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Fengyu Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Fengyu Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

UniTac: A Unified Multimodal Model for Cross-Sensor Tactile Understanding and Generation

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown great promise in integrating understanding and generation across diverse modalities. However, existing research rarely extends this paradigm to the tactile domain, where both object-level semantics and sensor-level configurations jointly determine the meaning of touch. To address this gap, we propose UniTac, the first UMM designed for tactile understanding and generation. UniTac models the tactile process as a transition from non-contact to contact, capturing the physical interaction between sensors and objects through a dual-level representation that encodes both sensor and object attributes. For tactile understanding, UniTac introduces two tasks, object property description and sensor identification, to enhance reasoning over physical and cross-sensor information. For tactile generation, we design a two-stage training paradigm consisting of reconstruction and alignment, together with a sensor-prior-based sampling strategy that simulates realistic tactile contact. Trained on large-scale multi-sensor datasets, UniTac achieves state-of-the-art performance in tactile understanding and generates realistic tactile signals across sensors.

cs.RO

RuleSmith: Multi-Agent LLMs for Automated Game Balancing

Game balancing is a longstanding challenge requiring repeated playtesting, expert intuition, and extensive manual tuning. We introduce RuleSmith, the first framework that achieves automated game balancing by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of multi-agent LLMs. It couples a game engine, multi-agent LLMs self-play, and Bayesian optimization operating over a multi-dimensional rule space. As a proof of concept, we instantiate RuleSmith on CivMini, a simplified civilization-style game containing heterogeneous factions, economy systems, production rules, and combat mechanics, all governed by tunable parameters. LLM agents interpret textual rulebooks and game states to generate actions, to conduct fast evaluation of balance metrics such as win-rate disparities. To search the parameter landscape efficiently, we integrate Bayesian optimization with acquisition-based adaptive sampling and discrete projection: promising candidates receive more evaluation games for accurate assessment, while exploratory candidates receive fewer games for efficient exploration. Experiments show that RuleSmith converges to highly balanced configurations and provides interpretable rule adjustments that can be directly applied to downstream game systems. Our results illustrate that LLM simulation can serve as a powerful surrogate for automating design and balancing in complex multi-agent environments.

cs.LG

LongCat-Flash-Omni Technical Report

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Omni, a state-of-the-art open-source omni-modal model with 560 billion parameters, excelling at real-time audio-visual interaction. By adopting a curriculum-inspired progressive training strategy that transitions from simpler to increasingly complex modality sequence modeling tasks, LongCat-Flash-Omni attains comprehensive multimodal capabilities while maintaining strong unimodal capability. Building upon LongCat-Flash, which adopts a high-performance Shortcut-connected Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with zero-computation experts, LongCat-Flash-Omni integrates efficient multimodal perception and speech reconstruction modules. Despite its immense size of 560B parameters (with 27B activated), LongCat-Flash-Omni achieves low-latency real-time audio-visual interaction. For training infrastructure, we developed a modality-decoupled parallelism scheme specifically designed to manage the data and model heterogeneity inherent in large-scale multimodal training. This innovative approach demonstrates exceptional efficiency by sustaining over 90% of the throughput achieved by text-only training. Extensive evaluations show that LongCat-Flash-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance on omni-modal benchmarks among open-source models. Furthermore, it delivers highly competitive results across a wide range of modality-specific tasks, including text, image, and video understanding, as well as audio understanding and generation. We provide a comprehensive overview of the model architecture design, training procedures, and data strategies, and open-source the model to foster future research and development in the community.

cs.MM

VideoSeg-R1:Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Reinforcement Learning

Traditional video reasoning segmentation methods rely on supervised fine-tuning, which limits generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios and lacks explicit reasoning. To address this, we propose \textbf{VideoSeg-R1}, the first framework to introduce reinforcement learning into video reasoning segmentation. It adopts a decoupled architecture that formulates the task as joint referring image segmentation and video mask propagation. It comprises three stages: (1) A hierarchical text-guided frame sampler to emulate human attention; (2) A reasoning model that produces spatial cues along with explicit reasoning chains; and (3) A segmentation-propagation stage using SAM2 and XMem. A task difficulty-aware mechanism adaptively controls reasoning length for better efficiency and accuracy. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that VideoSeg-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex video reasoning and segmentation tasks. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/euyis1019/VideoSeg-R1.

cs.CV

Iris: Integrating Language into Diffusion-based Monocular Depth Estimation

Traditional monocular depth estimation suffers from inherent ambiguity and visual nuisances. We demonstrate that language can enhance monocular depth estimation by providing an additional condition (rather than images alone) aligned with plausible 3D scenes, thereby reducing the solution space for depth estimation. This conditional distribution is learned during the text-to-image pre-training of diffusion models. To generate images under various viewpoints and layouts that precisely reflect textual descriptions, the model implicitly models object sizes, shapes, and scales, their spatial relationships, and the overall scene structure. In this paper, Iris, we investigate the benefits of our strategy to integrate text descriptions into training and inference of diffusion-based depth estimation models. We experiment with three different diffusion-based monocular depth estimators (Marigold, Lotus, and E2E-FT) and their variants. By training on HyperSim and Virtual KITTI, and evaluating on NYUv2, KITTI, ETH3D, ScanNet, and DIODE, we find that our strategy improves the overall monocular depth estimation accuracy, especially in small areas. It also improves the model's depth perception of specific regions described in the text. We find that by providing more details in the text, the depth prediction can be iteratively refined. Simultaneously, we find that language can act as a constraint to accelerate the convergence of both training and the inference diffusion trajectory. Code and generated text data will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV

Differentiation Through Black-Box Quadratic Programming Solvers

Differentiable optimization has attracted significant research interest, particularly for quadratic programming (QP). Existing approaches for differentiating the solution of a QP with respect to its defining parameters often rely on specific integrated solvers. This integration limits their applicability, including their use in neural network architectures and bi-level optimization tasks, restricting users to a narrow selection of solver choices. To address this limitation, we introduce dQP, a modular and solver-agnostic framework for plug-and-play differentiation of virtually any QP solver. A key insight we leverage to achieve modularity is that, once the active set of inequality constraints is known, both the solution and its derivative can be expressed using simplified linear systems that share the same matrix. This formulation fully decouples the computation of the QP solution from its differentiation. Building on this result, we provide a minimal-overhead, open-source implementation ( https://github.com/cwmagoon/dQP ) that seamlessly integrates with over 15 state-of-the-art solvers. Comprehensive benchmark experiments demonstrate dQP's robustness and scalability, particularly highlighting its advantages in large-scale sparse problems.

cs.LG

Discretized Gaussian Representation for Tomographic Reconstruction

Computed Tomography (CT) enables detailed cross-sectional imaging but continues to face challenges in balancing reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. While deep learning-based methods have significantly improved image quality and noise reduction, they typically require large-scale training data and intensive computation. Recent advances in scene reconstruction, such as Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, offer alternative perspectives but are not well-suited for direct volumetric CT reconstruction. In this work, we propose Discretized Gaussian Representation (DGR), a novel framework that reconstructs the 3D volume directly using a set of discretized Gaussian functions in an end-to-end manner. To further enhance efficiency, we introduce Fast Volume Reconstruction, a highly parallelized technique that aggregates Gaussian contributions into the voxel grid with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that DGR achieves superior reconstruction quality and runtime performance across various CT reconstruction scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wskingdom/DGR.

eess.IV

TextToucher: Fine-Grained Text-to-Touch Generation

Tactile sensation plays a crucial role in the development of multi-modal large models and embodied intelligence. To collect tactile data with minimal cost as possible, a series of studies have attempted to generate tactile images by vision-to-touch image translation. However, compared to text modality, visual modality-driven tactile generation cannot accurately depict human tactile sensation. In this work, we analyze the characteristics of tactile images in detail from two granularities: object-level (tactile texture, tactile shape), and sensor-level (gel status). We model these granularities of information through text descriptions and propose a fine-grained Text-to-Touch generation method (TextToucher) to generate high-quality tactile samples. Specifically, we introduce a multimodal large language model to build the text sentences about object-level tactile information and employ a set of learnable text prompts to represent the sensor-level tactile information. To better guide the tactile generation process with the built text information, we fuse the dual grains of text information and explore various dual-grain text conditioning methods within the diffusion transformer architecture. Furthermore, we propose a Contrastive Text-Touch Pre-training (CTTP) metric to precisely evaluate the quality of text-driven generated tactile data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our TextToucher method. The source codes will be available at \url{https://github.com/TtuHamg/TextToucher}.

cs.CV

Tri-Ergon: Fine-grained Video-to-Audio Generation with Multi-modal Conditions and LUFS Control

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation utilizes visual-only video features to produce realistic sounds that correspond to the scene. However, current V2A models often lack fine-grained control over the generated audio, especially in terms of loudness variation and the incorporation of multi-modal conditions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tri-Ergon, a diffusion-based V2A model that incorporates textual, auditory, and pixel-level visual prompts to enable detailed and semantically rich audio synthesis. Additionally, we introduce Loudness Units relative to Full Scale (LUFS) embedding, which allows for precise manual control of the loudness changes over time for individual audio channels, enabling our model to effectively address the intricate correlation of video and audio in real-world Foley workflows. Tri-Ergon is capable of creating 44.1 kHz high-fidelity stereo audio clips of varying lengths up to 60 seconds, which significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art V2A methods that typically generate mono audio for a fixed duration.

cs.CV

RSA: Resolving Scale Ambiguities in Monocular Depth Estimators through Language Descriptions

We propose a method for metric-scale monocular depth estimation. Inferring depth from a single image is an ill-posed problem due to the loss of scale from perspective projection during the image formation process. Any scale chosen is a bias, typically stemming from training on a dataset; hence, existing works have instead opted to use relative (normalized, inverse) depth. Our goal is to recover metric-scaled depth maps through a linear transformation. The crux of our method lies in the observation that certain objects (e.g., cars, trees, street signs) are typically found or associated with certain types of scenes (e.g., outdoor). We explore whether language descriptions can be used to transform relative depth predictions to those in metric scale. Our method, RSA, takes as input a text caption describing objects present in an image and outputs the parameters of a linear transformation which can be applied globally to a relative depth map to yield metric-scaled depth predictions. We demonstrate our method on recent general-purpose monocular depth models on indoors (NYUv2, VOID) and outdoors (KITTI). When trained on multiple datasets, RSA can serve as a general alignment module in zero-shot settings. Our method improves over common practices in aligning relative to metric depth and results in predictions that are comparable to an upper bound of fitting relative depth to ground truth via a linear transformation.

cs.CV

NeuroBind: Towards Unified Multimodal Representations for Neural Signals

Understanding neural activity and information representation is crucial for advancing knowledge of brain function and cognition. Neural activity, measured through techniques like electrophysiology and neuroimaging, reflects various aspects of information processing. Recent advances in deep neural networks offer new approaches to analyzing these signals using pre-trained models. However, challenges arise due to discrepancies between different neural signal modalities and the limited scale of high-quality neural data. To address these challenges, we present NeuroBind, a general representation that unifies multiple brain signal types, including EEG, fMRI, calcium imaging, and spiking data. To achieve this, we align neural signals in these image-paired neural datasets to pre-trained vision-language embeddings. Neurobind is the first model that studies different neural modalities interconnectedly and is able to leverage high-resource modality models for various neuroscience tasks. We also showed that by combining information from different neural signal modalities, NeuroBind enhances downstream performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the complementary strengths of different neural modalities. As a result, we can leverage multiple types of neural signals mapped to the same space to improve downstream tasks, and demonstrate the complementary strengths of different neural modalities. This approach holds significant potential for advancing neuroscience research, improving AI systems, and developing neuroprosthetics and brain-computer interfaces.

q-bio.NC

On the Viability of Monocular Depth Pre-training for Semantic Segmentation

The question of whether pre-training on geometric tasks is viable for downstream transfer to semantic tasks is important for two reasons, one practical and the other scientific. If the answer is positive, we may be able to reduce pre-training cost and bias from human annotators significantly. If the answer is negative, it may shed light on the role of embodiment in the emergence of language and other cognitive functions in evolutionary history. To frame the question in a way that is testable with current means, we pre-train a model on a geometric task, and test whether that can be used to prime a notion of 'object' that enables inference of semantics as soon as symbols (labels) are assigned. We choose monocular depth prediction as the geometric task, and semantic segmentation as the downstream semantic task, and design a collection of empirical tests by exploring different forms of supervision, training pipelines, and data sources for both depth pre-training and semantic fine-tuning. We find that monocular depth is a viable form of pre-training for semantic segmentation, validated by improvements over common baselines. Based on the findings, we propose several possible mechanisms behind the improvements, including their relation to dataset size, resolution, architecture, in/out-of-domain source data, and validate them through a wide range of ablation studies. We also find that optical flow, which at first glance may seem as good as depth prediction since it optimizes the same photometric reprojection error, is considerably less effective, as it does not explicitly aim to infer the latent structure of the scene, but rather the raw phenomenology of temporally adjacent images.

cs.CV

Towards Expressive Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Hierarchical Prosody Modeling

Recent research in zero-shot speech synthesis has made significant progress in speaker similarity. However, current efforts focus on timbre generalization rather than prosody modeling, which results in limited naturalness and expressiveness. To address this, we introduce a novel speech synthesis model trained on large-scale datasets, including both timbre and hierarchical prosody modeling. As timbre is a global attribute closely linked to expressiveness, we adopt a global vector to model speaker timbre while guiding prosody modeling. Besides, given that prosody contains both global consistency and local variations, we introduce a diffusion model as the pitch predictor and employ a prosody adaptor to model prosody hierarchically, further enhancing the prosody quality of the synthesized speech. Experimental results show that our model not only maintains comparable timbre quality to the baseline but also exhibits better naturalness and expressiveness.

cs.SD

WorDepth: Variational Language Prior for Monocular Depth Estimation

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from a single image is an ill-posed problem with inherent ambiguities, i.e. scale. Predicting a 3D scene from text description(s) is similarly ill-posed, i.e. spatial arrangements of objects described. We investigate the question of whether two inherently ambiguous modalities can be used in conjunction to produce metric-scaled reconstructions. To test this, we focus on monocular depth estimation, the problem of predicting a dense depth map from a single image, but with an additional text caption describing the scene. To this end, we begin by encoding the text caption as a mean and standard deviation; using a variational framework, we learn the distribution of the plausible metric reconstructions of 3D scenes corresponding to the text captions as a prior. To "select" a specific reconstruction or depth map, we encode the given image through a conditional sampler that samples from the latent space of the variational text encoder, which is then decoded to the output depth map. Our approach is trained alternatingly between the text and image branches: in one optimization step, we predict the mean and standard deviation from the text description and sample from a standard Gaussian, and in the other, we sample using a (image) conditional sampler. Once trained, we directly predict depth from the encoded text using the conditional sampler. We demonstrate our approach on indoor (NYUv2) and outdoor (KITTI) scenarios, where we show that language can consistently improve performance in both.

cs.CV

Tactile-Augmented Radiance Fields

We present a scene representation, which we call a tactile-augmented radiance field (TaRF), that brings vision and touch into a shared 3D space. This representation can be used to estimate the visual and tactile signals for a given 3D position within a scene. We capture a scene's TaRF from a collection of photos and sparsely sampled touch probes. Our approach makes use of two insights: (i) common vision-based touch sensors are built on ordinary cameras and thus can be registered to images using methods from multi-view geometry, and (ii) visually and structurally similar regions of a scene share the same tactile features. We use these insights to register touch signals to a captured visual scene, and to train a conditional diffusion model that, provided with an RGB-D image rendered from a neural radiance field, generates its corresponding tactile signal. To evaluate our approach, we collect a dataset of TaRFs. This dataset contains more touch samples than previous real-world datasets, and it provides spatially aligned visual signals for each captured touch signal. We demonstrate the accuracy of our cross-modal generative model and the utility of the captured visual-tactile data on several downstream tasks. Project page: https://dou-yiming.github.io/TaRF

cs.CV

APISR: Anime Production Inspired Real-World Anime Super-Resolution

While real-world anime super-resolution (SR) has gained increasing attention in the SR community, existing methods still adopt techniques from the photorealistic domain. In this paper, we analyze the anime production workflow and rethink how to use characteristics of it for the sake of the real-world anime SR. First, we argue that video networks and datasets are not necessary for anime SR due to the repetition use of hand-drawing frames. Instead, we propose an anime image collection pipeline by choosing the least compressed and the most informative frames from the video sources. Based on this pipeline, we introduce the Anime Production-oriented Image (API) dataset. In addition, we identify two anime-specific challenges of distorted and faint hand-drawn lines and unwanted color artifacts. We address the first issue by introducing a prediction-oriented compression module in the image degradation model and a pseudo-ground truth preparation with enhanced hand-drawn lines. In addition, we introduce the balanced twin perceptual loss combining both anime and photorealistic high-level features to mitigate unwanted color artifacts and increase visual clarity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on the public benchmark, showing our method outperforms state-of-the-art anime dataset-trained approaches.

eess.IV

FreeMan: Towards Benchmarking 3D Human Pose Estimation under Real-World Conditions

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. 3D human pose estimation is a vital step in advancing fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction, serving as a crucial technique for understanding and interacting with human actions in real-world settings. However, the current datasets, often collected under single laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of datasets on variable conditions is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, multi-view dataset collected under the real-world conditions. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an semi-automated pipeline containing error detection to reduce the workload of manual check and ensure precise annotation. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. Code and data are available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

cs.CV

Binding Touch to Everything: Learning Unified Multimodal Tactile Representations

The ability to associate touch with other modalities has huge implications for humans and computational systems. However, multimodal learning with touch remains challenging due to the expensive data collection process and non-standardized sensor outputs. We introduce UniTouch, a unified tactile model for vision-based touch sensors connected to multiple modalities, including vision, language, and sound. We achieve this by aligning our UniTouch embeddings to pretrained image embeddings already associated with a variety of other modalities. We further propose learnable sensor-specific tokens, allowing the model to learn from a set of heterogeneous tactile sensors, all at the same time. UniTouch is capable of conducting various touch sensing tasks in the zero-shot setting, from robot grasping prediction to touch image question answering. To the best of our knowledge, UniTouch is the first to demonstrate such capabilities. Project page: https://cfeng16.github.io/UniTouch/

cs.CV