arXiv subjects

Fei Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Fei Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

VLA-Precision: Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping for Efficient Real-World Online RL of Vision-Language-Action Models

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models enable broad manipulation but remain unreliable in tasks demanding precision and repeatability. Applying real-world online reinforcement learning (RL) to VLA post-training enables autonomous trial-and-error improvement beyond demonstrations alone, but exposes two bottlenecks: 1) unreliable value signals can induce policy drift; 2) large-VLA overhead constrains throughput and sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we present VLA-Precision, an efficient real-world online RL framework featuring the Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB-Stream architecture. Specifically, ACoB establishes asymmetric co-bootstrapping across timescales: early intervention-guided behavioral learning rapidly improves policy performance while enhancing online experience quality. As autonomous experience accumulates, global return propagation and local preference ranking progressively calibrate value estimates, yielding relative action advantages for reference-regularized policy improvement while suppressing drift. To enable ACoB on large VLAs, we develop ACoB-Stream, a closed-loop experience--policy architecture that establishes invariant-state decoupling and on-demand streaming as design principles, delivering up to 10.9$\times$ improvements in throughput and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations on nine high-precision chemistry tasks across four categories and four robot embodiments show that VLA-Precision achieves 98.3\% mean success rate in 45.8 min/task, with 27.6 s episodes running at 1.2$\times$ and 1.8$\times$ the speeds of VLA and RL baselines. Resources are available at https://vla-precision.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Language-Informed Flow Matching for Trend-Guided Structure-Based 3D Molecular Generation

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) requires ligands that satisfy both 3D target affinity and 1D chemical validity. Existing controllable generation methods often rely on task-specific fine-tuning or externally imposed sampling-time guidance, adding cost and potentially conflicting with evolving 3D geometric constraints. We propose LiFT, a language-informed cross-modal framework built on Flow Matching for trend-guided 3D molecular generation across both de novo design and scaffold hopping. LiFT uses a "Sense-Evolve-Assemble" agent to generate target-aware SMILES as intermediate chemical conditions, from which a pre-trained chemical foundation model extracts continuous semantic priors. These priors are integrated into geometric generation through a lightweight semantic projector with zero-initialized adaptive normalization for stable cross-modal conditioning. We further introduce a Self-Conditioned Decoupled Router (SCDR), which modulates the velocity field according to intermediate structural states during ODE integration. Experiments on Cross-Docked2020 show that LiFT achieves competitive distribution matching while improving medicinal chemistry metrics and maintaining competitive structural validity under task-steering settings without additional generator fine-tuning. Our results suggest that language-derived chemical priors provide effective trend-level guidance for 3D molecular generation. Code and released artifacts are available at https://github.com/kasurl/LiFT.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

RIBOSPAN: A Long-Context RNA Foundation Model for Versatile RNA Modeling

Full-length RNAs, particularly messenger RNAs, often exceed the context lengths used to pretrain existing RNA foundation models, limiting complete-transcript modeling at single-nucleotide resolution. We present RIBOSPAN, a 1.61-billion-parameter bidirectional RNA foundation model natively pretrained with context lengths up to 10,240 nt. RIBOSPAN combines dense bidirectional self-attention, single-nucleotide tokenization, and attention-isolated sequence packing to enable high-resolution modeling of complete long RNAs. Native 10K pretraining preserves strong reconstruction at 10,240 tokens and, in a controlled long-context benchmark, maintains strong contextual responsiveness and context-specific representation separation while keeping perturbation-induced changes highly localized. Inference-time YaRN scaling recovers much of the contextual organization lost by direct short-context extrapolation, but induces substantially greater distal representation diffusion. Frozen RNA-type evaluations show that RIBOSPAN learns state-of-the-art RNA representations, with a particularly clear advantage on long RNAs. Across downstream biological benchmarks, RIBOSPAN emerges as the strongest encoder-only RNA foundation model, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both full-transcript biological property prediction and zero-shot mutation-fitness modeling. Building on the same backbone, we develop a multidimensionally conditioned discrete-diffusion framework for full-length mRNA generation and redesign, including synonymous-codon diffusion for protein-preserving CDS optimization. Together, RIBOSPAN establishes a powerful long-context foundation for transferable RNA representation learning, biological prediction, and full-transcript mRNA design.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Preconditioner-Based Acceleration Method for Solving EMTP Linear Equations

The computational speed of electromagnetic transient programs (EMTP) is severely limited by both the curse of dimensionality and the ill-conditioned system matrix, which collectively degrade solver performance. However, existing research on EMTP acceleration has largely overlooked the issue of ill-conditioning. This letter presents a first systematic, EMT-oriented investigation of the ill-conditioning of the EMTP admittance matrix by establishing a link between its physical origins and mathematical pathologies, thereby revealing the underlying mechanism by which network topology induces ill-conditioning. Building upon these structural insights, a preconditioner-based strategy is developed that significantly accelerates computation while preserving numerical accuracy. Simulation results demonstrate the outstanding efficiency and robustness of the proposed approach.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

GR-Ben: A General Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Process Reward Models

Currently, process reward models (PRMs) have exhibited remarkable potential for test-time scaling. Since large language models (LLMs) regularly generate flawed intermediate reasoning steps when tackling a broad spectrum of reasoning and decision-making tasks, PRMs are required to possess capabilities for detecting process-level errors in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on mathematical reasoning, thereby failing to comprehensively evaluate the error detection ability of PRMs across diverse reasoning scenarios. To mitigate this gap, we introduce GR-Ben, a process-level benchmark specifically designed for assessing PRM's performance across two primary reasoning domains (science and logic) and nine subdomains. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 22 models, encompassing both PRMs and LLMs, and derive two key findings: (1) In domains beyond mathematical reasoning, the error-detection ability of existing PRMs and LLMs is found to be markedly weaker by comparison.(2) In general, PRMs are less adept at identifying knowledge-based errors, whereas LLMs exhibit poorer performance in detecting computational errors. We hope GR-Ben can foster future researches on PRMs for general domains, thereby enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DiffQEC: A versatile diffusion model for quantum error correction

Quantum computers could solve problems beyond the reach of classical devices, but this potential depends on quantum error correction (QEC) to protect fragile quantum states from noise. A central challenge in QEC is decoding: inferring likely physical errors from syndrome patterns generated by repeated stabilizer measurements. Existing decoders, including graph-based and neural approaches, typically return a single correction hypothesis and therefore discard the richer posterior structure of the error distribution conditioned on the observed syndrome. Here we recast QEC decoding as posterior inference using discrete denoising diffusion, exploiting the analogy between stochastic error accumulation and the forward diffusion process. We introduce DiffQEC, a generative decoder that combines a syndrome processor for multi-round spatial-temporal syndrome histories with syndrome feature modulation to condition denoising on the observed syndrome throughout inference. On experimental data from Google's superconducting quantum processor, DiffQEC reduces logical error rates by up to 10.2% relative to minimum-weight perfect matching and by about 5% relative to tensor-network decoding. These improvements persist for larger code distances up to 17 under depolarizing noise and for logical circuits of increasing depth. Beyond accuracy, the learned posterior provides confidence estimates for post-selection and reveals physically meaningful error structure, establishing posterior generative decoding as a practical framework for QEC.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

TransText: Alpha-as-RGB Representation for Transparent Text Animation

We introduce the first method, to the best of our knowledge, for adapting image-to-video models to layer-aware text (glyph) animation, a capability critical for practical dynamic visual design. Existing approaches predominantly handle the transparency-encoding (alpha channel) as an extra latent dimension appended to the RGB space, necessitating the reconstruction of the underlying RGB-centric variational autoencoder (VAE). However, given the scarcity of high-quality transparent glyph data, retraining the VAE is computationally expensive and may erode the robust semantic priors learned from massive RGB corpora, potentially leading to latent pattern mixing. To mitigate these limitations, we propose TransText, a framework based on a novel Alpha-as-RGB paradigm to jointly model appearance and transparency without modifying the pre-trained generative manifold. TransText embeds the alpha channel as an RGB-compatible visual signal through latent spatial concatenation, explicitly ensuring strict cross-modal (RGB-and-Alpha) consistency while preventing feature entanglement. Our experiments demonstrate that TransText significantly outperforms baselines, generating coherent, high-fidelity transparent animations with diverse, fine-grained effects.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Polarization-selective quantum cooperative response in dual-species atom arrays

Atom arrays have emerged as a powerful platform for quantum light-matter interfaces, yet single-species arrays are constrained by in-plane symmetry, restricting polarization control. Here we investigate the cooperative optical response of dual-species subwavelength atom arrays, in which intrinsic polarizability difference breaks in-plane symmetry. By engineering the lattice constants and detunings, the arrays exhibit polarization-dependent subradiant modes, enabling complete reflection of a specific polarization component. Leveraging this mechanism, we assemble array units as functional pixels and demonstrate a scalable polarization-selective quantum light modulator. Our work establishes a dynamically reconfigurable atomic-photonic platform for versatile subwavelength quantum optical elements.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Metasurface-assisted balanced-injection synchronization for turbulence-resilient long-haul chaotic free-space link

Optical chaotic synchronization between coupled nonlinear lasers underpins most chaos-based applications, including complex laser network dynamics, secure communication, key distribution, and reinforcement learning. In free-space links, however, chaotic synchronization is highly vulnerable to stochastic fluctuation induced by atmospheric turbulence, which results in temporal injection imbalances at symmetric receivers and triggers intermittent desynchronization. Here, we introduce a full Poincar\'e vector beam-enabled balanced-injection synchronization (BIS) mechanism, which passively mitigates coupling fluctuations and preserves injection symmetry through a complementary metasurface pair, without requiring any channel estimation or active control. Over a 3.2 km urban link under moderately strong turbulence, BIS suppresses coupling power fluctuations by a factor of 4.6 (from 0.4511 to 0.0975). It eliminates desynchronization events and increases the high-quality synchronization probability from 58.6% to 91.0%. This enables a record-high bit rate-distance product of 720 Gbps \cdot km, reducing communication interruption probability by up to 77% compared to Gaussian beam transmission. Our innovative strategy bridges the gap between nanophotonics and engineering optics, offering a new insight into advancing next-generation LiDAR, secure communication, and integrated sensing and communication systems in turbulent environments.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Refined HLA Linkage Disequilibrium Architectures of World Populations by a Novel Allelic Correlation Measure

Numerous diseases, particularly autoimmune disorders, are associated with the human leukocyte antigen (HLA), a small genomic region located on human chromosome 6. Adequate characterization of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the HLA across populations is crucial for identifying genetic markers associated with specific traits and phenotypes. However, current LD measures often fail to capture HLA's structural complexity due to methodological limitations and sensitivity to low-frequency variants, marginal allele frequencies, and haplotype composition. To address these challenges, we introduced the Conditional Informatics Correlation Coefficient (CICC), which integrates conditional probability, information content, and haplotype-aware XOR logic to quantify LD robustly. When applied to high-resolution haploid genomes from the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC), CICC revealed 10 novel high-LD regions in HLA. Further analyses using the 1000 Genomes Project and Genome Asia datasets identified nine strongly linked regions shared across five global populations-five in Class I and four in Class II. These results demonstrate CICC's ability to capture complex HLA LD structures across populations, highlighting its broad potential for disease gene mapping, population genomics, and guiding precision medicine.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2025

Qwen3-VL Technical Report

We introduce Qwen3-VL, the most capable vision-language model in the Qwen series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. It natively supports interleaved contexts of up to 256K tokens, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video. The model family includes both dense (2B/4B/8B/32B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B/235B-A22B) variants to accommodate diverse latency-quality trade-offs. Qwen3-VL delivers three core pillars: (i) markedly stronger pure-text understanding, surpassing comparable text-only backbones in several cases; (ii) robust long-context comprehension with a native 256K-token window for both text and interleaved multimodal inputs, enabling faithful retention, retrieval, and cross-referencing across long documents and videos; and (iii) advanced multimodal reasoning across single-image, multi-image, and video tasks, demonstrating leading performance on comprehensive evaluations such as MMMU and visual-math benchmarks (e.g., MathVista and MathVision). Architecturally, we introduce three key upgrades: (i) an enhanced interleaved-MRoPE for stronger spatial-temporal modeling across images and video; (ii) DeepStack integration, which effectively leverages multi-level ViT features to tighten vision-language alignment; and (iii) text-based time alignment for video, evolving from T-RoPE to explicit textual timestamp alignment for more precise temporal grounding. Under comparable token budgets and latency constraints, Qwen3-VL achieves superior performance in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We envision Qwen3-VL serving as a foundational engine for image-grounded reasoning, agentic decision-making, and multimodal code intelligence in real-world workflows.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Through the Perspective of LiDAR: A Feature-Enriched and Uncertainty-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Terrestrial Point Cloud Segmentation

Accurate semantic segmentation of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds is limited by costly manual annotation. We propose a semi-automated, uncertainty-aware pipeline that integrates spherical projection, feature enrichment, ensemble learning, and targeted annotation to reduce labeling effort, while sustaining high accuracy. Our approach projects 3D points to a 2D spherical grid, enriches pixels with multi-source features, and trains an ensemble of segmentation networks to produce pseudo-labels and uncertainty maps, the latter guiding annotation of ambiguous regions. The 2D outputs are back-projected to 3D, yielding densely annotated point clouds supported by a three-tier visualization suite (2D feature maps, 3D colorized point clouds, and compact virtual spheres) for rapid triage and reviewer guidance. Using this pipeline, we build Mangrove3D, a semantic segmentation TLS dataset for mangrove forests. We further evaluate data efficiency and feature importance to address two key questions: (1) how much annotated data are needed and (2) which features matter most. Results show that performance saturates after ~12 annotated scans, geometric features contribute the most, and compact nine-channel stacks capture nearly all discriminative power, with the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) plateauing at around 0.76. Finally, we confirm the generalization of our feature-enrichment strategy through cross-dataset tests on ForestSemantic and Semantic3D. Our contributions include: (i) a robust, uncertainty-aware TLS annotation pipeline with visualization tools; (ii) the Mangrove3D dataset; and (iii) empirical guidance on data efficiency and feature importance, thus enabling scalable, high-quality segmentation of TLS point clouds for ecological monitoring and beyond. The dataset and processing scripts are publicly available at https://fz-rit.github.io/through-the-lidars-eye/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Visual Programmability: A Guide for Code-as-Thought in Chart Understanding

Chart understanding presents a critical test to the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Prior approaches face critical limitations: some rely on external tools, making them brittle and constrained by a predefined toolkit, while others fine-tune specialist models that often adopt a single reasoning strategy, such as text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). The intermediate steps of text-based reasoning are difficult to verify, which complicates the use of reinforcement-learning signals that reward factual accuracy. To address this, we propose a Code-as-Thought (CaT) approach to represent the visual information of a chart in a verifiable, symbolic format. Our key insight is that this strategy must be adaptive: a fixed, code-only implementation consistently fails on complex charts where symbolic representation is unsuitable. This finding leads us to introduce Visual Programmability: a learnable property that determines if a chart-question pair is better solved with code or direct visual analysis. We implement this concept in an adaptive framework where a VLM learns to choose between the CaT pathway and a direct visual reasoning pathway. The selection policy of the model is trained with reinforcement learning using a novel dual-reward system. This system combines a data-accuracy reward to ground the model in facts and prevent numerical hallucination, with a decision reward that teaches the model when to use each strategy, preventing it from defaulting to a single reasoning mode. Experiments demonstrate strong and robust performance across diverse chart-understanding benchmarks. Our work shows that VLMs can be taught not only to reason but also how to reason, dynamically selecting the optimal reasoning pathway for each task.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Decouple before Align: Visual Disentanglement Enhances Prompt Tuning

Prompt tuning (PT), as an emerging resource-efficient fine-tuning paradigm, has showcased remarkable effectiveness in improving the task-specific transferability of vision-language models. This paper delves into a previously overlooked information asymmetry issue in PT, where the visual modality mostly conveys more context than the object-oriented textual modality. Correspondingly, coarsely aligning these two modalities could result in the biased attention, driving the model to merely focus on the context area. To address this, we propose DAPT, an effective PT framework based on an intuitive decouple-before-align concept. First, we propose to explicitly decouple the visual modality into the foreground and background representation via exploiting coarse-and-fine visual segmenting cues, and then both of these decoupled patterns are aligned with the original foreground texts and the hand-crafted background classes, thereby symmetrically strengthening the modal alignment. To further enhance the visual concentration, we propose a visual pull-push regularization tailored for the foreground-background patterns, directing the original visual representation towards unbiased attention on the region-of-interest object. We demonstrate the power of architecture-free DAPT through few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and data-efficient learning, all of which yield superior performance across prevailing benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ferenas/DAPT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ReSemAct: Advancing Fine-Grained Robotic Manipulation via Semantic Structuring and Affordance Refinement

Fine-grained robotic manipulation requires grounding natural language into appropriate affordance targets. However, most existing methods driven by foundation models often compress rich semantics into oversimplified affordances, preventing exploitation of implicit semantic information. To address these challenges, we present ReSemAct, a novel unified manipulation framework that introduces Semantic Structuring and Affordance Refinement (SSAR), powered by the automated synergistic reasoning between Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Specifically, the Semantic Structuring module derives a unified semantic affordance description from natural language and RGB observations, organizing affordance regions, implicit functional intent, and coarse affordance anchors into a structured representation for downstream refinement. Building upon this specification, the Affordance Refinement strategy instantiates two complementary flows that separately specialize geometry and position, yielding fine-grained affordance targets. These refined targets are then encoded as real-time joint-space optimization objectives, enabling reactive and robust manipulation in dynamic environments. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments are conducted in semantically rich household and sparse chemical lab environments. The results demonstrate that ReSemAct performs diverse tasks under zero-shot conditions, showcasing the robustness of SSAR with foundation models in fine-grained manipulation. Code and videos at https://github.com/scy-v/ReSemAct and https://resemact.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

ConText: Driving In-context Learning for Text Removal and Segmentation

This paper presents the first study on adapting the visual in-context learning (V-ICL) paradigm to optical character recognition tasks, specifically focusing on text removal and segmentation. Most existing V-ICL generalists employ a reasoning-as-reconstruction approach: they turn to using a straightforward image-label compositor as the prompt and query input, and then masking the query label to generate the desired output. This direct prompt confines the model to a challenging single-step reasoning process. To address this, we propose a task-chaining compositor in the form of image-removal-segmentation, providing an enhanced prompt that elicits reasoning with enriched intermediates. Additionally, we introduce context-aware aggregation, integrating the chained prompt pattern into the latent query representation, thereby strengthening the model's in-context reasoning. We also consider the issue of visual heterogeneity, which complicates the selection of homogeneous demonstrations in text recognition. Accordingly, this is effectively addressed through a simple self-prompting strategy, preventing the model's in-context learnability from devolving into specialist-like, context-free inference. Collectively, these insights culminate in our ConText model, which achieves new state-of-the-art across both in- and out-of-domain benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Ferenas/ConText.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

G4Seg: Generation for Inexact Segmentation Refinement with Diffusion Models

This paper considers the problem of utilizing a large-scale text-to-image diffusion model to tackle the challenging Inexact Segmentation (IS) task. Unlike traditional approaches that rely heavily on discriminative-model-based paradigms or dense visual representations derived from internal attention mechanisms, our method focuses on the intrinsic generative priors in Stable Diffusion~(SD). Specifically, we exploit the pattern discrepancies between original images and mask-conditional generated images to facilitate a coarse-to-fine segmentation refinement by establishing a semantic correspondence alignment and updating the foreground probability. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments validate the effectiveness and superiority of our plug-and-play design, underscoring the potential of leveraging generation discrepancies to model dense representations and encouraging further exploration of generative approaches for solving discriminative tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Pressure induced superconducting dome in LaNiGa2

LaNiGa2 is a time-reversal symmetry breaking superconductor with symmetry protected band crossings, making it an ideal platform for investigating the interplay between unconventional superconductivity and electronic structure topology. Here we present a transport study of LaNiGa2 under pressure. The application of pressure to LaNiGa2 induces a significant enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature Tc at a pressure of 7 GPa. In contrast, powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) results show no evidence of structural phase transitions up to 26.3 GPa. Moreover, the ratio of band diffusivity shows a sudden increase at around 7 GPa, suggesting possible pressure-induced changes in the electronic structure that are closely linked to the evolution of superconductivity.

cond-mat.supr-con↗