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Gang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Gang Chen.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

High-Quality and Efficient Turbulence Mitigation with Events

Turbulence mitigation (TM) is highly ill-posed due to the stochastic nature of atmospheric turbulence. Most methods rely on multiple frames recorded by conventional cameras to capture stable patterns in natural scenarios. However, they inevitably suffer from a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency: more frames enhance restoration at the cost of higher system latency and larger data overhead. Event cameras, equipped with microsecond temporal resolution and efficient sensing of dynamic changes, offer an opportunity to break the bottleneck. In this work, we present EHETM, a high-quality and efficient TM method inspired by the superiority of events to model motions in continuous sequences. We discover two key phenomena: (1) turbulence-induced events exhibit distinct polarity alternation correlated with sharp image gradients, providing structural cues for restoring scenes; and (2) dynamic objects form spatiotemporally coherent ``event tubes'' in contrast to irregular patterns within turbulent events, providing motion priors for disentangling objects from turbulence. Based on these insights, we design two complementary modules that respectively leverage polarity-weighted gradients for scene refinement and event-tube constraints for motion decoupling, achieving high-quality restoration with few frames. Furthermore, we construct two real-world event-frame turbulence datasets covering atmospheric and thermal cases. Experiments show that EHETM outperforms SOTA methods, especially under scenes with dynamic objects, while reducing data overhead and system latency by approximately 77.3% and 89.5%, respectively. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Xavier667/EHETM.

cs.CV↗

Building Explicit World Model for Zero-Shot Open-World Object Manipulation

Open-world object manipulation remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising results, they rely heavily on large-scale robot action demonstrations, which are costly to collect and can hinder out-of-distribution generalization. In this paper, we propose an explicit-world-model-based framework for open-world manipulation that achieves zero-shot generalization by constructing a physically grounded digital twin of the environment. The framework integrates open-set perception, digital-twin reconstruction, sampling and evaluation of interaction strategies. By constructing a digital twin of the environment, our approach efficiently explores and evaluates manipulation strategies in physic-enabled simulator and reliably deploys the chosen strategy to the real world. Experimentally, the proposed framework is able to perform multiple open-set manipulation tasks without any task-specific action demonstrations, proving strong zero-shot generalization on both the task and object levels. Project Page: https://bojack-bj.github.io/projects/thesis/

cs.RO↗

PromCopilot: Simplifying Prometheus Metric Querying in Cloud Native Online Service Systems via Large Language Models

With the increasing complexity of modern online service systems, understanding the state and behavior of the systems is essential for ensuring their reliability and stability. Therefore, metric monitoring systems are widely used and become an important infrastructure in online service systems. Engineers usually interact with metrics data by manually writing domain-specific language (DSL) queries to achieve various analysis objectives. However, writing these queries can be challenging and time-consuming, as it requires engineers to have high programming skills and understand the context of the system. In this paper, we focus on PromQL, which is the metric query DSL provided by the widely used metric monitoring system Prometheus. We aim to simplify metrics querying by enabling engineers to interact with metrics data in Prometheus through natural language, and we call this task text-to-PromQL. Building upon the insight, this paper proposes PromCopilot, a Large Language Model-based text-to-PromQL framework. PromCopilot first uses a knowledge graph to describe the complex context of a cloud native online service system. Then, through the synergistic reasoning of LLMs and the knowledge graph, PromCopilot transforms engineers' natural language questions into PromQL queries. To evaluate PromCopilot, we manually construct the first text-to-PromQL benchmark dataset which contains 280 metric query questions. The experiment results show that PromCopilot is effective in text-to-PromQL. When using GPT-4 as the backbone LLM, PromCopilot achieves an accuracy of 69.1\% in translating natural language questions to PromQL queries when using. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study of text-to-PromQL, and PromCopilot pioneered the DSL generation framework for metric querying and analysis.

cs.SE↗

Modeling Concurrency Control as a Learnable Function

Concurrency control (CC) algorithms are important in modern transactional databases, as they enable high performance by executing transactions concurrently while ensuring correctness. However, state-of-the-art CC algorithms struggle to perform well across diverse workloads, and most do not consider workload drifts. In this paper, we propose NeurCC, a novel learned concurrency control algorithm that achieves high performance across diverse workloads. The algorithm is quick to optimize, making it robust against dynamic workloads. It learns a function that captures a large number of design choices from existing CC algorithms. The function is implemented as an efficient in-database lookup table that maps database states to concurrency control actions. The learning process is based on a combination of Bayesian optimization and a novel graph reduction search algorithm, which converges quickly to a function that achieves high transaction throughput. We compare NeurCC against five state-of-the-art CC algorithms and show that it consistently outperforms the baselines both in transaction throughput and in optimization time.

cs.DB↗

BEACON: Language-Conditioned Navigation Affordance Prediction under Occlusion

Language-conditioned local navigation requires a robot to infer a nearby traversable target location from its current observation and an open-vocabulary, relational instruction. Existing vision-language spatial grounding methods usually rely on vision-language models (VLMs) to reason in image space, producing 2D predictions tied to visible pixels. As a result, they struggle to infer target locations in occluded regions, typically caused by furniture or moving humans. To address this issue, we propose BEACON, which predicts an ego-centric Bird's-Eye View (BEV) affordance heatmap over a bounded local region including occluded areas. Given an instruction and surround-view RGB-D observations from four directions around the robot, BEACON predicts the BEV heatmap by injecting spatial cues into a VLM and fusing the VLM's output with depth-derived BEV features. Using an occlusion-aware dataset built in the Habitat simulator, we conduct detailed experimental analysis to validate both our BEV space formulation and the design choices of each module. Our method improves the accuracy averaged across geodesic thresholds by 22.74 percentage points over the state-of-the-art image-space baseline on the validation subset with occluded target locations. Our project page is: https://xin-yu-gao.github.io/beacon.

cs.RO↗

FastBUS: A Fast Bayesian Framework for Unified Weakly-Supervised Learning

Machine Learning often involves various imprecise labels, leading to diverse weakly supervised settings. While recent methods aim for universal handling, they usually suffer from complex manual pre-work, ignore the relationships between associated labels, or are unable to batch process due to computational design flaws, resulting in long running times. To address these limitations, we propose a novel general framework that efficiently infers latent true label distributions across various weak supervisions. Our key idea is to express the label brute-force search process as a probabilistic transition of label variables, compressing diverse weakly supervised DFS tree structures into a shared Bayesian network. From this, we derived a latent probability calculation algorithm based on generalized belief propagation and proposed two joint acceleration strategies: 1) introducing a low-rank assumption to approximate the transition matrix, reducing time complexity; 2) designing an end-to-end state evolution module to learn batch-scale transition matrices, facilitating multi-category batch processing. In addition, the equivalence of our method with the EM algorithm in most scenarios is further demonstrated. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves SOTA results under most weakly supervised settings, and achieves up to hundreds of times faster acceleration in running time compared to other general methods.

cs.LG↗

Hestia: Hyperthread-Level Scheduling for Cloud Microservices with Interference-Aware Attention

Modern cloud servers routinely co-locate multiple latency-sensitive microservice instances to improve resource efficiency. However, the diversity of microservice behaviors, coupled with mutual performance interference under simultaneous multithreading (SMT), makes large-scale placement increasingly complex. Existing interference aware schedulers and isolation techniques rely on coarse core-level profiling or static resource partitioning, leaving asymmetric hyperthread-level heterogeneity and SMT contention dynamics largely unmodeled. We present Hestia, a hyperthread-level, interference-aware scheduling framework powered by self-attention. Through an extensive analysis of production traces encompassing 32,408 instances across 3,132 servers, we identify two dominant contention patterns -- sharing-core (SC) and sharing-socket (SS) -- and reveal strong asymmetry in their impact. Guided by these insights, Hestia incorporates (1) a self-attention-based CPU usage predictor that models SC/SS contention and hardware heterogeneity, and (2) an interference scoring model that estimates pairwise contention risks to guide scheduling decisions. We evaluate Hestia through large-scale simulation and a real production deployment. Hestia reduces the 95th-percentile service latency by up to 80\%, lowers overall CPU consumption by 2.3\% under the same workload, and surpasses five state-of-the-art schedulers by up to 30.65\% across diverse contention scenarios.

cs.DC↗

Detecting Logic Bugs of Join Optimizations in DBMS

Generation-based testing techniques have shown their effectiveness in detecting logic bugs of DBMS, which are often caused by improper implementation of query optimizers. Nonetheless, existing generation-based debug tools are limited to single-table queries and there is a substantial research gap regarding multi-table queries with join operators. In this paper, we propose TQS, a novel testing framework targeted at detecting logic bugs derived by queries involving multi-table joins. Given a target DBMS, TQS achieves the goal with two key components: Data-guided Schema and Query Generation (DSG) and Knowledge-guided Query Space Exploration (KQE). DSG addresses the key challenge of multi-table query debugging: how to generate ground-truth (query, result) pairs for verification. It adopts the database normalization technique to generate a testing schema and maintains a bitmap index for result tracking. To improve debug efficiency, DSG also artificially inserts some noises into the generated data. To avoid repetitive query space search, KQE forms the problem as isomorphic graph set discovery and combines the graph embedding and weighted random walk for query generation. We evaluated TQS on four popular DBMSs: MySQL, MariaDB, TiDB and the gray release of an industry-leading cloud-native database, anonymized as X-DB. Experimental results show that TQS is effective in finding logic bugs of join optimization in database management systems. It successfully detected 115 bugs within 24 hours, including 31 bugs in MySQL, 30 in MariaDB, 31 in TiDB, and 23 in X-DB respectively.

cs.DB↗

VLM-DEWM: Dynamic External World Model for Verifiable and Resilient Vision-Language Planning in Manufacturing

Vision-language model (VLM) shows promise for high-level planning in smart manufacturing, yet their deployment in dynamic workcells faces two critical challenges: (1) stateless operation, they cannot persistently track out-of-view states, causing world-state drift; and (2) opaque reasoning, failures are difficult to diagnose, leading to costly blind retries. This paper presents VLM-DEWM, a cognitive architecture that decouples VLM reasoning from world-state management through a persistent, queryable Dynamic External World Model (DEWM). Each VLM decision is structured into an Externalizable Reasoning Trace (ERT), comprising action proposal, world belief, and causal assumption, which is validated against DEWM before execution. When failures occur, discrepancy analysis between predicted and observed states enables targeted recovery instead of global replanning. We evaluate VLM-DEWM on multi-station assembly, large-scale facility exploration, and real-robot recovery under induced failures. Compared to baseline memory-augmented VLM systems, VLM DEWM improves state-tracking accuracy from 56% to 93%, increases recovery success rate from below 5% to 95%, and significantly reduces computational overhead through structured memory. These results establish VLM-DEWM as a verifiable and resilient solution for long-horizon robotic operations in dynamic manufacturing environments.

cs.RO↗

An affirmative answer to a question on connectivity of p-subgroup posets with irreducible characters

Let $p$ be a prime, $e$ a nonnegative integer, and G a finite p-group with $p^{e+1}$ dividing $|G|$. Let I be the intersection of all subgroups of order $p^{e+1}$ in $G$. It is proved that $|I\cap Z(G)|\le |π_0(Γ_{p,e}(G))|\le {\rm Irr}(I)$, where $Γ_{p,e}(G)$, whose connected components is denoted by $π_0(Γ_{p,e}(G))$, is the poset consisting of all pairs $(H, φ)$ with $H \le G$, $|H|\ge p^{e+1}$, and $φ\in {\rm Irr}(H)$. Hence, an affirmative answer to Question 2 raised by Meng and Yang is obtained.

math.GR↗

Stochastic Mean-field Theory for Conditional Spin Squeezing by Homodyne Probing of Atom-Cavity Photon Dressed States

Projective measurements of collective observables can be employed to herald the preparation of entangled states of quantum systems, and the resulting conditional dynamics is usually handled by stochastic master equation (SME) for small systems, and by an approximate Gaussian-state formalism for large systems. In this work, we present an alternative technique by developing a stochastic variant of cumulant mean-field theory, benchmark it against an exact stochastic collective density matrix approach by the simulations of hundreds of identical two-level atoms. More importantly, we demonstrate its full power by studying the conditional spin squeezing of thousands of three-level atoms coupled strongly with an optical cavity subject to individual decay and dephasing, and by simulating the experimental protocol to reveal formation and detection of the spin squeezed state. The proposed technique might be further extended to study more exotic quantum-measurement effects of large quantum systems, such as deterministic spin squeezing with quantum feedback, spin squeezing of optical clock transitions, and retrodictive spin squeezing by posterior measurements, and so on.

quant-ph↗

Kerr Black Hole Dynamics from an Extended Polyakov Action

We examine a hypersurface model for the classical dynamics of spinning black holes. Under specific rigid geometric constraints, it reveals an intriguing solution resembling expectations for the Kerr Black three-point amplitude. We explore various generalizations of this formalism and outline potential avenues for employing it to analyze spinning black hole attraction.

hep-th↗

Supervised Fine-Tuning Needs to Unlock the Potential of Token Priority

The transition from fitting empirical data to achieving true human utility is fundamentally constrained by a granularity mismatch, where fine-grained autoregressive generation is often supervised by coarse or uniform signals. This position paper advocates Token Priority as the essential bridge, formalizing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) not as simple optimization but as a precise distribution reshaping process that aligns raw data with the ideal alignment manifold. We analyze recent breakthroughs through this unified lens, categorizing them into two distinct regimes: Positive Priority for noise filtration and Signed Priority for toxic modes unlearning. We revisit existing progress and limitations, identify key challenges, and suggest directions for future research.

cs.CL↗

Optimized adiabatic-impulse protocol preserving Kibble-Zurek scaling with attenuated anti-Kibble-Zurek behavior

We propose an optimized adiabatic-impulse (OAI) protocol that substantially reduces the evolution time for crossing a quantum phase transition while preserving Kibble-Zurek (KZ) scaling. Near criticality, the control parameter is ramped linearly across the critical point at a rate characterized by a quench time $τ_Q$. Away from criticality, the evolution remains adiabatic and is tuned close to the threshold of adiabatic breakdown, as quantified by an adiabatic coefficient $ζ$ that scales as $τ_Q^α$. As a consequence, the total evolution time exhibits a sublinear power-law dependence on $τ_Q$, and the conventional linear quench is recovered in the limit $α\rightarrow\infty$. We apply the OAI protocol to the transverse Ising chain and numerically determine the minimal $ζ$ required for KZ scaling. We further investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics in the presence of a noisy field that can induce anti-Kibble-Zurek (AKZ) behavior. Within the OAI protocol, noise-induced defects is significantly attenuated due to the shorter evolution time. The optimal quench time at which the defect density is minimized obeys an altered universal power-law scaling with the noise strength. Finally, we generalize the OAI protocol to the nonlinear quenches and numerically demonstrate a marked reduction in noise-induced defects.

quant-ph↗

SurfSplat: Conquering Feedforward 2D Gaussian Splatting with Surface Continuity Priors

Reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse images remains a challenging task due to the difficulty of recovering accurate geometry and texture without optimization. Recent approaches leverage generalizable models to generate 3D scenes using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) primitive. However, they often fail to produce continuous surfaces and instead yield discrete, color-biased point clouds that appear plausible at normal resolution but reveal severe artifacts under close-up views. To address this issue, we present SurfSplat, a feedforward framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) primitive, which provides stronger anisotropy and higher geometric precision. By incorporating a surface continuity prior and a forced alpha blending strategy, SurfSplat reconstructs coherent geometry together with faithful textures. Furthermore, we introduce High-Resolution Rendering Consistency (HRRC), a new evaluation metric designed to evaluate high-resolution reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on RealEstate10K, DL3DV, and ScanNet demonstrate that SurfSplat consistently outperforms prior methods on both standard metrics and HRRC, establishing a robust solution for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs. Project page: https://hebing-sjtu.github.io/SurfSplat-website/

cs.CV↗

LFQA-E: Carefully Benchmarking Long-form QA Evaluation

Long-Form Question Answering (LFQA) involves generating comprehensive, paragraph-level responses to open-ended questions, which poses a significant challenge for evaluation due to the richness of information and flexible response format. Existing LFQA-evaluation benchmarks often lack reference answers and are limited in size and topic coverage, reducing their reliability. To address this gap, we introduce LFQA-E, a well-constructed, multilingual, and reference-based benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate automatic metrics for LFQA. LFQA-E comprises 1618 questions and 7323 pairwise comparisons across 15 topics, drawn from diverse sources such as online queries and examination questions, thereby enabling a comprehensive assessment of evaluation metrics. We examine five categories of metrics, encompassing 17 specific methods, using LFQA-E. The results demonstrate that none of the existing automatic metrics perform comparably to human judgments, highlighting their inability to capture the dense information in long-form responses. Furthermore, we present a detailed analysis of the failure cases and the generalization capacity of these metrics, offering insights to guide the future development of LFQA evaluation methods. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/YuchenFan48/LFQA-E.

cs.CL↗

Physics-informed Diffusion Generation for Geomagnetic Map Interpolation

Geomagnetic map interpolation aims to infer unobserved geomagnetic data at spatial points, yielding critical applications in navigation and resource exploration. However, existing methods for scattered data interpolation are not specifically designed for geomagnetic maps, which inevitably leads to suboptimal performance due to detection noise and the laws of physics. Therefore, we propose a Physics-informed Diffusion Generation framework~(PDG) to interpolate incomplete geomagnetic maps. First, we design a physics-informed mask strategy to guide the diffusion generation process based on a local receptive field, effectively eliminating noise interference. Second, we impose a physics-informed constraint on the diffusion generation results following the kriging principle of geomagnetic maps, ensuring strict adherence to the laws of physics. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of each component of PDG.

cs.AI↗

Data-Free Privacy-Preserving for LLMs via Model Inversion and Selective Unlearning

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful capabilities but risk memorizing sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) from their training data, posing significant privacy concerns. While machine unlearning techniques aim to remove such data, they predominantly depend on access to the training data. This requirement is often impractical, as training data in real-world deployments is commonly proprietary or inaccessible. To address this limitation, we propose Data-Free Selective Unlearning (DFSU), a novel privacy-preserving framework that removes sensitive PII from an LLM without requiring its training data. Our approach first synthesizes pseudo-PII through language model inversion, then constructs token-level privacy masks for these synthetic samples, and finally performs token-level selective unlearning via a contrastive mask loss within a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) subspace. Extensive experiments on the AI4Privacy PII-Masking dataset using Pythia models demonstrate that our method effectively removes target PII while maintaining model utility.

cs.CR↗