weak supervision and remains competitive with fully supervised methods.

cs.CV

SILMARILS: Information-Theoretic and Quantum-Secure Designated-Verifier Signatures

SILMARILS is built from a minimal algebraic core over $\mathbb{F}_p$ using true randomness and perfect $2$-out-of-$2$ Shamir secret sharing. The framework supports both two-party and three-party modes. In the two-party setting, SILMARILS realizes a transferable designated-verifier (TDV) signature scheme. The designated verifier can simulate accepting transcripts indistinguishable from real ones, achieving Jakobsson-Sako-Impagliazzo DV security. The verifier may publish a receipt $r$ enabling public verification, yet even with $r$, no external party can tell whether a transcript was signed or simulated. As DV signatures permit simulation, standard EUF-CMA cannot hold for the designated verifier; instead, we prove $\mathsf{EUF\text{-}CMA}^{\neg\mathsf{DV}}$ security for all non-designated verifiers in both the random oracle model (ROM) and quantum random oracle model (QROM). In the three-party mode, adopting the broadcast model of Fitzi et al., we obtain a statistically secure signature protocol with simulation-based security and error $1/p$. We analyze security in the Pure IT model, the IT+ROM, and the QROM, extending the Fitzi et al. framework to quantum adversaries with classical I/O. Correctness, secrecy, transferability, and unforgeability for non-designated parties remain equivalent to simulation-based security. Thanks to its simple algebraic structure, SILMARILS offers very compact keys and signatures for the blockchain settings we target, where standardized PQC schemes are already more than sufficient. Our goal is not to compare SILMARILS with PQC, but to highlight its suitability for lightweight TDV authentication. A fair comparison with other DV schemes is omitted due to space and the complexity of aligning models.

cs.CR

SCD4VPR: Multi-modal Scene Change Detection for Long-term Visual Place Recognition Database Update

Long-term autonomy in mobile robotics requires maps that remain accurate as environments change over time. Visual Place Recognition (VPR), a core localization capability, degrades sharply as the temporal gap between query and database images grows, particularly across seasonal transitions. Scene Change Detection (SCD) offers a principled mechanism for database maintenance, but existing methods rely on binary, uni-modal visual features that cannot distinguish structural changes from viewpoint-induced differences - a distinction essential for correct update decisions. We propose SCD4VPR, a scene change detection that jointly reasons about what has changed and distinguishes genuine change from viewpoint-induced difference in a unified vision-language framework. SCD4VPR fuses VLM-generated semantic descriptions with visual features via cross-modal attention and refines predictions with geometric-semantic matching, producing multi-class change masks that separately identify object changes, appearance changes, and viewpoint-induced changes. We introduce NYC-CD, the first real-world street-view SCD benchmark with pixel-level multi-class annotations across 8,122 image pairs. Experiments across four SCD benchmarks show that SCD4VPR consistently improves three architecturally distinct backbones. In a controlled VPR database maintenance experiment on NYU-VPR spanning summer through late winter, we confirm that retrieval performance deteriorates substantially when the database is left unchanged, and show that SCD4VPR-guided updates recover most of this loss (+30.1 R@1 at the largest time gap) while keeping the database far more compact than naive append.

cs.CV

A Mamba-based Perceptual Loss Function for Learning-based UGC Transcoding

In user-generated content (UGC) transcoding, source videos typically suffer various degradations due to prior compression, editing, or suboptimal capture conditions. Consequently, existing video compression paradigms that solely optimize for fidelity relative to the reference become suboptimal, as they force the codec to replicate the inherent artifacts of the non-pristine source. To address this, we propose a novel perceptually inspired loss function for learning-based UGC video transcoding that redefines the role of the reference video, shifting it from a ground-truth pixel anchor to an informative contextual guide. Specifically, we train a lightweight neural quality model based on a Selective Structured State-Space Model (Mamba) optimized using a weakly-supervised Siamese ranking strategy. The proposed model is then integrated into the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) process of two neural video codecs (DCVC and HiNeRV) as a loss function, aiming to generate reconstructed content with improved perceptual quality. Our experiments demonstrate that this framework achieves substantial coding gains over both autoencoder and implicit neural representation-based baselines, with 8.46% and 12.89% BD-rate savings, respectively.

eess.IV

Deconstructing the Failure of Ideal Noise Correction: A Three-Pillar Diagnosis

Statistically consistent methods based on the noise transition matrix ($T$) offer a theoretically grounded solution to Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL), with guarantees of convergence to the optimal clean-data classifier. In practice, however, these methods are often outperformed by empirical approaches such as sample selection, and this gap is usually attributed to the difficulty of accurately estimating $T$. The common assumption is that, given a perfect $T$, noise-correction methods would recover their theoretical advantage. In this work, we put this longstanding hypothesis to a decisive test. We conduct experiments under idealized conditions, providing correction methods with a perfect, oracle transition matrix. Even under these ideal conditions, we observe that these methods still suffer from performance collapse during training. This compellingly demonstrates that the failure is not fundamentally a $T$-estimation problem, but stems from a more deeply rooted flaw. To explain this behaviour, we provide a unified analysis that links three levels: macroscopic convergence states, microscopic optimisation dynamics, and information-theoretic limits on what can be learned from noisy labels. Together, these results give a formal account of why ideal noise correction fails and offer concrete guidance for designing more reliable methods for learning with noisy labels.

cs.LG

Relativistic Corrections to the Formation Rate of Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals

Extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are long-duration gravitational-wave sources in which a compact object gradually spirals into a massive black hole. Their formation is governed by the interplay between stochastic angular-momentum diffusion driven by two-body relaxation and the dissipative evolution caused by gravitational-wave emission, with the loss-cone boundary deciding whether an object undergoes an inspiral or a direct plunge. Building on this physical picture, we construct a relativistically self-consistent analytic framework for estimating EMRI event rates. In Schwarzschild spacetime, we generalize the standard loss-cone angular momentum to an energy-dependent quantity and revise the plunge pericenter by using the minimum stable radius derived from general relativity. Relative to the Newtonian treatment, we show that incorporating these relativistic effects increases the predicted EMRI rates by roughly a factor of 8. This enhancement becomes more pronounced for shallower stellar density profiles and is insensitive to the mass of the central massive black hole, which emphasizes that relativistic effects are essential for EMRI rate estimations that are relevant for space-based gravitational-wave detectors, such as LISA and Taiji.

gr-qc

Nano-EmoX: Unifying Multimodal Emotional Intelligence from Perception to Empathy

The development of affective multimodal language models (MLMs) has long been constrained by a gap between low-level perception and high-level interaction, leading to fragmented affective capabilities and limited generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a cognitively inspired three-level hierarchy that organizes affective tasks according to their cognitive depth-perception, understanding, and interaction-and provides a unified conceptual foundation for advancing affective modeling. Guided by this hierarchy, we introduce Nano-EmoX, a small-scale multitask MLM, and P2E (Perception-to-Empathy), a curriculum-based training framework. Nano-EmoX integrates a suite of omni-modal encoders, including an enhanced facial encoder and a fusion encoder, to capture key multimodal affective cues and improve cross-task transferability. The outputs are projected into a unified language space via heterogeneous adapters, empowering a lightweight language model to tackle diverse affective tasks. Concurrently, P2E progressively cultivates emotional intelligence by aligning rapid perception with chain-of-thought-driven empathy. To the best of our knowledge, Nano-EmoX is the first compact MLM (2.2B) to unify six core affective tasks across all three hierarchy levels, achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating excellent efficiency and generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/waHAHJIAHAO/Nano-EmoX.

cs.AI

CRAG: Can 3D Generative Models Help 3D Assembly?

Most existing 3D assembly methods treat the problem as pure pose estimation, rearranging observed parts via rigid transformations. In contrast, human assembly naturally couples structural reasoning with holistic shape inference. Inspired by this intuition, we reformulate 3D assembly as a joint problem of assembly and generation. We show that these two processes are mutually reinforcing: assembly provides part-level structural priors for generation, while generation injects holistic shape context that resolves ambiguities in assembly. Unlike prior methods that cannot synthesize missing geometry, we propose CRAG, which simultaneously generates plausible complete shapes and predicts poses for input parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across in-the-wild objects with diverse geometries, varying part counts, and missing pieces. Project Page: https://ai4ce.github.io/CRAG/

cs.CV

EgoPush: Learning End-to-End Egocentric Multi-Object Rearrangement for Mobile Robots

Humans can rearrange objects in cluttered environments using egocentric perception, navigating occlusions without global coordinates. Inspired by this capability, we study long-horizon multi-object non-prehensile rearrangement for mobile robots using a single egocentric camera. We introduce EgoPush, a policy learning framework that enables egocentric, perception-driven rearrangement without relying on explicit global state estimation that often fails in dynamic scenes. EgoPush designs an object-centric latent space to encode relative spatial relations among objects, rather than absolute poses. This design enables a privileged reinforcement-learning (RL) teacher to jointly learn latent states and mobile actions from sparse keypoints, which is then distilled into a purely visual student policy. To reduce the supervision gap between the omniscient teacher and the partially observed student, we restrict the teacher's observations to visually accessible cues. This induces active perception behaviors that are recoverable from the student's viewpoint. To address long-horizon credit assignment, we decompose rearrangement into stage-level subproblems using temporally decayed, stage-local completion rewards. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that EgoPush significantly outperforms end-to-end RL baselines in success rate, with ablation studies validating each design choice. We further demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a mobile platform in the real world. Code and videos are available at https://ai4ce.github.io/EgoPush/.

cs.RO

FC-Vision: Real-Time Visibility-Aware Replanning for Occlusion-Free Aerial Target Structure Scanning in Unknown Environments

Autonomous aerial scanning of target structures is crucial for practical applications, requiring online adaptation to unknown obstacles during flight. Existing methods largely emphasize collision avoidance and efficiency, but overlook occlusion-induced visibility degradation, severely compromising scanning quality. This study proposes FC-Vision, an on-the-fly visibility-aware replanning framework that proactively and safely prevents target occlusions while preserving full target coverage and efficiency of the original plan. Our approach explicitly enforces dense surface-visibility constraints to regularize replanning behavior in real-time via an efficient two-level decomposition: occlusion-free viewpoint repair that maintains coverage with minimal deviation from the nominal scan, followed by segment-wise clean-sensing connection in 5-DoF space. A plug-in integration strategy is also presented to seamlessly interface \textbf{FC-Vision} with existing UAV scanning systems without architectural changes. Comprehensive simulation and real-world evaluations show that \textbf{FC-Vision} consistently improves scanning quality under unexpected occluders, delivering a maximum coverage gain of 55.32% and a 73.17% reduction in the occlusion ratio, while achieving real-time performance with a moderate increase in flight time. The code has been released at https://github.com/FC-Family/FC-Vision.

cs.RO

Neurophysiological effects of museum modalities on emotional engagement with real artworks

Museums increasingly rely on digital content to support visitors' understanding of artworks, yet little is known about how these formats shape the emotional engagement that underlies meaningful art experiences. This research presents an in-situ EEG study on how digital interpretive content modulate engagement during art viewing. Participants experienced three modalities: direct viewing of a Bruegel painting, a 180{\deg} immersive interpretive projection, and a regular, display-based interpretive video. Frontal EEG markers of motivational orientation, internal involvement, perceptual drive, and arousal were extracted using eyes-open baselines and Z-normalized contrasts. Results show modality-specific engagement profiles: display-based interpretive video induced high arousal and fast-band activity, immersive projections promoted calm, presence-oriented absorption, and original artworks reflected internally regulated engagement. These findings, relying on lightweight EEG sensing in an operational cultural environment, suggest that digital interpretive content affects engagement style rather than quantity. This paves the way for new multimodal sensing approaches and enables museums to optimize the modalities and content of their interpretive media.

eess.SP

Beyond Training for Cultural Awareness: The Role of Dataset Linguistic Structure in Large Language Models

The global deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about cultural misalignment, yet the linguistic properties of fine-tuning datasets used for cultural adaptation remain poorly understood. We adopt a dataset-centric view of cultural alignment and ask which linguistic properties of fine-tuning data are associated with cultural performance, whether these properties are predictive prior to training, and how these effects vary across models. We compute lightweight linguistic, semantic, and structural metrics for Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese datasets and apply principal component analysis separately within each language. This design ensures that the resulting components capture variation among datasets written in the same language rather than differences between languages. The resulting components correspond to broadly interpretable axes related to semantic coherence, surface-level lexical and syntactic diversity, and lexical or structural richness, though their composition varies across languages. We fine-tune three major LLM families (LLaMA, Mistral, DeepSeek) and evaluate them on benchmarks of cultural knowledge, values, and norms. While PCA components correlate with downstream performance, these associations are strongly model-dependent. Through controlled subset interventions, we show that lexical-oriented components (PC3) are the most robust, yielding more consistent performance across models and benchmarks, whereas emphasizing semantic or diversity extremes (PC1-PC2) is often neutral or harmful.

cs.CL