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Feng Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Chen.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

The Distributionally Robust Cyclic Inventory Routing Problem

We study the cyclic inventory routing problem that involves joint decisions on vehicle routing and inventory replenishment on an infinite, cyclic horizon. It considers a single warehouse and a set of geographically dispersed retailers. We model retailer demand as random variables with uncertain distributions belonging to a moment-based ambiguity set. We develop a distributionally robust optimization formulation that minimizes the worst-case expected cost over the ambiguity set, while ensuring service reliability through a distributionally robust chance constraint. Our main results are that we prove that the worst-case expected inventory cost is attained under a multi-point distribution, which can be identified a posteriori via linear programming, and that the distributionally robust chance constraint can be reformulated into near-equivalent deterministic forms. This yields a deterministic reformulation of the original problem. To solve it, we design a nested branch-and-price framework, in which the first level partitions retailers into clusters, and the second level concerns routing and replenishment decisions within each cluster. Computational experiments on both synthetic instances and real-world data from SAIC Volkswagen Automobile Co., Ltd. demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

math.OC↗

Fin-PRM: A Domain-Specialized Process Reward Model for Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models

Process Reward Models (PRMs) supervise intermediate reasoning steps in large language models (LLMs), but existing PRMs are mainly trained on general-domain data and struggle with the structured, symbolic, and fact-sensitive nature of financial reasoning. Financial tasks require not only correct final answers but also verifiable intermediate steps grounded in domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose Fin-PRM, a domain-specialized, trajectory-aware PRM for financial reasoning that jointly models step-level correctness and trajectory-level coherence, producing binary supervision signals for both local and global reasoning quality. To support reliable supervision, we construct a high-quality financial reasoning dataset of 3K trajectories, where step- and trajectory-level labels are automatically derived from multi-source reward signals, including Monte Carlo rollouts, LLM-based evaluation, and explicit financial knowledge verification. Fin-PRM defines a unified ranking score that integrates step- and trajectory-level rewards, enabling consistent use across multiple settings. We evaluate Fin-PRM in three scenarios: (1) offline trajectory selection for supervised fine-tuning, (2) reward-guided Best-of-$N$ inference for test-time scaling, and (3) process-aware reward shaping for reinforcement learning. Experiments on financial reasoning benchmarks, including CFLUE and FinQA, show that Fin-PRM consistently outperforms general-purpose PRMs and strong baselines. Our project resources will be available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

cs.CL↗

Self-DACE++: Robust Low-Light Enhancement via Efficient Adaptive Curve Estimation

In this paper, we present Self-DACE++, an improved unsupervised and lightweight framework for Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE), building upon our previous Self-Reference Deep Adaptive Curve Estimation (Self-DACE). To better address the trade-off between computational efficiency and restoration quality, Self-DACE++ introduces enhanced Adaptive Adjustment Curves (AACs). These curves, governed by minimal trainable parameters, flexibly adjust the dynamic range while preserving the color fidelity, structural integrity, and naturalness of the enhanced images. To achieve an extremely lightweight architecture without sacrificing performance, we propose a randomized order training strategy coupled with a network fusion mechanism, which compresses the model into an efficient iterative inference structure. Furthermore, we formulate a physics-grounded objective function based on Retinex theory and incorporate a dedicated denoising module to effectively estimate and suppress latent noise in dark regions. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on multiple real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that Self-DACE++ outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, delivering superior enhancement quality with real-time inference capability. The code is available at https://github.com/John-Wendell/Self-DACE.

cs.CV↗

Knowledge-Data Dually Driven Paradigm for Accurate Landslide Susceptibility Prediction under Data-Scarce Conditions Using Geomorphic Priors and Tabular Foundation Model

Landslide susceptibility prediction is critical for geohazard risk assessment and mitigation. Conventional data-driven paradigm achieves high predictive accuracy but require sufficient conditioning factors and large-scale landslide inventories. However, in practical engineering applications across mountainous and plateau regions, data-scarce conditions are commonly observed, where such data requirements are rarely satisfied, rendering conventional data-driven paradigm inapplicable. To address this issue, we propose a knowledge-data dually driven paradigm for accurate landslide susceptibility prediction under data-scarce conditions. The essential idea behind the proposed novel paradigm is the integration of the geomorphic prior knowledge with scarce landslide data. To validate the proposed paradigm, we first applied it to a data-rich region in central Italy, where a conventional data-driven paradigm trained on the full dataset served as the baseline. By utilizing only 30% of the available landslide data, the proposed paradigm achieved comparable predictive accuracy to the baseline, demonstrating its effectiveness under data-scarce conditions. The paradigm was further evaluated in a genuinely data-scarce environment for application, the Qilian Permafrost Region of the Tibetan Plateau, where it also yielded reliable susceptibility predictions, confirming its applicability under data-scarce conditions.

cs.LG↗

On-Chip Neodymium-Doped Lithium Niobate Microdisk Laser with Self-Induced Pulsing

Rare-earth-doped materials constitute the foundation of conventional solid-state lasers, but their bulk-crystal form is inherently incompatible with photonic integration, making it challenging to realize compact, high performance nanoscale laser sources. Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI), with its exceptional electro-optic and nonlinear optical properties, has emerged as one of the most promising platforms for integrated photonics. Combining Nd3+ doping with LNOI offers the unique possibility of uniting the efficient gain provided by Nd3+ ions with the excellent characteristics of LNOI. However, on-chip laser emission from Nd:LNOI has not been demonstrated previously. In this work, we report the first realization of an integrated Nd:LNOI microdisk laser, demonstrating lasing at 1094.17 nm under 785.10 nm pumping with a low threshold of 146 uW and a slope efficiency of 1.962*10^(-5). Beyond continuous-wave operation, we further observe self-induced laser pulsing on the hundred-microsecond scale, with a laser-pulse duration down to 500 us and an oscillation period of 6.45 ms, arising from nonlinear thermo-optic-photorefractive dynamics. We demonstrate stable continuous wave lasing and self-induced pulsed emission within a monolithically integrated Nd:LNOI cavity. Our results expand the operational degrees of freedom for LNOI-based lasers and open a new direction toward deeply integrated gain with intrinsic nonlinear dynamical processes.

physics.optics↗

Modeling Multiple Support Strategies within a Single Turn for Emotional Support Conversations

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to assist individuals experiencing distress by generating empathetic and supportive dialogue. While prior work typically assumes that each supporter turn corresponds to a single strategy, real-world supportive communication often involves multiple strategies within a single utterance. In this paper, we revisit the ESC task by formulating it as multi-strategy utterance generation, where each utterance may contain one or more strategy-response pairs. We propose two generation methods: All-in-One, which predicts all strategy-response pairs in a single decoding step, and One-by-One, which iteratively generates strategy-response pairs until completion. Both methods are further enhanced with cognitive reasoning guided by reinforcement learning to improve strategy selection and response composition. We evaluate our models on the ESConv dataset under both utterance-level and dialogue-level settings. Experimental results show that our methods effectively model multi-strategy utterances and lead to improved supportive quality and dialogue success. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic empirical evidence that allowing multiple support strategies within a single utterance is both feasible and beneficial for emotional support conversations. All code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

cs.CL↗

Chain of Event-Centric Causal Thought for Physically Plausible Video Generation

Physically Plausible Video Generation (PPVG) has emerged as a promising avenue for modeling real-world physical phenomena. PPVG requires an understanding of commonsense knowledge, which remains a challenge for video diffusion models. Current approaches leverage commonsense reasoning capability of large language models to embed physical concepts into prompts. However, generation models often render physical phenomena as a single moment defined by prompts, due to the lack of conditioning mechanisms for modeling causal progression. In this paper, we view PPVG as generating a sequence of causally connected and dynamically evolving events. To realize this paradigm, we design two key modules: (1) Physics-driven Event Chain Reasoning. This module decomposes the physical phenomena described in prompts into multiple elementary event units, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning. To mitigate causal ambiguity, we embed physical formulas as constraints to impose deterministic causal dependencies during reasoning. (2) Transition-aware Cross-modal Prompting (TCP). To maintain continuity between events, this module transforms causal event units into temporally aligned vision-language prompts. It summarizes discrete event descriptions to obtain causally consistent narratives, while progressively synthesizing visual keyframes of individual events by interactive editing. Comprehensive experiments on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance in generating physically plausible videos across diverse physical domains. Code is available at https://github.com/ZixuanWang0525/CoECT.

cs.CV↗

Training-free Motion Factorization for Compositional Video Generation

Compositional video generation aims to synthesize multiple instances with diverse appearance and motion. However, current approaches mainly focus on binding semantics, neglecting to understand diverse motion categories specified in prompts. In this paper, we propose a motion factorization framework that decomposes complex motion into three primary categories: motionlessness, rigid motion, and non-rigid motion. Specifically, our framework follows a planning before generation paradigm. (1) During planning, we reason about motion laws on the motion graph to obtain frame-wise changes in the shape and position of each instance. This alleviates semantic ambiguities in the user prompt by organizing it into a structured representation of instances and their interactions. (2) During generation, we modulate the synthesis of distinct motion categories in a disentangled manner. Conditioned on the motion cues, guidance branches stabilize appearance in motionless regions, preserve rigid-body geometry, and regularize local non-rigid deformations. Crucially, our two modules are model-agnostic, which can be seamlessly incorporated into various diffusion model architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves impressive performance in motion synthesis on real-world benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/ZixuanWang0525/MF-CVG.

cs.CV↗

FinMCP-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use under the Model Context Protocol

This paper introduces \textbf{FinMCP-Bench}, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in solving real-world financial problems through tool invocation of financial model context protocols. FinMCP-Bench contains 613 samples spanning 10 main scenarios and 33 sub-scenarios, featuring both real and synthetic user queries to ensure diversity and authenticity. It incorporates 65 real financial MCPs and three types of samples, single tool, multi-tool, and multi-turn, allowing evaluation of models across different levels of task complexity. Using this benchmark, we systematically assess a range of mainstream LLMs and propose metrics that explicitly measure tool invocation accuracy and reasoning capabilities. FinMCP-Bench provides a standardized, practical, and challenging testbed for advancing research on financial LLM agents.

cs.AI↗

Stochastic maximum principle for time-changed forward-backward stochastic control problem with Lévy noise

This paper establishes a stochastic maximum principle for optimal control problems governed by time-changed forward-backward stochastic differential equations with Lévy noise. The system incorporates a random, non-decreasing operational time (the inverse of an $α$-stable subordinator) to model phenomena like trapping events and subdiffusion. Using a duality transformation and the convex variational method, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality, expressed through a novel set of adjoint equations. Finally, the theoretical results are applied to solve an explicit cash management problem under stochastic recursive utility.

math.OC↗

LiveWorld: Simulating Out-of-Sight Dynamics in Generative Video World Models

Recent generative video world models aim to simulate visual environment evolution, allowing an observer to interactively explore the scene via camera control. However, they implicitly assume that the world only evolves within the observer's field of view. Once an object leaves the observer's view, its state is "frozen" in memory, and revisiting the same region later often fails to reflect events that should have occurred in the meantime. In this work, we identify and formalize this overlooked limitation as the "out-of-sight dynamics" problem, which impedes video world models from representing a continuously evolving world. To address this issue, we propose LiveWorld, a novel framework that extends video world models to support persistent world evolution. Instead of treating the world as static observational memory, LiveWorld models a persistent global state composed of a static 3D background and dynamic entities that continue evolving even when unobserved. To maintain these unseen dynamics, LiveWorld introduces a monitor-based mechanism that autonomously simulates the temporal progression of active entities and synchronizes their evolved states upon revisiting, ensuring spatially coherent rendering. For evaluation, we further introduce LiveBench, a dedicated benchmark for the task of maintaining out-of-sight dynamics. Extensive experiments show that LiveWorld enables persistent event evolution and long-term scene consistency, bridging the gap between existing 2D observation-based memory and true 4D dynamic world simulation. The baseline and benchmark will be publicly available at https://zichengduan.github.io/LiveWorld/index.html.

cs.CV↗

ACT as Human: Multimodal Large Language Model Data Annotation with Critical Thinking

Supervised learning relies on high-quality labeled data, but obtaining such data through human annotation is both expensive and time-consuming. Recent work explores using large language models (LLMs) for annotation, but LLM-generated labels still fall short of human-level quality. To address this problem, we propose the Annotation with Critical Thinking (ACT) data pipeline, where LLMs serve not only as annotators but also as judges to critically identify potential errors. Human effort is then directed towards reviewing only the most "suspicious" cases, significantly improving the human annotation efficiency. Our major contributions are as follows: (1) ACT is applicable to a wide range of domains, including natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and multimodal understanding, by leveraging multimodal-LLMs (MLLMs). (2) Through empirical studies, we derive 7 insights on how to enhance annotation quality while efficiently reducing the human cost, and then translate these findings into user-friendly guidelines. (3) We theoretically analyze how to modify the loss function so that models trained on ACT data achieve similar performance to those trained on fully human-annotated data. Our experiments show that the performance gap can be reduced to less than 2% on most benchmark datasets while saving up to 90% of human costs.

cs.LG↗

Reconciling In-Context and In-Weight Learning via Dual Representation Space Encoding

In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts with the model's inherent in-weight learning (IWL) ability. By examining the representation space learned by a toy model in synthetic experiments, we identify the shared encoding space for context and samples in Transformers as a potential source of this conflict. To address this, we modify the model architecture to separately encode the context and samples into two distinct spaces: a task representation space and a sample representation space. We model these two spaces under a simple yet principled framework, assuming a linear representational structure and treating them as a pair of dual spaces. Both theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture, CoQE, in the single-value answer setting. It not only enhances ICL performance through improved representation learning, but also successfully reconciles ICL and IWL capabilities across synthetic few-shot classification and a newly designed pseudo-arithmetic task. Code: https://github.com/McGuinnessChen/dual-representation-space-encoding

cs.LG↗

Bridging the Cognitive Gap: Co-Designing and Evaluating a Voice-Enabled Community Chatbot for Older Adults

Digital portals in retirement communities often create physical and cognitive barriers for older adults, leading to digital avoidance. Generative AI offers a solution by enabling natural language interaction, yet its adoption is hindered by the opaque, "Black Box" nature of these systems and lingering usability challenges. To address this, we evaluated a voice-enabled Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot at a continuing care retirement community in the Pacific Northwest. Through a mixed-methods Co-Design and Literacy Workshop (N=25), we applied a "Glass Box" approach combining multimodal accessibility with intentional AI education. The intervention significantly improved participants' technical understanding (p=0.004) and perceived transparency (p=0.001), shifting their interaction model from blind trust to informed reliance prioritizing verifiable evidence. While voice input reduced cognitive load, usability scores dropped significantly for users aged 80 and older (r=-0.50), indicating that truly age-inclusive AI must evolve beyond touch-based interfaces toward zero-touch navigation.

cs.HC↗

Depression Detection at the Point of Care: Automated Analysis of Linguistic Signals from Routine Primary Care Encounters

Depression is underdiagnosed in primary care, yet timely identification remains critical. Recorded clinical encounters, increasingly common with digital scribing technologies, present an opportunity to detect depression from naturalistic dialogue. We investigated automated depression detection from 1,108 audio-recorded primary care encounters in the Establishing Focus study, with depression defined by PHQ-9 (n=253 depressed, n=855 non-depressed). We compared three supervised approaches, Sentence-BERT + Logistic Regression (LR), LIWC+LR and ModernBERT, against a zero-shot GPT-OSS. GPT-OSS achieved the strongest performance (AUPRC=0.510, AUROC=0.774), with LIWC+LR competitive among supervised models (AUPRC=0.500, AUROC=0.742). Combined dyadic transcripts outperformed single-speaker configurations, with providers linguistically mirroring patients in depression encounters, an additive signal not captured by either speaker alone. Meaningful detection is achievable from the first 128 patient tokens (AUPRC=0.356, AUROC=0.675), supporting in-the-moment clinical decision support. These findings argue for passively collected clinical audio as a low-burden complement to existing screening workflows.

cs.CL↗

DianJin-OCR-R1: Enhancing OCR Capabilities via a Reasoning-and-Tool Interleaved Vision-Language Model

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled end-to-end document parsing and understanding, achieving strong performance on diverse optical character recognition (OCR) tasks. However, VLMs are prone to generate words that do not exist in the input image due to over-reliance on language priors. By contrast, traditional OCR models, whose architectures are tailored for specific recognition tasks, often achieve stronger fine-grained visual perception with fewer hallucinations, but they typically lack the contextual semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities needed in more challenging cases. To bridge this gap, we propose DianJin-OCR-R1, a reasoning-enhanced framework for recognition that trains VLMs in a reasoning-and-tool interleaved paradigm. Our DianJin-OCR-R1 model first recognizes the content in the input image through its own OCR capabilities, and then calls other expert models for extra results as references. After that, it is guided to "look again" at the image and compare its own recognized content with other results to find errors or omissions. Finally, it integrates all available evidence to generate a more accurate output. This design empowers the model to learn how to implicitly re-focus on the visual input and effectively leverage the results of other expert models for better performance. We evaluate our DianJin-OCR-R1 model on ReST and OmniDocBench, where it consistently outperforms both its non-reasoning counterparts and expert models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗

Sparsity Forcing: Reinforcing Token Sparsity of MLLMs

Sparse attention mechanisms aim to reduce computational overhead with minimal accuracy loss by selectively processing salient tokens. Despite their effectiveness, most methods merely exploit a model's inherent sparsity and thus plateau at moderate budgets (about 50\% token reduction), with little headroom to push budget lower without hurting accuracy. Other approaches attempt to enforce sparsity through trainable sparse attention or sharpness-inducing regularizers, but these either fix rigid patterns that ignore input and layer dynamics, or optimize proxy objectives without direct control over token budgets. In this paper, we explicitly reinforce token sparsity in well-posed multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through a simple RL-based post-training framework named \textit{Sparsity Forcing}. Our method explores the efficiency-accuracy trade-off by running multiple rollouts with different token budgets, where both efficiency (token reduction ratio) and performance (answer correctness) are formulated as joint rewards. By contrasting rollouts within each group, the more efficient and correct answer is rewarded while less efficient or incorrect ones are penalized, thereby turning token saving into an end-to-end, inference-consistent optimization objective. Across thirteen image and video benchmarks, Sparsity Forcing raises token reduction ratio on Qwen2-VL/Qwen2.5-VL from 20\% to 75\% with minimal accuracy decline, significantly reducing long-context inference memory by up to 3$\times$ while speeding up decoding by up to 3.3$\times$.

cs.LG↗

Data-driven Radiative Magnetohydrodynamics Simulations with the MURaM Code: the Emergence of Active Region 11158 and the X2.2 Flare

We present the application of the data-driven branch of the MURaM code to the extensively studied flare-productive active region 11158. We refine the hybrid model strategy, which was described in the earlier paper of this series, to model the emergence of the active region during 4 solar days starting shortly before 2011 February 11 and the eruption of an X2.2 flare on February 15. After 4 days of evolution, a major eruption of a magnetic flux rope occurs in the simulation at approximately 3 hours (3\% difference) before the real flare. The eruption leads to magnetic reconnection that contributes to bulk heating in the chromosphere and corona. The deposition of flare energy in the chromosphere causes strong condensations and evaporations, which fill hot post-flare loops and bright flare ribbons that exhibit separation and extension similar to the observed ribbon evolution. The synthesized soft X-ray flux corresponds to X class, which is close to the real event. The upward eruption of the flux rope leads to a piston-driven shock and horizontal expansion that exerts a strong downward impact on the lower atmosphere and generate an apparently fast-propagating chromospheric Moreton wave. We conclude that the data-driven radiative simulation of this active region can reproduce the key observational results of the real flare and demonstrate the great potential of this method for studying solar eruptions in a realistic corona environment.

astro-ph.SR↗