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Jiamin Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Jiamin Xu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Robust Global Structure-from-Motion via View Graph Pruning

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) aims to estimate camera poses and reconstruct 3D structures from a collection of unordered images. Compared with incremental SfM, global SfM achieves better scalability by jointly estimating camera poses based on a view graph constructed from pairwise correspondences. However, its performance is highly sensitive to erroneous edges caused by visually ambiguous matches, which may lead to incorrect camera registration and reconstruction artifacts. In this work, we propose a subgraph-guided view graph pruning framework for robust global SfM. Our key idea is to exploit the internal consistency of reliable subgraphs to identify and remove unreliable connections. Specifically, we first partition the view graph into locally consistent subgraphs and perform global SfM within each subgraph to obtain reliable camera poses. We then apply RANSAC-based edge pruning across subgraphs to remove inconsistent edges, and finally perform global SfM on the refined view graph. Extensive experiments on ambiguous, sequential, and unordered image datasets demonstrate that our method improves the robustness of global SfM under challenging conditions. Further evaluation with neural rendering shows that the improved camera estimation leads to higher-quality novel view synthesis results.

cs.CV

WildShadowRemover: In-the-Wild Video Shadow Removal via Detail-Preserving Video Diffusion Models

Video shadow removal in the wild remains challenging due to complex illumination, diverse shadow appearances, and limited training data. Despite its importance to numerous vision and graphics applications, it remains largely unexplored in unconstrained real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we present WildShadowRemover, a framework that adapts a pretrained video diffusion model for robust video shadow removal via LoRA fine-tuning. To preserve fine image details while retaining the model's powerful generative prior, we augment the frozen VAE decoder with a detail injection module and introduce a shadow-mask-guided frequency-decomposed modulation module to selectively restore high-frequency textures while suppressing shadow artifacts. Monocular depth priors from Depth Anything 3 further provide geometry-aware guidance under challenging lighting conditions. We also construct WildShadow, a large-scale paired video shadow removal dataset and benchmark, covering diverse synthetic scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in shadow removal quality and temporal consistency, producing temporally coherent shadow-free videos with superior visual quality and strong generalization across challenging in-the-wild scenarios.

cs.CV

Robust Activation Map Rectification for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Segmentation: Temporal Coherence as a Free Lunch

Weakly supervised segmentation relies heavily on class activation maps (CAMs) to initially localize target regions. However, CAMs are often noisy and prone to catastrophic failures. Existing remedies typically introduce additional training stages or prototype learning, increasing computational cost and reducing robustness. In this paper, we propose a training-free prototype-free framework that rectifies unreliable CAMs by exploiting temporal and structural coherence in volumetric data as a free lunch. Our approach is built on two key components. First, we introduce Variance-Reduced Activation Aggregation (VRAA) which suppresses noise and amplify coherent semantic signals. We provide a theoretical justification by modeling CAMs as high-dimensional random vectors and show that aggregation yields provable variance reduction. Second, we design a Bidirectional Extremity Rectification (BER) mechanism that detects and rectifies implausible activations through bidirectional extremity checks, effectively mitigating extreme-value failures without learning additional parameters. Our method is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with existing pipelines. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods, achieving up to 20% Dice and 40% mIoU gains while reducing inference time by more than 5 times. These results indicate that leveraging coherence as an implicit inductive bias yields a principled and efficient approach to stabilizing weakly supervised volumetric segmentation. Our code will be available.

cs.CV

TurboGS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error-Guided Sparse Pixel Sampling and Optimization

Consumer-level applications require fast optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with high-fidelity novel view rendering. However, existing 3DGS acceleration approaches still incur substantial computation on redundant pixels while sacrificing fine details. In this paper, we present TurboGS, an error-guided training framework that accelerates 3DGS by concentrating optimization on perceptually informative pixels. TurboGS is built upon four core components: (1) a tile-wise sparse pixel sampling, which, driven by multi-view reconstruction errors during training, prioritizes challenging regions and skips well-reconstructed ones to avoid redundant gradient computation; (2) a tile-wise structure-aware loss with sparse Normalized Cross-Correlation, which provides sparse yet effective supervision to preserve fine details and stabilize training; (3) an error-driven Gaussian density control strategy, which dynamically allocates model capacity and removes redundant primitives; and (4) a tailored hybrid optimizer that couples Hessian-informed updates with Adam moment damping to stabilize and improve convergence under sparse supervision. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TurboGS can deliver on par or superior rendering quality within 100 seconds on a single RTX 5090 GPU card (up to 10x training speedup over vanilla 3DGS).

cs.CV

HetScene: Heterogeneity-Aware Diffusion for Dense Indoor Scene Generation

Generating controllable and physically plausible indoor scenes is a pivotal prerequisite for constructing high-fidelity simulation environments for embodied AI. However, existing deeplearning-based methods usually treat all objects as homogeneous instances within a unified generation process. While effective for sparse and simplistic layouts, they struggle to model realistic layouts with dense object arrangements and complex spatial dependencies, leadingto limited scalability and degraded physical plausibility. To deal with these challenges, we revisit indoor layout generation from the perspective of structural heterogeneity and decompose the objects into primary objects and secondary objects according to their distinct roles in shaping a scene. Based on this decomposition, we propose HetScene, a heterogeneous two-stage generation framework that decouples indoor layout synthesis into Structural Layout Generation (SLG) and Contextual Layout Generation (CLG). SLG first generates globally coherent structural layouts with only primary objects conditioned on text descriptions, top-down binary room masks, and spatial relation graphs, establishing a stable global macro-skeleton of large core furniture.

cs.CV

Integrating Causal DAGs in Deep RL: Activating Minimal Markovian States with Multi-Order Exposure

Online reinforcement learning (RL) relies on the Markov property for guaranteed performance, but real-world applications often lack well-defined states given raw observed variables. While causal RL has attracted growing interest, existing work typically assumes Markovian states are provided and focuses on using causality to accelerate learning, leaving a fundamental gap: \emph{given a longitudinal causal graph over observed variables, how does one construct MDP states that provably satisfy the Markov property?} We address this by providing a procedure that constructs a provably minimal state representation. In deep RL, we observe that the minimal representation alone empirically fails to improve performance, indicating that neural networks cannot directly exploit Markovian minimality. To address this, we propose \textbf{MOSE} (Multi-Order State Exposure), which feeds multi-order historical state constructions into the same $Q$-function. MOSE consistently outperforms both the minimal state construction and single-window policies on common benchmarks and synthetic datasets. Including the minimal representation alongside MOSE can further improve performance. Our results establish a core principle for causal deep RL: minimal sufficiency is not enough, and \emph{controlled redundancy} is necessary to unlock the benefit of causal state information.

cs.LG

Behavioral Score Diffusion: Model-Free Trajectory Planning via Kernel-Based Score Estimation from Data

Diffusion-based trajectory optimization has emerged as a powerful planning paradigm, but existing methods require either learned score networks trained on large datasets or analytical dynamics models for score computation. We introduce \emph{Behavioral Score Diffusion} (BSD), a training-free and model-free trajectory planner that computes the diffusion score function directly from a library of trajectory data via kernel-weighted estimation. At each denoising step, BSD retrieves relevant trajectories using a triple-kernel weighting scheme -- diffusion proximity, state context, and goal relevance -- and computes a Nadaraya-Watson estimate of the denoised trajectory. The diffusion noise schedule naturally controls kernel bandwidths, creating a multi-scale nonparametric regression: broad averaging of global behavioral patterns at high noise, fine-grained local interpolation at low noise. This coarse-to-fine structure handles nonlinear dynamics without linearization or parametric assumptions. Safety is preserved by applying shielded rollout on kernel-estimated state trajectories, identical to existing model-based approaches. We evaluate BSD on four robotic systems of increasing complexity (3D--6D state spaces) in a parking scenario. BSD with fixed bandwidth achieves 98.5\% of the model-based baseline's average reward across systems while requiring no dynamics model, using only 1{,}000 pre-collected trajectories. BSD substantially outperforms nearest-neighbor retrieval (18--63\% improvement), confirming that the diffusion denoising mechanism is essential for effective data-driven planning.

cs.RO

Stochastic Trajectory Influence Functions for LQR: Joint Sensitivity Through Dynamics and Noise Covariance

We present a three-level influence hierarchy for data valuation in stochastic LQR. At the \emph{model level}, the trajectory influence surrogate $\IFm_k := H^{-1}g_k$ approximates the leave-one-trajectory parameter shift. At the \emph{control level} with fixed covariance, the usual fixed-noise score is obtained by composing $\IFm_k$ with the Riccati gradient of $\tr(P(\theta)\Sigma)$. At the \emph{stochastic control level}, the plug-in cost depends additionally on the residual covariance estimate $\hat W$, so removing a trajectory perturbs the cost through both the dynamics and the covariance channels. We derive an exact leave-one-trajectory decomposition of the covariance shift into a \emph{direct-removal} term and a \emph{parameter-shift} term, show that the additional first-order contribution is a simple residual cross-moment, and obtain a stochastic influence score built directly on $\IFm_k$. The resulting method preserves the amortized structure of prior work: after one Hessian factorization and one adjoint Lyapunov solve, each trajectory requires only a dot product plus an $O(n_x^2)$ direct-removal correction. The shared Hessian solves can also be performed iteratively by conjugate gradients when explicit factorization is undesirable. The new covariance remainder is explicit and does not involve Lyapunov-operator amplification; the only amplified term is the familiar Riccati remainder inherited from fixed-covariance influence analysis. Numerical results on two linear systems show that accounting for the estimated covariance substantially improves agreement with exact leave-one-trajectory retraining, especially under heterogeneous noise.

eess.SY

IF-CPS: Influence Functions for Cyber-Physical Systems -- A Unified Framework for Diagnosis, Curation, and Safety Attribution

Neural network controllers trained via behavior cloning are increasingly deployed in cyber-physical systems (CPS), yet practitioners lack tools to trace controller failures back to training data. Existing data attribution methods assume i.i.d.\ data and standard loss targets, ignoring CPS-specific properties: closed-loop dynamics, safety constraints, and temporal trajectory structure. We propose IF-CPS, a modular influence function framework with three CPS-adapted variants: safety influence (attributing constraint violations), trajectory influence (temporal discounting over trajectories), and propagated influence (tracing effects through plant dynamics). We evaluate IF-CPS on six benchmarks across diagnosis, curation, and safety attribution tasks. IF-CPS improves over standard influence functions in the majority of settings, achieving AUROC $1.00$ in Pendulum (5-10\% poisoning), $0.92$ vs.\ $0.50$ in HVAC (10\%), and the strongest constraint-boundary correlation (Spearman $\rho = 0.55$ in Pendulum).

eess.SY

Fast Non-Episodic Finite-Horizon RL with K-Step Lookahead Thresholding

Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted contraction, do not naturally account for this fixed-horizon structure. We introduce a modified Q-function: rather than targeting the full-horizon, we learn a K-step lookahead Q-function that truncates planning to the next K steps. To further improve sample efficiency, we introduce a thresholding mechanism: actions are selected only when their estimated K-step lookahead value exceeds a time-varying threshold. We provide an efficient tabular learning algorithm for this novel objective, proving it achieves fast finite-sample convergence: it achieves minimax optimal constant regret for $K=1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\max((K-1),C_{K-1})\sqrt{SAT\log(T)})$ regret for any $K \geq 2$. We numerically evaluate the performance of our algorithm under the objective of maximizing reward. Our implementation adaptively increases K over time, balancing lookahead depth against estimation variance. Empirical results demonstrate superior cumulative rewards over state-of-the-art tabular RL methods across synthetic MDPs and RL environments: JumpRiverswim, FrozenLake and AnyTrading. Code is provided on \href{https://github.com/jamie01713/K-Step-Lookahead}{github}.

cs.LG

Datamodel-Based Data Selection for Nonlinear Data-Enabled Predictive Control

Data-Enabled Predictive Control (DeePC) has emerged as a powerful framework for controlling unknown systems directly from input-output data. For nonlinear systems, recent work has proposed selecting relevant subsets of data columns based on geometric proximity to the current operating point. However, such proximity-based selection ignores the control objective: different reference trajectories may benefit from different data even at the same operating point. In this paper, we propose a datamodel-based approach that learns a context-dependent influence function mapping the current initial trajectory and reference trajectory to column importance scores. Adapting the linear datamodel framework from machine learning, we model closed-loop cost as a linear function of column inclusion indicators, with coefficients that depend on the control context. Training on closed-loop simulations, our method captures which data columns actually improve tracking performance for specific control tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that task-aware selection substantially outperforms geometry-based heuristics, particularly when using small data subsets.

eess.SY

Algorithm-Relative Trajectory Valuation in Policy Gradient Control

We study how trajectory value depends on the learning algorithm in policy-gradient control. Using Trajectory Shapley in an uncertain LQR, we find a negative correlation between Persistence of Excitation (PE) and marginal value under vanilla REINFORCE ($r\approx-0.38$). We prove a variance-mediated mechanism: (i) for fixed energy, higher PE yields lower gradient variance; (ii) near saddles, higher variance increases escape probability, raising marginal contribution. When stabilized (state whitening or Fisher preconditioning), this variance channel is neutralized and information content dominates, flipping the correlation positive ($r\approx+0.29$). Hence, trajectory value is algorithm-relative. Experiments validate the mechanism and show decision-aligned scores (Leave-One-Out) complement Shapley for pruning, while Shapley identifies toxic subsets.

cs.LG

From Natural Language to Certified H-infinity Controllers: Integrating LLM Agents with LMI-Based Synthesis

We present \textsc{S2C} (Specification-to-Certified-Controller), a multi-agent framework that maps natural-language requirements to certified $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ state-feedback controllers via LMI synthesis. \textsc{S2C} coordinates five roles -- \textit{SpecInt} (spec extraction), \textit{Solv} (bounded-real lemma (BRL) LMI), \textit{Tester} (Monte Carlo and frequency-domain checks), \textit{Adapt} (spec refinement), and \textit{CodeGen} (deployable code). The loop is stabilized by a severity- and iteration-aware $γ$-floor guardrail and a decay-rate region constraint enforcing $\Reλ(A{+}BK)<-α$ with $α=3.9/T_s$ derived from settling-time targets. For state feedback, verification reports disturbance rejection $\big\|C\,(sI-(A{+}BK))^{-1}E\big\|_\infty$ alongside time-domain statistics; discrete benchmarks are converted to continuous time via a Tustin (bilinear) transform when needed. On 14 COMPleib problems, \textsc{S2C} attains \textbf{100\%} synthesis success and \textbf{100\%} convergence within six iterations, with strong decay-rate satisfaction and near-target certified $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ levels; it improves robustness metrics relative to single-shot BRL and BRL+$α$ baselines. An ablation over LLM backbones (GPT-5, GPT-5 mini, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-2.5-72B, Llama-4 Maverick) shows the pipeline is robust across models, while stronger models yield the highest effectiveness. These results indicate that LLM agents can integrate certificate-bearing control synthesis from high-level intent, enabling rapid end-to-end prototyping without sacrificing formal guarantees.

eess.SY

Existence and Uniqueness of Solution for Linear Complementarity Problem in Contact Mechanics

Although a unique solution is guaranteed in the Linear complementarity problem (LCP) when the matrix $\mathbf{M}$ is positive definite, practical applications often involve cases where $\mathbf{M}$ is only positive semi-definite, leading to multiple possible solutions. However, empirical observations suggest that uniqueness can still emerge under certain structural conditions on the matrix $\mathbf{M}$ and vector $\mathbf{q}$. Motivated by an unresolved problem in nonlinear modeling for beam contact in directional drilling, this paper systematically investigates conditions under which a unique solution exists for LCPs with certain positive semi-definite matrices $\mathbf{M}$. We provide a rigorous proof demonstrating the existence and uniqueness of the solution for this specific case and extend our findings to establish a generalized framework applicable to broader classes of LCPs. This framework enhances the understanding of LCP uniqueness conditions and provides theoretical guarantees for solving real-world problems where positive semi-definite matrices $\mathbf{M}$ arise.

math.OC

Influence Functions for Data Attribution in Linear System Identification and LQR Control

When a controller is designed from an identified model, its performance ultimately depends on the trajectories used for identification, but pinpointing which ones help or hurt remains an open problem. We bring influence functions, a data attribution tool from machine learning, into this setting by chaining two closed form sensitivity analyses across a regularized least squares identification and an infinite horizon LQR pipeline. On the identification side, the quadratic loss admits an exact leave one trajectory out parameter shift and a reusable first order approximation with a Neumann series error bound. On the control side, we implicitly differentiate through the DARE via its discrete Lyapunov structure and compress the cost gradient to a single adjoint Lyapunov solve. The resulting scores track true LOTO retraining with Pearson correlations above 0.99 and speedups of 7 to 60 times on linear systems of dimension 2 to 10.

eess.SY

MatTools: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Materials Science Tools

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to materials science questions, including literature comprehension, property prediction, materials discovery and alloy design. At the same time, a wide range of physics-based computational approaches have been developed in which materials properties can be calculated. Here, we propose a benchmark application to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs to answer materials science questions through the generation and safe execution of codes based on such physics-based computational materials science packages. MatTools is built on two complementary components: a materials simulation tool question-answer (QA) benchmark and a real-world tool-usage benchmark. We designed an automated methodology to efficiently collect real-world materials science tool-use examples. The QA benchmark, derived from the pymatgen (Python Materials Genomics) codebase and documentation, comprises 69,225 QA pairs that assess the ability of an LLM to understand materials science tools. The real-world benchmark contains 49 tasks (138 subtasks) requiring the generation of functional Python code for materials property calculations. Our evaluation of diverse LLMs yields three key insights: (1)Generalists outshine specialists;(2)AI knows AI; and (3)Simpler is better. MatTools provides a standardized framework for assessing and improving LLM capabilities for materials science tool applications, facilitating the development of more effective AI systems for materials science and general scientific research.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Tight upper bound and monogamy relation for the maximum quantum value of the parity-CHSH inequality and applied to device-independent randomness

Based on the violation of Bell inequalities, we can verify quantum random numbers by examining the correlation between device inputs and outputs. In this paper, we derive the maximum quantum value of the parity-CHSH inequality for a three-qubit system, establishing a tight upper bound applicable to any quantum state. Simultaneously, the necessary constraints for achieving saturation are analyzed. Utilizing this method, we present necessary and sufficient conditions for certain states to violate the parity-CHSH inequality. Building upon our proposal, the relationship between the noise parameter and the certifiable randomness in a bipartite entangled state is probed. Furthermore, we derive a monogamy relationship between the average values of the parity-CHSH inequality associated with the reduced three-qubit density matrices of GHZ-class states comprising four qubits.

quant-ph

OmniSR: Shadow Removal under Direct and Indirect Lighting

Shadows can originate from occlusions in both direct and indirect illumination. Although most current shadow removal research focuses on shadows caused by direct illumination, shadows from indirect illumination are often just as pervasive, particularly in indoor scenes. A significant challenge in removing shadows from indirect illumination is obtaining shadow-free images to train the shadow removal network. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel rendering pipeline for generating shadowed and shadow-free images under direct and indirect illumination, and create a comprehensive synthetic dataset that contains over 30,000 image pairs, covering various object types and lighting conditions. We also propose an innovative shadow removal network that explicitly integrates semantic and geometric priors through concatenation and attention mechanisms. The experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art shadow removal techniques and can effectively generalize to indoor and outdoor scenes under various lighting conditions, enhancing the overall effectiveness and applicability of shadow removal methods.

cs.CV