arXiv subjects

Chengxi Li

Publications and source records attributed to Chengxi Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Surfsvr: 2D Surface Priors as 3D Geometric Regularizers for Sparse Voxel Reconstruction

Sparse voxel reconstruction offers an efficient representation for high-fidelity 3D modeling, yet its geometry is commonly optimized from local photometric evidence and discrete visibility statistics. This often leads to fragmented surfaces, excessive subdivision, and floating artifacts, particularly in weakly textured or sparsely observed regions. We introduce SurfSVR, a novel sparse voxel reconstruction paradigm that treats 2D surface priors as explicit 3D geometric regularizers. Instead of directly lifting noisy pixel-wise depth predictions, SurfSVR first organizes each image into coherent surface regions by jointly reasoning over appearance, monocular depth, normals and cross-view geometry. Each region is then represented by an adaptively selected planar or quadratic surface model based on fitting reliability and geometric complexity, while cross-model agreement distinguishes reliable geometry from ambiguous predictions. These structured 2D priors are lifted into 3D and integrated throughout the reconstruction pipeline. They guide surface-adaptive voxel subdivision, provide region-level depth and normal supervision during optimization, enhance geometrically reliable sparse-observed surfaces in voxel pruning, and suppress off-surface floaters during post-refinement training. This unified design converts semantic and geometric coherence in image space into persistent structural constraints in 3D. Extensive experiments on 3 public benchmarks demonstrate that SurfSVR consistently improves sparse voxel reconstruction across scenes with substantially different visibility and geometry characteristics, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. Codes and models will be released soon.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval via Evidential Learning

In cross-modal remote sensing image-text retrieval (CMRSITR), test-time remote sensing (RS) images and textual descriptions may deviate from well-curated benchmark conditions due to sensor- and atmosphere-related image degradations and text-side RS-vocabulary heterogeneity. Under such non-ideal conditions, existing CMRSITR methods may produce unreliable retrieval results because they perform retrieval with full certainty for each query and do not distinguish the varying uncertainty across queries. To address this issue, we propose an evidential learning-based CMRSITR (ELC) method for uncertainty-aware retrieval. During the training phase of ELC, evidential learning (EDL) is employed to model the inter-modal correspondences between RS images and textual descriptions as Dirichlet distributions, from which the uncertainty of each query can be obtained. Based on the EDL outputs, uncertainty-correctness alignment learning (UCL) is introduced to align the estimated uncertainty with retrieval correctness, encouraging high uncertainty for incorrect retrieval and low uncertainty for correct retrieval. Furthermore, intra-modal relationship learning (RL) distills the intra-modal similarity structure from pretrained mentor encoders for the trainable encoders, thereby making the Dirichlet distributions modeled by EDL more discriminative. In the test phase of ELC, the estimated uncertainty is compared with a threshold determined by a fixed deferral ratio, where low-uncertainty queries are directly returned and high-uncertainty queries are refined by RS-aware test-time augmentation (RS-TTA). Experimental results demonstrate that ELC achieves competitive retrieval performance compared with state-of-the-art CMRSITR methods and provides stronger robustness under the evaluated RS-specific degradations, including sensor- and atmosphere-related image perturbations and RS-vocabulary heterogeneity.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

VE2VF: Vision-Enabled to Vision-Free Distillation via Real-world Reinforcement Learning for Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation

When using reinforcement learning (RL) for contact-rich robotic manipulation, vision can provide task-relevant information that accelerates learning beyond what proprioception alone can achieve. However, vision-enabled policies tend to overfit to the visual conditions seen during training, limiting their robustness and transferability. We present a human-in-the-loop RL framework that employs teacher-student distillation to achieve robust performance across multiple task variants, trained entirely in the real world without requiring domain randomization or data augmentation. A vision-enabled teacher distills its knowledge into a vision-free student that relies solely on pose, twist, and wrench sensing, combining fast training with strong task generalization. On the real-world NIST assembly benchmark board, our approach achieves 95\% overall success after approximately 50 minutes of training on 3 representative tasks, including robust generalization to 8 unseen task variants. Fine-tuning with distillation achieves full success on the most challenging task. We demonstrate that the resulting policies outperform baselines in both robustness and adaptability.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

DexTwist: Dexterous Hand Retargeting for Twist Motion via Mixed Reality-based Teleoperation

Dexterous teleoperation via Mixed Reality (MR)-based interfaces offers a scalable paradigm for transferring human manipulation skills to dexterous robot hands. However, conventional retargeting approaches that minimize kinematic dissimilarity (e.g., joint angle or fingertip position error) often fail in contact-rich rotational manipulation, such as cap opening, key turning, and bolt screwing. This failure stems from the embodiment gap: mismatched link lengths, joint axes/limits, and fingertip geometry can cause direct pose imitation to induce tangential fingertip sliding rather than stable object rotation, resulting in screw axis drift, contact slip, and grasp instability. To address this, we propose DexTwist, a functional twist-retargeting framework for MR-based dexterous teleoperation. DexTwist detects a tripod pinch, estimates the operator's intended screw axis and twist magnitude, and applies a real-time residual joint-space refinement that tracks turning progress while regularizing the robot tripod geometry. The refinement minimizes a virtual-object objective defined by turning angle, screw axis consistency, fingertip closure, and tripod stability. Simulation and real-world experiments show that DexTwist improves turning angle tracking and screw axis stability compared with a vector-based retargeting baseline.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Biased Compression in Gradient Coding for Distributed Learning

Communication bottlenecks and the presence of stragglers pose significant challenges in distributed learning (DL). To deal with these challenges, recent advances leverage unbiased compression functions and gradient coding. However, the significant benefits of biased compression remain largely unexplored. To close this gap, we propose Compressed Gradient Coding with Error Feedback (COCO-EF), a novel DL method that combines gradient coding with biased compression to mitigate straggler effects and reduce communication costs. In each iteration, non-straggler devices encode local gradients from redundantly allocated training data, incorporate prior compression errors, and compress the results using biased compression functions before transmission. The server aggregates these compressed messages from the non-stragglers to approximate the global gradient for model updates. We provide rigorous theoretical convergence guarantees for COCO-EF and validate its superior learning performance over baseline methods through empirical evaluations. As far as we know, we are among the first to rigorously demonstrate that biased compression has substantial benefits in DL, when gradient coding is employed to cope with stragglers.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Byzantine-Robust and Communication-Efficient Distributed Training: Compressive and Cyclic Gradient Coding

In this paper, we study the problem of distributed training (DT) under Byzantine attacks with communication constraints. While prior work has developed various robust aggregation rules at the server to enhance robustness to Byzantine attacks, the existing methods suffer from a critical limitation in that the solution error does not diminish when the local gradients sent by different devices vary considerably, as a result of data heterogeneity among the subsets held by different devices. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel DT method, cyclic gradient coding-based DT (LAD). In LAD, the server allocates the entire training dataset to the devices before training begins. In each iteration, it assigns computational tasks redundantly to the devices using cyclic gradient coding. Each honest device then computes local gradients on a fixed number of data subsets and encodes the local gradients before transmitting to the server. The server aggregates the coded vectors from the honest devices and the potentially incorrect messages from Byzantine devices using a robust aggregation rule. Leveraging the redundancy of computation across devices, the convergence performance of LAD is analytically characterized, demonstrating improved robustness against Byzantine attacks and significantly lower solution error. Furthermore, we extend LAD to a communication-efficient variant, compressive and cyclic gradient coding-based DT (Com-LAD), which further reduces communication overhead under constrained settings. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enhancing both Byzantine resilience and communication efficiency.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

LLaDA2.1: Speeding Up Text Diffusion via Token Editing

While LLaDA2.0 showcased the scaling potential of 100B-level block-diffusion models and their inherent parallelization, the delicate equilibrium between decoding speed and generation quality has remained an elusive frontier. Today, we unveil LLaDA2.1, a paradigm shift designed to transcend this trade-off. By seamlessly weaving Token-to-Token (T2T) editing into the conventional Mask-to-Token (M2T) scheme, we introduce a joint, configurable threshold-decoding scheme. This structural innovation gives rise to two distinct personas: the Speedy Mode (S Mode), which audaciously lowers the M2T threshold to bypass traditional constraints while relying on T2T to refine the output; and the Quality Mode (Q Mode), which leans into conservative thresholds to secure superior benchmark performances with manageable efficiency degrade. Furthering this evolution, underpinned by an expansive context window, we implement the first large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework specifically tailored for dLLMs, anchored by specialized techniques for stable gradient estimation. This alignment not only sharpens reasoning precision but also elevates instruction-following fidelity, bridging the chasm between diffusion dynamics and complex human intent. We culminate this work by releasing LLaDA2.1-Mini (16B) and LLaDA2.1-Flash (100B). Across 33 rigorous benchmarks, LLaDA2.1 delivers strong task performance and lightning-fast decoding speed. Despite its 100B volume, on coding tasks it attains an astounding 892 TPS on HumanEval+, 801 TPS on BigCodeBench, and 663 TPS on LiveCodeBench.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LLaDA2.0: Scaling Up Diffusion Language Models to 100B

This paper presents LLaDA2.0 -- a tuple of discrete diffusion large language models (dLLM) scaling up to 100B total parameters through systematic conversion from auto-regressive (AR) models -- establishing a new paradigm for frontier-scale deployment. Instead of costly training from scratch, LLaDA2.0 upholds knowledge inheritance, progressive adaption and efficiency-aware design principle, and seamless converts a pre-trained AR model into dLLM with a novel 3-phase block-level WSD based training scheme: progressive increasing block-size in block diffusion (warm-up), large-scale full-sequence diffusion (stable) and reverting back to compact-size block diffusion (decay). Along with post-training alignment with SFT and DPO, we obtain LLaDA2.0-mini (16B) and LLaDA2.0-flash (100B), two instruction-tuned Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variants optimized for practical deployment. By preserving the advantages of parallel decoding, these models deliver superior performance and efficiency at the frontier scale. Both models were open-sourced.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

ReForm: Reflective Autoformalization with Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization

Autoformalization, which translates natural language mathematics into machine-verifiable formal statements, is critical for using formal mathematical reasoning to solve math problems stated in natural language. While Large Language Models can generate syntactically correct formal statements, they often fail to preserve the original problem's semantic intent. This limitation arises from the LLM approaches' treating autoformalization as a simplistic translation task which lacks mechanisms for self-reflection and iterative refinement that human experts naturally employ. To address these issues, we propose ReForm, a Reflective Autoformalization method that tightly integrates semantic consistency evaluation into the autoformalization process. This enables the model to iteratively generate formal statements, assess its semantic fidelity, and self-correct identified errors through progressive refinement. To effectively train this reflective model, we introduce Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization (PBSO), which employs different rewards at different sequence positions to ensure that the model develops both accurate autoformalization and correct semantic validations, preventing superficial critiques that would undermine the purpose of reflection. Extensive experiments across four autoformalization benchmarks demonstrate that ReForm achieves an average improvement of 22.6 percentage points over the strongest baselines. To further ensure evaluation reliability, we introduce ConsistencyCheck, a benchmark of 859 expert-annotated items that not only validates LLMs as judges but also reveals that autoformalization is inherently difficult: even human experts produce semantic errors in up to 38.5% of cases.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SmaRTLy: RTL Optimization with Logic Inferencing and Structural Rebuilding

This paper proposes smaRTLy: a new optimization technique for multiplexers in Register-Transfer Level (RTL) logic synthesis. Multiplexer trees are very common in RTL designs, and traditional tools like Yosys optimize them by traversing the tree and monitoring control port values. However, this method does not fully exploit the intrinsic logical relationships among signals or the potential for structural optimization. To address these limitations, we develop innovative strategies to remove redundant multiplexer trees and restructure the remaining ones, significantly reducing the overall gate count. We evaluate smaRTLy on the IWLS-2005 and RISC-V benchmarks, achieving an additional 8.95% reduction in AIG area compared to Yosys. We also evaluate smaRTLy on an industrial benchmark in the scale of millions of gates, results show that smaRTLy can remove 47.2% more AIG area than Yosys. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our logic inferencing and structural rebuilding techniques in enhancing the RTL optimization process, leading to more efficient hardware designs.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

From Data-Centric to Sample-Centric: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Progressive Optimization

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While prior work has emphasized algorithmic design, data curation, and reward shaping, we investigate RLVR from a sample-centric perspective and introduce LPPO (Learning-Progress and Prefix-guided Optimization), a framework of progressive optimization techniques. Our work addresses a critical question: how to best leverage a small set of trusted, high-quality demonstrations, rather than simply scaling up data volume. First, motivated by how hints aid human problem-solving, we propose prefix-guided sampling, an online data augmentation method that incorporates partial solution prefixes from expert demonstrations to guide the policy, particularly for challenging instances. Second, inspired by how humans focus on important questions aligned with their current capabilities, we introduce learning-progress weighting, a dynamic strategy that adjusts each training sample's influence based on model progression. We estimate sample-level learning progress via an exponential moving average of per-sample pass rates, promoting samples that foster learning and de-emphasizing stagnant ones. Experiments on mathematical-reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our methods outperform strong baselines, yielding faster convergence and a higher performance ceiling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

HARMONY: A Scalable Distributed Vector Database for High-Throughput Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) is essential for various data-intensive applications, including recommendation systems, image retrieval, and machine learning. Scaling ANNS to handle billions of high-dimensional vectors on a single machine presents significant challenges in memory capacity and processing efficiency. To address these challenges, distributed vector databases leverage multiple nodes for the parallel storage and processing of vectors. However, existing solutions often suffer from load imbalance and high communication overhead, primarily due to traditional partition strategies that fail to effectively distribute the workload. In this paper, we introduce Harmony, a distributed ANNS system that employs a novel multi-granularity partition strategy, combining dimension-based and vector-based partition. This strategy ensures a balanced distribution of computational load across all nodes while effectively minimizing communication costs. Furthermore, Harmony incorporates an early-stop pruning mechanism that leverages the monotonicity of distance computations in dimension-based partition, resulting in significant reductions in both computational and communication overhead. We conducted extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets, demonstrating that Harmony outperforms leading distributed vector databases, achieving 4.63 times throughput on average in four nodes and 58% performance improvement over traditional distribution for skewed workloads.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Coded Robust Aggregation for Distributed Learning under Byzantine Attacks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of distributed learning (DL) in the presence of Byzantine attacks. For this problem, various robust bounded aggregation (RBA) rules have been proposed at the central server to mitigate the impact of Byzantine attacks. However, current DL methods apply RBA rules for the local gradients from the honest devices and the disruptive information from Byzantine devices, and the learning performance degrades significantly when the local gradients of different devices vary considerably from each other. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new DL method to cope with Byzantine attacks based on coded robust aggregation (CRA-DL). Before training begins, the training data are allocated to the devices redundantly. During training, in each iteration, the honest devices transmit coded gradients to the server computed from the allocated training data, and the server then aggregates the information received from both honest and Byzantine devices using RBA rules. In this way, the global gradient can be approximately recovered at the server to update the global model. Compared with current DL methods applying RBA rules, the improvement of CRA-DL is attributed to the fact that the coded gradients sent by the honest devices are closer to each other. This closeness enhances the robustness of the aggregation against Byzantine attacks, since Byzantine messages tend to be significantly different from those of honest devices in this case. We theoretically analyze the convergence performance of CRA-DL. Finally, we present numerical results to verify the superiority of the proposed method over existing baselines, showing its enhanced learning performance under Byzantine attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Uniformization of cofat domains on metric two-spheres

We extend \emph{Schramm's cofat uniformization theorem} to cofat domains on upper Ahlfors 2-regular metric two-spheres $X$. Specifically, we show that if $\Omega \subset X$ is a cofat domain, then there exists a $\frac{\pi}{2}$-quasiconformal homeomorphism $f: \Omega \to D$ onto a circle domain $D \subset \mathbb{S}^2$. Moreover, $f$ preserves the point-components and non-trivial complementary components. We also construct examples which show that the above conclusions are not true for countably connected $\ell^{\alpha}$-subdomains of $\mathbb{S}^2$.

math.CV↗

arXiv2025

Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation with Fully Unidirectional Architecture

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) produces translations incrementally while processing partial speech input. Although large language models (LLMs) have showcased strong capabilities in offline translation tasks, applying them to SimulST poses notable challenges. Existing LLM-based SimulST approaches either incur significant computational overhead due to repeated encoding of bidirectional speech encoder, or they depend on a fixed read/write policy, limiting the efficiency and performance. In this work, we introduce Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation (EASiST) with fully unidirectional architecture, including both speech encoder and LLM. EASiST includes a multi-latency data curation strategy to generate semantically aligned SimulST training samples and redefines SimulST as an interleaved generation task with explicit read/write tokens. To facilitate adaptive inference, we incorporate a lightweight policy head that dynamically predicts read/write actions. Additionally, we employ a multi-stage training strategy to align speech-text modalities and optimize both translation and policy behavior. Experiments on the MuST-C En$\rightarrow$De and En$\rightarrow$Es datasets demonstrate that EASiST offers superior latency-quality trade-offs compared to several strong baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LLMs Can Achieve High-quality Simultaneous Machine Translation as Efficiently as Offline

When the complete source sentence is provided, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform excellently in offline machine translation even with a simple prompt "Translate the following sentence from [src lang] into [tgt lang]:". However, in many real scenarios, the source tokens arrive in a streaming manner and simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is required, then the efficiency and performance of decoder-only LLMs are significantly limited by their auto-regressive nature. To enable LLMs to achieve high-quality SiMT as efficiently as offline translation, we propose a novel paradigm that includes constructing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data for SiMT, along with new training and inference strategies. To replicate the token input/output stream in SiMT, the source and target tokens are rearranged into an interleaved sequence, separated by special tokens according to varying latency requirements. This enables powerful LLMs to learn read and write operations adaptively, based on varying latency prompts, while still maintaining efficient auto-regressive decoding. Experimental results show that, even with limited SFT data, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various SiMT benchmarks, and preserves the original abilities of offline translation. Moreover, our approach generalizes well to document-level SiMT setting without requiring specific fine-tuning, even beyond the offline translation model.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The Curse of CoT: On the Limitations of Chain-of-Thought in In-Context Learning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the fundamental domain of pattern-based in-context learning (ICL). Through extensive experiments involving 16 state-of-the-art LLMs and nine diverse pattern-based ICL datasets, we demonstrate that CoT and its reasoning variants consistently underperform direct answering across varying model scales and benchmark complexities. To systematically investigate this unexpected phenomenon, we designed extensive experiments to validate several hypothetical explanations. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental hybrid mechanism of explicit-implicit reasoning driving CoT's performance in pattern-based ICL: while explicit reasoning falters due to LLMs' struggles to infer underlying patterns from demonstrations, implicit reasoning-disrupted by the increased contextual distance of CoT rationales-often compensates, delivering correct answers despite flawed rationales. This hybrid mechanism explains CoT's relative underperformance, as noise from weak explicit inference undermines the process, even as implicit mechanisms partially salvage outcomes. Notably, even long-CoT reasoning models, which excel in abstract and symbolic reasoning, fail to fully overcome these limitations despite higher computational costs. Our findings challenge existing assumptions regarding the universal efficacy of CoT, yielding novel insights into its limitations and guiding future research toward more nuanced and effective reasoning methodologies for LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

OFL: Opportunistic Federated Learning for Resource-Heterogeneous and Privacy-Aware Devices

Efficient and secure federated learning (FL) is a critical challenge for resource-limited devices, especially mobile devices. Existing secure FL solutions commonly incur significant overhead, leading to a contradiction between efficiency and security. As a result, these two concerns are typically addressed separately. This paper proposes Opportunistic Federated Learning (OFL), a novel FL framework designed explicitly for resource-heterogenous and privacy-aware FL devices, solving efficiency and security problems jointly. OFL optimizes resource utilization and adaptability across diverse devices by adopting a novel hierarchical and asynchronous aggregation strategy. OFL provides strong security by introducing a differentially private and opportunistic model updating mechanism for intra-cluster model aggregation and an advanced threshold homomorphic encryption scheme for inter-cluster aggregation. Moreover, OFL secures global model aggregation by implementing poisoning attack detection using frequency analysis while keeping models encrypted. We have implemented OFL in a real-world testbed and evaluated OFL comprehensively. The evaluation results demonstrate that OFL achieves satisfying model performance and improves efficiency and security, outperforming existing solutions.

cs.CR↗