arXiv subjects

Ji Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ji Zhang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

ClimaOoD: Improving Anomaly Segmentation via Physically Realistic Synthetic Data

Anomaly segmentation seeks to detect and localize unknown or out-of-distribution (OoD) objects that fall outside predefined semantic classes a capability essential for safe autonomous driving. However, the scarcity and limited diversity of anomaly data severely constrain model generalization in open-world environments. Existing approaches mitigate this issue through synthetic data generation, either by copy-pasting external objects into driving scenes or by leveraging text-to-image diffusion models to inpaint anomalous regions. While these methods improve anomaly diversity, they often lack contextual coherence and physical realism, resulting in domain gaps between synthetic and real data. In this paper, we present ClimaDrive, a semantics-guided image-to-image framework for synthesizing semantically coherent, weather-diverse, and physically plausible OoD driving data. ClimaDrive unifies structure-guided multi-weather generation with prompt-driven anomaly inpainting, enabling the creation of visually realistic training data. Based on this framework, we construct ClimaOoD, a large-scale benchmark spanning six representative driving scenarios under both clear and adverse weather conditions. Extensive experiments on four state-of-the-art methods show that training with ClimaOoD leads to robust improvements in anomaly segmentation. Across all methods, AUROC, AP, and FPR95 show notable gains, with FPR95 dropping from 3.97 to 3.52 for RbA on Fishyscapes LAF. These results demonstrate that ClimaOoD enhances model robustness, offering valuable training data for better generalization in open-world anomaly detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Exploring Partial Multi-Label Learning via Integrating Semantic Co-occurrence Knowledge

Partial multi-label learning aims to extract knowledge from incompletely annotated data, which includes known correct labels, known incorrect labels, and unknown labels. The core challenge lies in accurately identifying the ambiguous relationships between labels and instances. In this paper, we emphasize that matching co-occurrence patterns between labels and instances is key to addressing this challenge. To this end, we propose Semantic Co-occurrence Insight Network (SCINet), a novel and effective framework for partial multi-label learning. Specifically, SCINet introduces a bi-dominant prompter module, which leverages an off-the-shelf multimodal model to capture text-image correlations and enhance semantic alignment. To reinforce instance-label interdependencies, we develop a cross-modality fusion module that jointly models inter-label correlations, inter-instance relationships, and co-occurrence patterns across instance-label assignments. Moreover, we propose an intrinsic semantic augmentation strategy that enhances the model's understanding of intrinsic data semantics by applying diverse image transformations, thereby fostering a synergistic relationship between label confidence and sample difficulty. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCINet surpasses state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Flare: Anomaly Diagnostics for Divergent LLM Training in GPU Clusters of Thousand-Plus Scale

The rapid proliferation of large language models has driven the need for efficient GPU training clusters. However, it is challenging due to the frequent occurrence of training anomalies. Since existing diagnostic tools are narrowly tailored to specific issues, there are gaps in their ability to address anomalies spanning the entire training stack. In response, we introduce Flare, a diagnostic framework designed for distributed LLM training at scale. Flare first integrates a lightweight tracing daemon for full-stack and backend-extensible tracing. Additionally, it features a diagnostic engine that automatically diagnoses anomalies, with a focus on performance regressions. The deployment of Flare across 6,000 GPUs has demonstrated significant improvements in pinpointing deficiencies in real-world scenarios, with continuous operation for over eight months.

cs.OS↗

arXiv2026

Beyond the Majority: Long-tail Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

While generalist robot policies hold significant promise for learning diverse manipulation skills through imitation, their performance is often hindered by the long-tail distribution of training demonstrations. Policies learned on such data, which is heavily skewed towards a few data-rich head tasks, frequently exhibit poor generalization when confronted with the vast number of data-scarce tail tasks. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the pervasive long-tail challenge inherent in policy learning. Our analysis begins by demonstrating the inefficacy of conventional long-tail learning strategies (e.g., re-sampling) for improving the policy's performance on tail tasks. We then uncover the underlying mechanism for this failure, revealing that data scarcity on tail tasks directly impairs the policy's spatial reasoning capability. To overcome this, we introduce Approaching-Phase Augmentation (APA), a simple yet effective scheme that transfers knowledge from data-rich head tasks to data-scarce tail tasks without requiring external demonstrations. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of APA. Our code and demos are publicly available at: https://mldxy.github.io/Project-VLA-long-tail/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

PatternKV: Flattening KV Representation Expands Quantization Headroom

KV cache in autoregressive LLMs eliminates redundant recomputation but has emerged as the dominant memory and bandwidth bottleneck during inference, notably with long contexts and test-time scaling. KV quantization is a key lever for reducing cache cost, but accuracy drops sharply as the native KV distribution lacks flatness and thus maintains a wide quantization range. Prior work focuses on isolating outliers, which caps their error but fails to flatten the overall distribution, leaving performance fragile under low-bit settings. In this work, we show that the K cache maintains a stable, context-evolving structure, while the V cache carries latent semantic regularities, with both contributing to the organization of vectors into shared patterns. Building on these insights, we propose PatternKV, a pattern-aligned residual quantization scheme. It mines representative pattern vectors online, aligns each KV vector to its nearest pattern, and quantizes only the residual. This reshaping of the KV distribution flattens the quantization target and narrows its range, thereby improving the fidelity of low-bit KV quantization. Across long-context and test-time scaling settings on multiple backbones, PatternKV delivers consistent 2-bit gains, with a 0.08% average 4-bit drop relative to FP16, improves test-time scaling accuracy by 10% on average, and raises throughput by 1.5x while supporting 1.25x larger batches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

GenPairX: A Hardware-Algorithm Co-Designed Accelerator for Paired-End Read Mapping

Genome sequencing has become a central focus in computational biology. A genome study typically begins with sequencing, which produces millions to billions of short DNA fragments known as reads. Read mapping aligns these reads to a reference genome. Read mapping for short reads comes in two forms: single-end and paired-end, with the latter being more prevalent due to its higher accuracy and support for advanced analysis. Read mapping remains a major performance bottleneck in genome analysis due to expensive dynamic programming. Prior efforts have attempted to mitigate this cost by employing filters to identify and potentially discard computationally expensive matches and leveraging hardware accelerators to speed up the computations. While partially effective, these approaches have limitations. In particular, existing filters are often ineffective for paired-end reads, as they evaluate each read independently and exhibit relatively low filtering ratios. In this work, we propose GenPairX, a hardware-algorithm co-designed accelerator that efficiently minimizes the computational load of paired-end read mapping while enhancing the throughput of memory-intensive operations. GenPairX introduces: (1) a novel filtering algorithm that jointly considers both reads in a pair to improve filtering effectiveness, and a lightweight alignment algorithm to replace most of the computationally expensive dynamic programming operations, and (2) two specialized hardware mechanisms to support the proposed algorithms. Our evaluations show that GenPairX delivers substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art solutions, achieving 1575x and 1.43x higher throughput per watt compared to leading CPU-based and accelerator-based read mappers, respectively, all without compromising accuracy.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

RPT*: Global Planning with Probabilistic Terminals for Target Search in Complex Environments

Routing problems such as Hamiltonian Path Problem (HPP), seeks a path to visit all the vertices in a graph while minimizing the path cost. This paper studies a variant, HPP with Probabilistic Terminals (HPP-PT), where each vertex has a probability representing the likelihood that the robot's path terminates there, and the objective is to minimize the expected path cost. HPP-PT arises in target object search, where a mobile robot must visit all candidate locations to find an object, and prior knowledge of the object's location is expressed as vertex probabilities. While routing problems have been studied for decades, few of them consider uncertainty as required in this work. The challenge lies not only in optimally ordering the vertices, as in standard HPP, but also in handling history dependency: the expected path cost depends on the order in which vertices were previously visited. This makes many existing methods inefficient or inapplicable. To address the challenge, we propose a search-based approach RPT* with solution optimality guarantees, which leverages dynamic programming in a new state space to bypass the history dependency and novel heuristics to speed up the computation. Building on RPT*, we design a Hierarchical Autonomous Target Search (HATS) system that combines RPT* with either Bayesian filtering for lifelong target search with noisy sensors, or autonomous exploration to find targets in unknown environments. Experiments in both simulation and real robot show that our approach can naturally balance between exploitation and exploration, thereby finding targets more quickly on average than baseline methods.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

SuperEar: Eavesdropping on Mobile Voice Calls via Stealthy Acoustic Metamaterials

Acoustic eavesdropping is a privacy risk, but existing attacks rarely work in real outdoor situations where people make phone calls on the move. We present SuperEar, the first portable system that uses acoustic metamaterials to reliably capture conversations in these scenarios. We show that the threat is real as a practical prototype can be implemented to enhance faint signals, cover the full range of speech with a compact design, and reduce noise and distortion to produce clear audio. We show that SuperEar can be implemented from low-cost 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf hardware. Experimental results show that SuperEar can recover phone call audio with a success rate of over 80% at distances of up to 4.6 m - more than twice the range of previous approaches. Our findings highlight a new class of privacy threats enabled by metamaterial technology that requires attention.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via prior-LLM Context Fusion

With the bloom of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate LLMs with pre-trained vision models have recently demonstrated impressive performance across diverse vision-language tasks. However, they fall short to comprehend context involving multiple images. A primary reason for this shortcoming is that the visual features for each images are encoded individually by frozen encoders before feeding into the LLM backbone, lacking awareness of other images and the multimodal instructions. We term this issue as prior-LLM modality isolation and propose a two phase paradigm, browse-and-concentrate, to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. This paradigm initially "browses" through the inputs for essential insights, and then revisits the inputs to "concentrate" on crucial details, guided by these insights, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the multimodal inputs. Additionally, we develop training strategies specifically to enhance the understanding of multi-image inputs. Our method markedly boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

From Failure to Mastery: Generating Hard Samples for Tool-use Agents

The advancement of LLM agents with tool-use capabilities requires diverse and complex training corpora. Existing data generation methods, which predominantly follow a paradigm of random sampling and shallow generation, often yield simple and homogeneous trajectories that fail to capture complex, implicit logical dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce HardGen, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate hard tool-use training samples with verifiable reasoning. Firstly, HardGen establishes a dynamic API Graph built upon agent failure cases, from which it samples to synthesize hard traces. Secondly, these traces serve as conditional priors to guide the instantiation of modular, abstract advanced tools, which are subsequently leveraged to formulate hard queries. Finally, the advanced tools and hard queries enable the generation of verifiable complex Chain-of-Thought (CoT), with a closed-loop evaluation feedback steering the continuous refinement of the process. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that a 4B parameter model trained with our curated dataset achieves superior performance compared to several leading open-source and closed-source competitors (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro and Claude-Opus-4.5). Our code, models, and dataset will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Error Estimate and Convergence Analysis for Data Valuation

Data valuation quantifies data importance, but existing methods cannot ensure validity in a single training process. The neural dynamic data valuation (NDDV) method [3] addresses this limitation. Based on NDDV, we are the first to explore error estimation and convergence analysis in data valuation. Under Lipschitz and smoothness assumptions, we derive quadratic error bounds for loss differences that scale inversely with time steps and quadratically with control variations, ensuring stability. We also prove that the expected squared gradient norm for the training loss vanishes asymptotically, and that the meta loss converges sublinearly over iterations. In particular, NDDV achieves sublinear convergence.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

GT23D-Bench: A Comprehensive General Text-to-3D Generation Benchmark

Text-to-3D (T23D) generation has emerged as a crucial visual generation task, aiming at synthesizing 3D content from textual descriptions. Studies of this task are currently shifting from per-scene T23D, which requires optimization of the model for every content generated, to General T23D (GT23D), which requires only one pre-trained model to generate different content without re-optimization, for more generalized and efficient 3D generation. Despite notable advancements, GT23D is severely bottlenecked by two interconnected challenges: the lack of high-quality, large-scale training data and the prevalence of evaluation metrics that overlook intrinsic 3D properties. Existing datasets often suffer from incomplete annotations, noisy organization, and inconsistent quality, while current evaluations rely heavily on 2D image-text similarity or scoring, failing to thoroughly assess 3D geometric integrity and semantic relevance. To address these fundamental gaps, we introduce GT23D-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for GT23D training and evaluation. We first construct a high-quality dataset of 400K 3D assets, featuring diverse visual annotations (70M+ visual samples) and multi-granularity hierarchical captions (1M+ descriptions) to foster robust semantic learning. Second, we propose a comprehensive evaluation suite with 10 metrics assessing both text-3D alignment and 3D visual quality at multiple levels. Crucially, we demonstrate through rigorous experiments that our proposed metrics exhibit significantly higher correlation with human judgment compared to existing methods. Our in-depth analysis of eight leading GT23D models using this benchmark provides the community with critical insights into current model capabilities and their shared failure modes. GT23D-Bench will be publicly available to facilitate rigorous and reproducible research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

WritingBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Generative Writing

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced text generation capabilities, yet evaluating their performance in generative writing remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on generic text generation or limited in writing tasks, failing to capture the diverse requirements of high-quality written contents across various domains. To bridge this gap, we present WritingBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across 6 core writing domains and 100 subdomains. We further propose a query-dependent evaluation framework that empowers LLMs to dynamically generate instance-specific assessment criteria. This framework is complemented by a fine-tuned critic model for criteria-aware scoring, enabling evaluations in style, format and length. The framework's validity is further demonstrated by its data curation capability, which enables a 7B-parameter model to outperform the performance of GPT-4o in writing. We open-source the benchmark, along with evaluation tools and modular framework components, to advance the development of LLMs in writing.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

FunReason: Enhancing Large Language Models' Function Calling via Self-Refinement Multiscale Loss and Automated Data Refinement

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with function calling has emerged as a crucial capability for enhancing their practical utility in real-world applications. However, effectively combining reasoning processes with accurate function execution remains a significant challenge. Traditional training approaches often struggle to balance the detailed reasoning steps with the precision of function calls, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we introduce FunReason, a novel framework that enhances LLMs' function calling capabilities through an automated data refinement strategy and a Self-Refinement Multiscale Loss (SRML) approach. FunReason leverages LLMs' natural reasoning abilities to generate high-quality training examples, focusing on query parseability, reasoning coherence, and function call precision. The SRML approach dynamically balances the contribution of reasoning processes and function call accuracy during training, addressing the inherent trade-off between these two critical aspects. FunReason achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. FunReason provides a comprehensive solution for enhancing LLMs' function calling capabilities by introducing a balanced training methodology and a data refinement pipeline. For code and dataset, please refer to our repository at GitHub https://github.com/BingguangHao/FunReason

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Sensing and Understanding the World over Air: A Large Multimodal Model for Mobile Networks

Large models (LMs), such as ChatGPT, have made a significant impact across diverse domains and hold great potential to facilitate the evolution of network intelligence. Wireless-native multi-modal large models (WMLMs) can sense and understand the physical world through multi-modal data, serving as a key enabler that integrates communication, sensing, and intelligence, and thus they can boost various smart services to billions of users. However, research on WMLMs remains in its infancy, and the construction of domain-specific multi-modal large models for wireless networks is still underexplored. In this paper, we outlines the key characteristics of WMLMs and summarizes existing methods, on the basis of which a wireless-native multimodal training paradigm is proposed. Specifically, we constructed a GPT-style WMLM model and trained it on a real-world large-scale dataset, leveraging wireless signals as an anchor modality for contrastive learning. Our approach demonstrates outstanding performance compared with existing small-scale models and large multi-modal models, validating the feasibility of using wireless signals as a universal modality and highlighting WMLM's potential to emerge as a new paradigm for future wireless networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

ProFuser: Progressive Fusion of Large Language Models

While fusing the capacities and advantages of various large language models offers a pathway to construct more powerful and versatile models, a fundamental challenge is to properly select advantageous model during training. Existing fusion methods primarily focus on the training mode that uses cross entropy on ground truth in a teacher-forcing setup to measure a model's advantage, which may provide limited insight towards model advantage. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that enhances the fusion process by incorporating both the training and inference modes. Our method evaluates model advantage not only through cross entropy during training but also by considering inference outputs, providing a more comprehensive assessment. To combine the two modes effectively, we introduce ProFuser to progressively transition from inference mode to training mode. To validate ProFuser's effectiveness, we fused three models, including Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Llama-2-7B-Chat, and MPT-7B-8K-Chat, and demonstrated the improved performance in knowledge, reasoning, and safety compared to baseline methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MOSAIC: Generating Consistent, Privacy-Preserving Scenes from Multiple Depth Views in Multi-Room Environments

We introduce a diffusion-based approach for generating privacy-preserving digital twins of multi-room indoor environments from depth images only. Central to our approach is a novel Multi-view Overlapped Scene Alignment with Implicit Consistency (MOSAIC) model that explicitly considers cross-view dependencies within the same scene in the probabilistic sense. MOSAIC operates through a multi-channel inference-time optimization that avoids error accumulation common in sequential or single-room constraints in panorama-based approaches. MOSAIC scales to complex scenes with zero extra training and provably reduces the variance during denoising process when more overlapping views are added, leading to improved generation quality. Experiments show that MOSAIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on image fidelity metrics in reconstructing complex multi-room environments. Resources and code are at https://mosaic-cmubig.github.io

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series: A Survey

Time series frequently manifest distribution shifts, diverse latent features, and non-stationary learning dynamics, particularly in open and evolving environments. These characteristics pose significant challenges for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. While substantial progress has been made, a systematic synthesis of advancements remains lacking. To address this gap, we present the first comprehensive review of OOD generalization methodologies for time series, organized to delineate the field's evolutionary trajectory and contemporary research landscape. We organize our analysis across three foundational dimensions: data distribution, representation learning, and OOD evaluation. For each dimension, we present several popular algorithms in detail. Furthermore, we highlight key application scenarios, emphasizing their real-world impact. Finally, we identify persistent challenges and propose future research directions. A detailed summary of the methods reviewed for the generalization of OOD in time series can be accessed at https://tsood-generalization.com.

cs.LG↗