arXiv subjects

Chunlin Tian

Publications and source records attributed to Chunlin Tian.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SurgWMBench: A Vision-Based Benchmark for World-Modeling Surgical Instrument Motion Planning

Reliable surgical planning requires models that move beyond recognizing the current surgical step or imitating expert demonstrations, and instead anticipate how instrument motion reshapes subsequent operative states. Most surgical video understanding methods focus on recognizing phases, actions, or workflow states, while providing limited support for explicitly modeling instrument motion. Conversely, existing tool motion prediction methods can forecast instrument trajectories, but they generally do not capture the coupled evolution of future surgical video states. World models offer a natural framework for jointly modeling visual state transitions and instrument motion dynamics. However, existing surgical world model studies remain largely centered on visual generation quality, relying on generation-oriented metrics such as FVD and CD-FVD. These metrics are poorly aligned with instrument motion planning, as they do not directly measure whether predicted trajectories are geometrically accurate, temporally coherent, or actionable for downstream planning. This limitation is partly structural, since the field lacks public datasets and standardized evaluation protocols that provide the benchmarking infrastructure needed to assess motion-centric capabilities in surgical world models. In this paper, we introduce SurgWMBench, a vision-based benchmark for short-horizon surgical motion planning and dynamics prediction. Given intraoperative image sequences and historical instrument trajectory, SurgWMBench evaluates both near-future instrument motion prediction and stability under continuous rollout or input perturbations.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Scaling: Agents Are Heading to the Edge

The bottleneck of useful agentic intelligence has shifted from compressing world knowledge into a single model to executing a coordinated system. This position paper argues that personal-agent architecture must move to the edge because the core properties of agentic intelligence tasks, particularly their structural coupling with high-fidelity local context and the need for zero-latency execution loops, do not sit well with cloud-centric designs. We develop this claim through three structural shifts. First, the Prefrontal Turn: the main marginal lever of capability has moved from pre-training scale to framework-level executive control. Such control must remain physically close to the environment of action if the agent is to preserve cognitive alignment. Second, the Data-Geography Paradox, the ``dark matter'' of agentic data (local file hierarchies, real-time sensor streams, and transient OS states) degrades, disappears, or loses meaning once prepared for cloud transmission, thereby cutting the agent off from ground-truth context. Third, the interaction-alignment loop, the only economically and ecologically sustainable source of agentic refinement data is the high-fidelity implicit preference signal produced through real-time local interaction. Third, the interaction-alignment loop, the only economically and ecologically sustainable source of agentic refinement data is the high-fidelity implicit preference signal produced through real-time local interaction. We conclude with falsifiable predictions for the next deployment cycle of personal agents.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Beyond End-to-End: Dynamic Chain Optimization for Private LLM Adaptation on the Edge

Federated fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving LLM adaptation but faces a critical bottleneck: the disparity between LLMs' high memory demands and edge devices' limited capacity. To break the memory barrier, we propose Chain Federated Fine-Tuning (ChainFed), an innovative paradigm that forgoes end-to-end updates in favor of a sequential, layer-by-layer manner. It first trains the initial adapter to convergence, freezes its weights, and then proceeds to the next. This iterative train-and-freeze process forms an optimization chain, gradually enhancing the model's task-specific proficiency. ChainFed further integrates three core techniques: 1) Dynamic Layer Co-Tuning to bridge semantic gaps between sequentially tuned layers and facilitate information flow; 2) Globally Perceptive Optimization to endow each adapter with foresight beyond its local objective; 3) Function-Oriented Adaptive Tuning to automatically identify the optimal fine-tuning starting point. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ChainFed over existing methods, boosting average accuracy by up to 46.46\%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

SutureFormer: Learning Surgical Trajectories via Goal-conditioned Offline RL in Pixel Space

Predicting surgical needle trajectories from endoscopic video is critical for robot-assisted suturing, enabling anticipatory planning, real-time guidance, and safer motion execution. Existing methods that directly learn motion distributions from visual observations tend to overlook the sequential dependency among adjacent motion steps. Moreover, sparse waypoint annotations often fail to provide sufficient supervision, further increasing the difficulty of supervised or imitation learning methods. To address these challenges, we formulate image-based needle trajectory prediction as a sequential decision-making problem, in which the needle tip is treated as an agent that moves step by step in pixel space. This formulation naturally captures the continuity of needle motion and enables the explicit modeling of physically plausible pixel-wise state transitions over time. From this perspective, we propose SutureFormer, a goal-conditioned offline reinforcement learning framework that leverages sparse annotations to dense reward signals via cubic spline interpolation, encouraging the policy to exploit limited expert guidance while exploring plausible future motion paths. SutureFormer encodes variable-length clips using an observation encoder to capture both local spatial cues and long-range temporal dynamics, and autoregressively predicts future waypoints through actions composed of discrete directions and continuous magnitudes. To enable stable offline policy optimization from expert demonstrations, we adopt Conservative Q-Learning with Behavioral Cloning regularization. Experiments on a new kidney wound suturing dataset containing 1,158 trajectories from 50 patients show that SutureFormer reduces Average Displacement Error by 58.6% compared with the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of modeling needle trajectory prediction as pixel-level sequential action learning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Floe: Federated Specialization for Real-Time LLM-SLM Inference

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-time systems remains challenging due to their substantial computational demands and privacy concerns. We propose Floe, a hybrid federated learning framework designed for latency-sensitive, resource-constrained environments. Floe combines a cloud-based black-box LLM with lightweight small language models (SLMs) on edge devices to enable low-latency, privacy-preserving inference. Personal data and fine-tuning remain on-device, while the cloud LLM contributes general knowledge without exposing proprietary weights. A heterogeneity-aware LoRA adaptation strategy enables efficient edge deployment across diverse hardware, and a logit-level fusion mechanism enables real-time coordination between edge and cloud models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Floe enhances user privacy and personalization. Moreover, it significantly improves model performance and reduces inference latency on edge devices under real-time constraints compared with baseline approaches.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Less is More: Resource-Efficient Low-Rank Adaptation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still incurs notable overhead and suffers from parameter interference in complex datasets. While recent works decouple LoRA update matrices to exploit matrix-wise asymmetry, training costs remain high. We revisit LoRA from the perspective of inter-matrix and intra-layer parameter redundancy and propose Resource-Efficient Low-Rank Adaptation, EffiLoRA, a lightweight and generalizable approach for language, multimodal, and diffusion models. EffiLoRA employs a unified A matrix across all transformer layers and introduces a runtime selective B matrices update to dynamically trade-off the system resource budget and model performance. EffiLoRA consistently outperforms LoRA across diverse modalities, including commonsense reasoning, visual instruction tuning, and image generation, demonstrating improved efficiency and robustness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

FedHybrid: Breaking the Memory Wall of Federated Learning via Hybrid Tensor Management

Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a new learning paradigm that enables multiple devices to collaboratively train a shared model while preserving data privacy. However, one fundamental and prevailing challenge that hinders the deployment of FL on mobile devices is the memory limitation. This paper proposes \textit{FedHybrid}, a novel framework that effectively reduces the memory footprint during the training process while guaranteeing the model accuracy and the overall training progress. Specifically, \textit{FedHybrid} first selects the participating devices for each training round by jointly evaluating their memory budget, computing capability, and data diversity. After that, it judiciously analyzes the computational graph and generates an execution plan for each selected client in order to meet the corresponding memory budget while minimizing the training delay through employing a hybrid of recomputation and compression techniques according to the characteristic of each tensor. During the local training process, \textit{FedHybrid} carries out the execution plan with a well-designed activation compression technique to effectively achieve memory reduction with minimum accuracy loss. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate \textit{FedHybrid} on both simulation and off-the-shelf mobile devices. The experiment results demonstrate that \textit{FedHybrid} achieves up to a 39.1\% increase in model accuracy and a 15.5$\times$ reduction in wall clock time under various memory budgets compared with the baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Memory-Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models via Layer Pruning

Federated fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving Large Language Model (LLM) adaptation, but its high memory cost limits participation from resource-constrained devices. We propose FedPruner, an innovative federated fine-tuning paradigm that tackles this via intelligent layer pruning. FedPruner flexibly prunes the global model, creating personalized submodels based on device memory constraints. It employs a macro-micro synergistic pruning framework: a macro-level functionality-driven layer orchestration mechanism groups layers, while a micro-level importance-aware layer selection strategy prunes within groups to build device-specific submodels. We further introduce a fine-grained variant that independently prunes Multi-Head Attention and Feed-Forward Network components to precisely preserve critical architectural elements. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FedPruner significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to a 1.98\% improvement in average model accuracy while reducing peak memory usage by 75\%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

CLONE: Customizing LLMs for Efficient Latency-Aware Inference at the Edge

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices is crucial for delivering fast responses and ensuring data privacy. However, the limited storage, weight, and power of edge devices make it difficult to deploy LLM-powered applications. These devices must balance latency requirements with energy consumption and model accuracy. In this paper, we first quantify the challenges of deploying LLMs on off-the-shelf edge devices and then we present CLONE, an in-depth algorithm-hardware co-design at both the model- and system-level that intelligently integrates real-time, energy optimization while maintaining robust generality. In order to maximize the synergistic benefits of these algorithms in always-on and intermediate edge computing settings, we specialize in a 28nm scalable hardware accelerator system. We implement and extensively evaluate CLONE on two off-the-shelf edge platforms. Experiments show that CLONE effectively accelerates the inference process up to 11.92x, and saves energy up to 7.36x, while maintaining high-generation.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

RAP: Runtime Adaptive Pruning for LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) excel at language understanding and generation, but their enormous computational and memory requirements hinder deployment. Compression offers a potential solution to mitigate these constraints. However, most existing methods rely on fixed heuristics and thus fail to adapt to runtime memory variations or heterogeneous KV-cache demands arising from diverse user requests. To address these limitations, we propose RAP, an elastic pruning framework driven by reinforcement learning (RL) that dynamically adjusts compression strategies in a runtime-aware manner. Specifically, RAP dynamically tracks the evolving ratio between model parameters and KV-cache across practical execution. Recognizing that FFNs house most parameters, whereas parameter -light attention layers dominate KV-cache formation, the RL agent retains only those components that maximize utility within the current memory budget, conditioned on instantaneous workload and device state. Extensive experiments results demonstrate that RAP outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, marking the first time to jointly consider model weights and KV-cache on the fly.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

A Survey on Federated Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive success across various tasks. Integrating LLMs with Federated Learning (FL), a paradigm known as FedLLM, offers a promising avenue for collaborative model adaptation while preserving data privacy. This survey provides a systematic and comprehensive review of FedLLM. We begin by tracing the historical development of both LLMs and FL, summarizing relevant prior research to set the context. Subsequently, we delve into an in-depth analysis of the fundamental challenges inherent in deploying FedLLM. Addressing these challenges often requires efficient adaptation strategies; therefore, we conduct an extensive examination of existing Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods and explore their applicability within the FL framework. To rigorously evaluate the performance of FedLLM, we undertake a thorough review of existing fine-tuning datasets and evaluation benchmarks. Furthermore, we discuss FedLLM's diverse real-world applications across multiple domains. Finally, we identify critical open challenges and outline promising research directions to foster future advancements in FedLLM. This survey aims to serve as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners, offering valuable insights into the rapidly evolving landscape of federated fine-tuning for LLMs. It also establishes a roadmap for future innovations in privacy-preserving AI. We actively maintain a \href{https://github.com/Clin0212/Awesome-Federated-LLM-Learning}{GitHub repo} to track cutting-edge advancements in this field.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

AsymLoRA: Harmonizing Data Conflicts and Commonalities in MLLMs

Effective instruction fine-tuning on diverse image-text datasets is crucial for developing a versatile Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), where dataset composition dictates the model's adaptability across multimodal tasks. However, complex datasets often contain inherent conflicts -- stemming from modality-specific optimization objectives -- and latent commonalities that enable cross-task transfer, which most existing approaches handle separately. To bridge this gap, we introduce AsymLoRA, a parameter-efficient tuning framework that unifies knowledge modularization and cross-modal coordination via asymmetric LoRA: task-specific low-rank projections (matrix B) that preserve distinct adaptation pathways for conflicting objectives, and a shared projection (matrix A) that consolidates cross-modal commonalities. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AsymLoRA consistently surpasses both vanilla LoRA, which captures only commonalities, and LoRA-MoE, which focuses solely on conflicts, achieving superior model performance and system efficiency across diverse benchmarks.\href{Code}{https://github.com/Clin0212/HydraLoRA/blob/main/MLLM-HydraLoRA/README.md}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Breaking the Memory Wall for Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Model Splitting

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple devices to collaboratively train a shared model while preserving data privacy. Ever-increasing model complexity coupled with limited memory resources on the participating devices severely bottlenecks the deployment of FL in real-world scenarios. Thus, a framework that can effectively break the memory wall while jointly taking into account the hardware and statistical heterogeneity in FL is urgently required. In this paper, we propose SmartSplit, a framework that effectively reduces the memory footprint on the device side while guaranteeing the training progress and model accuracy for heterogeneous FL through model splitting.Towards this end, SmartSplit employs a hierarchical structure to adaptively guide the overall training process. In each training round, the central manager, hosted on the server, dynamically selects the participating devices and sets the cutting layer by jointly considering the memory budget, training capacity, and data distribution of each device. The MEC manager, deployed within the edge server, proceeds to split the local model and perform training of the server-side portion. Meanwhile, it fine-tunes the splitting points based on the time-evolving statistical importance. The on-device manager, embedded inside each mobile device, continuously monitors the local training status while employing cost-aware checkpointing to match the runtime dynamic memory budget. Extensive experiments on representative datasets are conducted on both commercial off-the-shelf mobile device testbeds. The experimental results show that SmartSplit excels in FL training on highly memory-constrained mobile SoCs, offering up to a 94% peak latency reduction and 100-fold memory savings. It enhances accuracy performance by 1.49%-57.18% and adaptively adjusts to dynamic memory budgets through cost-aware recomputation.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Heterogeneity-Aware Coordination for Federated Learning via Stitching Pre-trained blocks

Federated learning (FL) coordinates multiple devices to collaboratively train a shared model while preserving data privacy. However, large memory footprint and high energy consumption during the training process excludes the low-end devices from contributing to the global model with their own data, which severely deteriorates the model performance in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose FedStitch, a hierarchical coordination framework for heterogeneous federated learning with pre-trained blocks. Unlike the traditional approaches that train the global model from scratch, for a new task, FedStitch composes the global model via stitching pre-trained blocks. Specifically, each participating client selects the most suitable block based on their local data from the candidate pool composed of blocks from pre-trained models. The server then aggregates the optimal block for stitching. This process iterates until a new stitched network is generated. Except for the new training paradigm, FedStitch consists of the following three core components: 1) an RL-weighted aggregator, 2) a search space optimizer deployed on the server side, and 3) a local energy optimizer deployed on each participating client. The RL-weighted aggregator helps to select the right block in the non-IID scenario, while the search space optimizer continuously reduces the size of the candidate block pool during stitching. Meanwhile, the local energy optimizer is designed to minimize energy consumption of each client while guaranteeing the overall training progress. The results demonstrate that compared to existing approaches, FedStitch improves the model accuracy up to 20.93%. At the same time, it achieves up to 8.12% speedup, reduces the memory footprint up to 79.5%, and achieves 89.41% energy saving at most during the learning procedure.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Bridging Memory Gaps: Scaling Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Clients

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared model while preserving data privacy. However, the high memory demand during model training severely limits the deployment of FL on resource-constrained clients. To this end, we propose \our, a scalable and inclusive FL framework designed to overcome memory limitations through sequential block-wise training. The core idea of \our is to partition the global model into blocks and train them sequentially, thereby reducing training memory requirements. To mitigate information loss during block-wise training, \our introduces a Curriculum Mentor that crafts curriculum-aware training objectives for each block to steer their learning process. Moreover, \our incorporates a Training Harmonizer that designs a parameter co-adaptation training scheme to coordinate block updates, effectively breaking inter-block information isolation. Extensive experiments on both simulation and hardware testbeds demonstrate that \our significantly improves model performance by up to 84.2\%, reduces peak memory usage by up to 50.4\%, and accelerates training by up to 1.9$\times$.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

CRASH: Crash Recognition and Anticipation System Harnessing with Context-Aware and Temporal Focus Attentions

Accurately and promptly predicting accidents among surrounding traffic agents from camera footage is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). This task presents substantial challenges stemming from the unpredictable nature of traffic accidents, their long-tail distribution, the intricacies of traffic scene dynamics, and the inherently constrained field of vision of onboard cameras. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel accident anticipation framework for AVs, termed CRASH. It seamlessly integrates five components: object detector, feature extractor, object-aware module, context-aware module, and multi-layer fusion. Specifically, we develop the object-aware module to prioritize high-risk objects in complex and ambiguous environments by calculating the spatial-temporal relationships between traffic agents. In parallel, the context-aware is also devised to extend global visual information from the temporal to the frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and capture fine-grained visual features of potential objects and broader context cues within traffic scenes. To capture a wider range of visual cues, we further propose a multi-layer fusion that dynamically computes the temporal dependencies between different scenes and iteratively updates the correlations between different visual features for accurate and timely accident prediction. Evaluated on real-world datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D) datasets--our model surpasses existing top baselines in critical evaluation metrics like Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA). Importantly, its robustness and adaptability are particularly evident in challenging driving scenarios with missing or limited training data, demonstrating significant potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

When, Where, and What? A Novel Benchmark for Accident Anticipation and Localization with Large Language Models

As autonomous driving systems increasingly become part of daily transportation, the ability to accurately anticipate and mitigate potential traffic accidents is paramount. Traditional accident anticipation models primarily utilizing dashcam videos are adept at predicting when an accident may occur but fall short in localizing the incident and identifying involved entities. Addressing this gap, this study introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance predictive capabilities across multiple dimensions--what, when, and where accidents might occur. We develop an innovative chain-based attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts to prioritize high-risk elements within complex driving scenes. This mechanism is complemented by a three-stage model that processes outputs from smaller models into detailed multimodal inputs for LLMs, thus enabling a more nuanced understanding of traffic dynamics. Empirical validation on the DAD, CCD, and A3D datasets demonstrates superior performance in Average Precision (AP) and Mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA), establishing new benchmarks for accident prediction technology. Our approach not only advances the technological framework for autonomous driving safety but also enhances human-AI interaction, making predictive insights generated by autonomous systems more intuitive and actionable.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Less is More: Efficient Brain-Inspired Learning for Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction

Accurately and safely predicting the trajectories of surrounding vehicles is essential for fully realizing autonomous driving (AD). This paper presents the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction model (HLTP++), which emulates human cognitive processes to improve trajectory prediction in AD. HLTP++ incorporates a novel teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the dynamic allocation of attention human drivers exhibit based on factors like spatial orientation, proximity, and driving speed. On the other hand, the "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and human decision-making, drawing parallels to the human memory storage mechanism. Furthermore, we improve the model's efficiency by introducing a new Fourier Adaptive Spike Neural Network (FA-SNN), allowing for faster and more precise predictions with fewer parameters. Evaluated using the NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD benchmarks, HLTP++ demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, which reduces the predicted trajectory error with over 11% on the NGSIM dataset and 25% on the HighD datasets. Moreover, HLTP++ demonstrates strong adaptability in challenging environments with incomplete input data. This marks a significant stride in the journey towards fully AD systems.

cs.AI↗