arXiv subjects

Ji Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ji Zhang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

A Simple yet Effective Layout Token in Large Language Models for Document Understanding

Recent methods that integrate spatial layouts with text for document understanding in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results. A commonly used method is to represent layout information as text tokens and interleave them with text content as inputs to the LLMs. However, such a method still demonstrates limitations, as it requires additional position IDs for tokens that are used to represent layout information. Due to the constraint on max position IDs, assigning them to layout information reduces those available for text content, reducing the capacity for the model to learn from the text during training, while also introducing a large number of potentially untrained position IDs during long-context inference, which can hinder performance on document understanding tasks. To address these issues, we propose LayTokenLLM, a simple yet effective method for document understanding. LayTokenLLM represents layout information as a single token per text segment and uses a specialized positional encoding scheme. It shares position IDs between text and layout tokens, eliminating the need for additional position IDs. This design maintains the model's capacity to learn from text while mitigating long-context issues during inference. Furthermore, a novel pre-training objective called Next Interleaved Text and Layout Token Prediction (NTLP) is devised to enhance cross-modality learning between text and layout tokens. Extensive experiments show that LayTokenLLM outperforms existing layout-integrated LLMs and MLLMs of similar scales on multi-page document understanding tasks, as well as most single-page tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

IRef-VLA: A Benchmark for Interactive Referential Grounding with Imperfect Language in 3D Scenes

With the recent rise of large language models, vision-language models, and other general foundation models, there is growing potential for multimodal, multi-task robotics that can operate in diverse environments given natural language input. One such application is indoor navigation using natural language instructions. However, despite recent progress, this problem remains challenging due to the 3D spatial reasoning and semantic understanding required. Additionally, the language used may be imperfect or misaligned with the scene, further complicating the task. To address this challenge, we curate a benchmark dataset, IRef-VLA, for Interactive Referential Vision and Language-guided Action in 3D Scenes with imperfect references. IRef-VLA is the largest real-world dataset for the referential grounding task, consisting of over 11.5K scanned 3D rooms from existing datasets, 7.6M heuristically generated semantic relations, and 4.7M referential statements. Our dataset also contains semantic object and room annotations, scene graphs, navigable free space annotations, and is augmented with statements where the language has imperfections or ambiguities. We verify the generalizability of our dataset by evaluating with state-of-the-art models to obtain a performance baseline and also develop a graph-search baseline to demonstrate the performance bound and generation of alternatives using scene-graph knowledge. With this benchmark, we aim to provide a resource for 3D scene understanding that aids the development of robust, interactive navigation systems. The dataset and all source code is publicly released at https://github.com/HaochenZ11/IRef-VLA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Skip Tuning: Pre-trained Vision-Language Models are Effective and Efficient Adapters Themselves

Prompt tuning (PT) has long been recognized as an effective and efficient paradigm for transferring large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks by learning a tiny set of context vectors. Nevertheless, in this work, we reveal that freezing the parameters of VLMs during learning the context vectors neither facilitates the transferability of pre-trained knowledge nor improves the memory and time efficiency significantly. Upon further investigation, we find that reducing both the length and width of the feature-gradient propagation flows of the full fine-tuning (FT) baseline is key to achieving effective and efficient knowledge transfer. Motivated by this, we propose Skip Tuning, a novel paradigm for adapting VLMs to downstream tasks. Unlike existing PT or adapter-based methods, Skip Tuning applies Layer-wise Skipping (LSkip) and Class-wise Skipping (CSkip) upon the FT baseline without introducing extra context vectors or adapter modules. Extensive experiments across a wide spectrum of benchmarks demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of our Skip Tuning over both PT and adapter-based methods. Code: https://github.com/Koorye/SkipTuning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Streamlined Federated Unlearning: Unite as One to Be Highly Efficient

Recently, the enactment of ``right to be forgotten" laws and regulations has imposed new privacy requirements on federated learning (FL). Researchers aim to remove the influence of certain data from the trained model without training from scratch through federated unlearning (FU). While current FU research has shown progress in enhancing unlearning efficiency, it often results in degraded model performance upon achieving the goal of data unlearning, necessitating additional steps to recover the performance of the unlearned model. Moreover, these approaches also suffer from many shortcomings such as high consumption of computational and storage resources. To this end, we propose a streamlined federated unlearning approach (SFU) aimed at effectively removing the influence of the target data while preserving the model performance on the retained data without degradation. We design a practical multi-teacher system that achieves both target data influence removal and model performance preservation by guiding the unlearned model through several distinct teacher models. SFU is both computationally and storage-efficient, highly flexible, and generalizable. We conduct extensive experiments on both image and text benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that SFU significantly improves time and communication efficiency compared to the benchmark retraining method and significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods. Additionally, we verify the effectiveness of SFU using the backdoor attack.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Every FLOP Counts: Scaling a 300B Mixture-of-Experts LING LLM without Premium GPUs

In this technical report, we tackle the challenges of training large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, focusing on overcoming cost inefficiency and resource limitations prevalent in such systems. To address these issues, we present two differently sized MoE large language models (LLMs), namely Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus (referred to as "Bailing" in Chinese, spelled Bǎilíng in Pinyin). Ling-Lite contains 16.8 billion parameters with 2.75 billion activated parameters, while Ling-Plus boasts 290 billion parameters with 28.8 billion activated parameters. Both models exhibit comparable performance to leading industry benchmarks. This report offers actionable insights to improve the efficiency and accessibility of AI development in resource-constrained settings, promoting more scalable and sustainable technologies. Specifically, to reduce training costs for large-scale MoE models, we propose innovative methods for (1) optimization of model architecture and training processes, (2) refinement of training anomaly handling, and (3) enhancement of model evaluation efficiency. Additionally, leveraging high-quality data generated from knowledge graphs, our models demonstrate superior capabilities in tool use compared to other models. Ultimately, our experimental findings demonstrate that a 300B MoE LLM can be effectively trained on lower-performance devices while achieving comparable performance to models of a similar scale, including dense and MoE models. Compared to high-performance devices, utilizing a lower-specification hardware system during the pre-training phase demonstrates significant cost savings, reducing computing costs by approximately 20%. The models can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MM-StoryAgent: Immersive Narrated Storybook Video Generation with a Multi-Agent Paradigm across Text, Image and Audio

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has accelerated AI-native applications, such as AI-based storybooks that automate engaging story production for children. However, challenges remain in improving story attractiveness, enriching storytelling expressiveness, and developing open-source evaluation benchmarks and frameworks. Therefore, we propose and opensource MM-StoryAgent, which creates immersive narrated video storybooks with refined plots, role-consistent images, and multi-channel audio. MM-StoryAgent designs a multi-agent framework that employs LLMs and diverse expert tools (generative models and APIs) across several modalities to produce expressive storytelling videos. The framework enhances story attractiveness through a multi-stage writing pipeline. In addition, it improves the immersive storytelling experience by integrating sound effects with visual, music and narrative assets. MM-StoryAgent offers a flexible, open-source platform for further development, where generative modules can be substituted. Both objective and subjective evaluation regarding textual story quality and alignment between modalities validate the effectiveness of our proposed MM-StoryAgent system. The demo and source code are available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference

We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without requiring auxiliary models or external databases. By dynamically analyzing structural patterns across parallel reasoning paths through a probabilistic aggregation mechanism, it identifies consensus token sequences that align with the decoding distribution. Evaluations on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate a substantial improvement in draft acceptance rates over baselines, while reducing the latency in draft token construction. This work establishes a paradigm shift for efficient multi-sample inference, enabling seamless integration of speculative decoding with sampling-based reasoning techniques.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Search-Based Path Planning in Interactive Environments among Movable Obstacles

This paper investigates Path planning Among Movable Obstacles (PAMO), which seeks a minimum cost collision-free path among static obstacles from start to goal while allowing the robot to push away movable obstacles (i.e., objects) along its path when needed. To develop planners that are complete and optimal for PAMO, the planner has to search a giant state space involving both the location of the robot as well as the locations of the objects, which grows exponentially with respect to the number of objects. This paper leverages a simple yet under-explored idea that, only a small fraction of this giant state space needs to be searched during planning as guided by a heuristic, and most of the objects far away from the robot are intact, which thus leads to runtime efficient algorithms. Based on this idea, this paper introduces two PAMO formulations, i.e., bi-objective and resource constrained problems in an occupancy grid, and develops PAMO*, a planning method with completeness and solution optimality guarantees, to solve the two problems. We then further extend PAMO* to hybrid-state PAMO* to plan in continuous spaces with high-fidelity interaction between the robot and the objects. Our results show that, PAMO* can often find optimal solutions within a second in cluttered maps with up to 400 objects.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

PC-Agent: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Complex Task Automation on PC

In the field of MLLM-based GUI agents, compared to smartphones, the PC scenario not only features a more complex interactive environment, but also involves more intricate intra- and inter-app workflows. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical agent framework named PC-Agent. Specifically, from the perception perspective, we devise an Active Perception Module (APM) to overcome the inadequate abilities of current MLLMs in perceiving screenshot content. From the decision-making perspective, to handle complex user instructions and interdependent subtasks more effectively, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent collaboration architecture that decomposes decision-making processes into Instruction-Subtask-Action levels. Within this architecture, three agents (i.e., Manager, Progress and Decision) are set up for instruction decomposition, progress tracking and step-by-step decision-making respectively. Additionally, a Reflection agent is adopted to enable timely bottom-up error feedback and adjustment. We also introduce a new benchmark PC-Eval with 25 real-world complex instructions. Empirical results on PC-Eval show that our PC-Agent achieves a 32% absolute improvement of task success rate over previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent/tree/main/PC-Agent.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks

Smartphones have become indispensable in modern life, yet navigating complex tasks on mobile devices often remains frustrating. Recent advancements in large multimodal model (LMM)-based mobile agents have demonstrated the ability to perceive and act in mobile environments. However, current approaches face significant limitations: they fall short in addressing real-world human needs, struggle with reasoning-intensive and long-horizon tasks, and lack mechanisms to learn and improve from prior experiences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-E, a hierarchical multi-agent framework capable of self-evolution through past experience. By hierarchical, we mean an explicit separation of high-level planning and low-level action execution. The framework comprises a Manager, responsible for devising overall plans by breaking down complex tasks into subgoals, and four subordinate agents--Perceptor, Operator, Action Reflector, and Notetaker--which handle fine-grained visual perception, immediate action execution, error verification, and information aggregation, respectively. Mobile-Agent-E also features a novel self-evolution module which maintains a persistent long-term memory comprising Tips and Shortcuts. Tips are general guidance and lessons learned from prior tasks on how to effectively interact with the environment. Shortcuts are reusable, executable sequences of atomic operations tailored for specific subroutines. The inclusion of Tips and Shortcuts facilitates continuous refinement in performance and efficiency. Alongside this framework, we introduce Mobile-Eval-E, a new benchmark featuring complex mobile tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-app interactions. Empirical results show that Mobile-Agent-E achieves a 22% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches across three foundation model backbones. Project page: https://x-plug.github.io/MobileAgent.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Effective and efficient modeling of the hydrodynamics for bacterial flagella

The hydrodynamic interactions among bacterial cell bodies, flagella, and surrounding boundaries are essential for understanding bacterial motility in complex environments. In this study, we demonstrate that each slender flagellum can be modeled as a series of spheres, and that the interactions between these spheres can be accurately characterized using a resistance matrix. This approach allows us to effectively and efficiently evaluate the propulsive effects of the flagella. Notably, our investigation into bacterial motility near a colloidal sphere reveals significant discrepancies between results derived from the twin multipole moment and those obtained through resistive force theory. Consequently, neglecting the hydrodynamic interactions among cell bodies, flagella, and colloidal spheres may lead to substantial inaccuracies. Our model simplifies bacteria into a series of spheres, making it well-suited for examining bacterial motility near spherical boundaries, as well as the nonlinear deformation dynamics of elastic flagella.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2024

From Skepticism to Acceptance: Simulating the Attitude Dynamics Toward Fake News

In the digital era, the rapid propagation of fake news and rumors via social networks brings notable societal challenges and impacts public opinion regulation. Traditional fake news modeling typically forecasts the general popularity trends of different groups or numerically represents opinions shift. However, these methods often oversimplify real-world complexities and overlook the rich semantic information of news text. The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides the possibility of modeling subtle dynamics of opinion. Consequently, in this work, we introduce a Fake news Propagation Simulation framework (FPS) based on LLM, which studies the trends and control of fake news propagation in detail. Specifically, each agent in the simulation represents an individual with a distinct personality. They are equipped with both short-term and long-term memory, as well as a reflective mechanism to mimic human-like thinking. Every day, they engage in random opinion exchanges, reflect on their thinking, and update their opinions. Our simulation results uncover patterns in fake news propagation related to topic relevance, and individual traits, aligning with real-world observations. Additionally, we evaluate various intervention strategies and demonstrate that early and appropriately frequent interventions strike a balance between governance cost and effectiveness, offering valuable insights for practical applications. Our study underscores the significant utility and potential of LLMs in combating fake news.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

A More Advanced Group Polarization Measurement Approach Based on LLM-Based Agents and Graphs

Group polarization is an important research direction in social media content analysis, attracting many researchers to explore this field. Therefore, how to effectively measure group polarization has become a critical topic. Measuring group polarization on social media presents several challenges that have not yet been addressed by existing solutions. First, social media group polarization measurement involves processing vast amounts of text, which poses a significant challenge for information extraction. Second, social media texts often contain hard-to-understand content, including sarcasm, memes, and internet slang. Additionally, group polarization research focuses on holistic analysis, while texts is typically fragmented. To address these challenges, we designed a solution based on a multi-agent system and used a graph-structured Community Sentiment Network (CSN) to represent polarization states. Furthermore, we developed a metric called Community Opposition Index (COI) based on the CSN to quantify polarization. Finally, we tested our multi-agent system through a zero-shot stance detection task and achieved outstanding results. In summary, the proposed approach has significant value in terms of usability, accuracy, and interpretability.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Learning to Solve Domain-Specific Calculation Problems with Knowledge-Intensive Programs Generator

Domain Large Language Models (LLMs) are developed for domain-specific tasks based on general LLMs. But it still requires professional knowledge to facilitate the expertise for some domain-specific tasks. In this paper, we investigate into knowledge-intensive calculation problems. We find that the math problems to be challenging for LLMs, when involving complex domain-specific rules and knowledge documents, rather than simple formulations of terminologies. Therefore, we propose a pipeline to solve the domain-specific calculation problems with Knowledge-Intensive Programs Generator more effectively, named as KIPG. It generates knowledge-intensive programs according to the domain-specific documents. For each query, key variables are extracted, then outcomes which are dependent on domain knowledge are calculated with the programs. By iterative preference alignment, the code generator learns to improve the logic consistency with the domain knowledge. Taking legal domain as an example, we have conducted experiments to prove the effectiveness of our pipeline, and extensive analysis on the modules. We also find that the code generator is also adaptable to other domains, without training on the new knowledge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

PASCAL: A Learning-aided Cooperative Bandwidth Control Policy for Hierarchical Storage Systems

Nowadays, the Hierarchical Storage System (HSS) is considered as an ideal model to meet the cost-performance demand. The data migration between storing tiers of HSS is the way to achieve the cost-performance goal. The bandwidth control is to limit the maximum amount of data migration. Most of previous research about HSS focus on studying the data migration policy instead of bandwidth control. However, the recent research about cache and networking optimization suggest that the bandwidth control has significant impact on the system performance. Few previous work achieves a satisfactory bandwidth control in HSS since it is hard to control bandwidth for so many data migration tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we first give a stochastic programming model to formalize the bandwidth control problem in HSS. Then we propose a learning-aided bandwidth control policy for HSS, named \Pascal{}, which learns to control the bandwidth of different data migration task in an cooperative way. We implement \Pascal{} on a commercial HSS and compare it with three strong baselines over a group of workloads. Our evaluation on the physical system shows that \Pascal{} can effectively decrease 1.95X the tail latency and greatly improve throughput stability (2X $\downarrow$ throughput jitter), and meanwhile keep the throughput at a relatively high level.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

SymDPO: Boosting In-Context Learning of Large Multimodal Models with Symbol Demonstration Direct Preference Optimization

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, existing LMMs face a critical issue: they often fail to effectively leverage the visual context in multimodal demonstrations and instead simply follow textual patterns. This indicates that LMMs do not achieve effective alignment between multimodal demonstrations and model outputs. To address this problem, we propose Symbol Demonstration Direct Preference Optimization (SymDPO). Specifically, SymDPO aims to break the traditional paradigm of constructing multimodal demonstrations by using random symbols to replace text answers within instances. This forces the model to carefully understand the demonstration images and establish a relationship between the images and the symbols to answer questions correctly. We validate the effectiveness of this method on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that with SymDPO, LMMs can more effectively understand the multimodal context within examples and utilize this knowledge to answer questions better. Code is available at https://github.com/APiaoG/SymDPO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Knowledge Distillation of Black-Box Large Language Models

Given the exceptional performance of proprietary large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, recent research has increasingly focused on boosting the capabilities of smaller models through knowledge distillation (KD) from these powerful yet black-box teachers. While leveraging the high-quality outputs of these teachers is advantageous, the inaccessibility of their internal states often limits effective knowledge transfer. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Proxy-KD, a novel method that uses a proxy model to facilitate the efficient transfer of knowledge from black-box LLMs to smaller models. Our experiments show that Proxy-KD not only enhances the performance of KD from black-box teacher models but also surpasses traditional white-box KD techniques.~This approach presents a compelling new avenue for distilling knowledge from advanced LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Hal-Eval: A Universal and Fine-grained Hallucination Evaluation Framework for Large Vision Language Models

Large Vision Language Models exhibit remarkable capabilities but struggle with hallucinations inconsistencies between images and their descriptions. Previous hallucination evaluation studies on LVLMs have identified hallucinations in terms of objects, attributes, and relations but overlooked complex hallucinations that create an entire narrative around a fictional entity. In this paper, we introduce a refined taxonomy of hallucinations, featuring a new category: Event Hallucination. We then utilize advanced LLMs to generate and filter fine grained hallucinatory data consisting of various types of hallucinations, with a particular focus on event hallucinations, laying the groundwork for integrating discriminative and generative evaluation methods within our universal evaluation framework. The proposed benchmark distinctively assesses LVLMs ability to tackle a broad spectrum of hallucinations, making it a reliable and comprehensive tool for gauging LVLMs efficacy in handling hallucinations. We will release our code and data.

cs.AI↗