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Jian Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to Jian Cheng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

EvoPINN: Agentic Discovery of Executable Algorithms for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), yet their performance heavily relies on the manual, trial-and-error engineering of neural representations, loss formulations, and optimization dynamics. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for automated design, unconstrained code generation often yields mathematically invalid or numerically unstable solutions under strict scientific computing constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{EvoPINN}, an agentic framework that reformulates PINN development from labor-intensive manual design into a rigorous, execution-grounded algorithm discovery problem. EvoPINN navigates a modular search space by decoupling neural representations from training programs, utilizing an LLM agent to iteratively propose memory-conditioned programmatic modifications. To ensure scientific validity, all candidates undergo strict structural verification and budget-matched PDE evaluation. Extensive experiments across diverse PDE regimes (oscillatory, elliptic, dissipative, and nonlinear transport) demonstrate that EvoPINN discovers PDE-specialized learning algorithms that significantly reduce relative $L_{2}$ error compared to baselines. Crucially, EvoPINN autonomously invented SLRC-PINN, a novel architecture whose performance gains persist under rigorous parameter-matched comparisons, establishing the viability of execution-grounded agents for discovering genuinely new scientific computing mechanisms.

cs.AI↗

When Good Equations Get Bad Scores: Improving Symbolic Regression Through Better Parameter Optimization

Symbolic Regression (SR) plays a central role in scientific knowledge discovery by distilling mathematical equations from observational data. Most existing SR methods function within a bi-level optimization framework: an outer loop that searches for the discrete equation structure, and an inner loop that optimizes the continuous parameters of that structure. Crucially, parameter-fitting quality directly determines a structure's score and thus the outer-loop search. However, nonlinear operators make the inner loop highly non-convex, and budget-driven reliance on fast local solvers (e.g., BFGS) often yields poor local minima and underestimated scores for correct structures. This ``Good Structure, Bad Score'' phenomenon becomes a key bottleneck, degrading efficiency and misguiding the search away from the true equation. To resolve this, we propose SAGE-Fit (Structure-Aware and Semantics-Guided Evaluator for Symbolic Regression), an SR-native fitting framework that exploits the dual native priors of symbolic expressions. By capitalizing on the structural and semantic priors unique to SR, we design tailored modules for each property, thereby effectively mitigating this optimization bottleneck. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, as a plug-and-play module, significantly enhances evaluation fidelity and universally improves the performance of various SR systems.

cs.LG↗

LLM-Based Scientific Equation Discovery via Physics-Informed Token-Regularized Policy Optimization

Symbolic regression aims to distill mathematical equations from observational data. Recent approaches have successfully leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate equation hypotheses, capitalizing on their vast pre-trained scientific priors. However, existing frameworks predominantly treat the LLM as a static generator, relying on prompt-level guidance to steer exploration. This paradigm fails to update the model's internal representations based on search feedback, often yielding physically inconsistent or mathematically redundant expressions. In this work, we propose PiT-PO (Physics-informed Token-regularized Policy Optimization), a unified framework that evolves the LLM into an adaptive generator via reinforcement learning. Central to PiT-PO is a dual-constraint mechanism that rigorously enforces hierarchical physical validity while simultaneously applying fine-grained, token-level penalties to suppress redundant structures. Consequently, PiT-PO aligns LLM to produce equations that are both scientifically consistent and structurally parsimonious. Empirically, PiT-PO achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks and successfully discovers novel turbulence models for challenging fluid dynamics problems. We also demonstrate that PiT-PO empowers small-scale models to outperform closed-source giants, democratizing access to high-performance scientific discovery.

cs.LG↗

RefineEvo: Planning-Guided Heuristic Evolution with Bidirectional Experience

Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) has emerged as a transformative approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems. While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods have shown promise, they predominantly rely on fixed evolutionary operators and struggle to effectively accumulate and reuse historical search experience. This paper proposes RefineEvo, a novel evolutionary framework that transforms AHD from a static trial-and-error process into a planning-guided, experience-driven system. RefineEvo introduces a Planner to dynamically schedule evolutionary operators and trigger refinement based on the current search state, and a Reflector to distill valuable lessons into a Bidirectional Experience Pool containing both positive insights and negative pitfalls. This synergistic framework enables the system to adapt its search tools to the evolving complexity of the problem and leverage trajectory-aware, situation-conditioned insights to guide generation. Experiments on several classic combinatorial optimization benchmarks demonstrate that RefineEvo consistently outperforms strong baselines. In particular, RefineEvo delivers superior solution quality while improving token efficiency, enabling more efficient and autonomous heuristic design.

cs.CL↗

BiSCo-LLM: Lookup-Free Binary Spherical Coding for Extreme Low-Bit Large Language Model Compression

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly constrained by memory capacity, weight bandwidth, and checkpoint storage during deployment. Existing low-bit compression methods mainly follow two directions. Scalar or group-wise quantization is simple and compatible with efficient low-precision kernels, but its representation capacity becomes limited when the target budget approaches 2 bits per weight. Vector-quantized weight compression provides a richer block-level representation, but usually introduces explicit codebooks, index lookup, and additional storage accounting. This paper presents BiSCo-LLM, a codebook-free binary spherical coding framework for extreme low-bit LLM weight compression. The core pipeline is built on three components. First, local weight chunks are mapped onto a unit hypersphere and binarized into compact spherical codes, so that the main payload is a bit-packed sign stream rather than explicit VQ centroids. Second, a residual BSQ stage encodes the reconstruction error left by the base spherical codec, providing an explicit rate-distortion path without stored codebooks. Third, category-wise recovery distillation is performed after replacing each Transformer module category, reducing the mismatch between local weight reconstruction and assembled model behavior. A small 8-bit protected-channel path is used as an auxiliary stabilization mechanism for sensitive channels and is counted separately from the BSQ payload. The reported storage budget includes binary codes, neural decoders, protected-channel payloads, LoRA adapters, and metadata.

cs.LG↗

Mean Flow Policy Optimization

Diffusion models have recently emerged as expressive policy representations for online reinforcement learning (RL). However, their iterative generative processes introduce substantial training and inference overhead. To overcome this limitation, we propose to represent policies using MeanFlow models, a class of few-step flow-based generative models, to improve training and inference efficiency over diffusion-based RL approaches. To promote exploration, we optimize MeanFlow policies under the maximum entropy RL framework via soft policy iteration, and address two key challenges specific to MeanFlow policies: action likelihood evaluation and soft policy improvement. Experiments on MuJoCo, DeepMind Control Suite and HumanoidBench benchmarks demonstrate that our method, Mean Flow Policy Optimization (MFPO), achieves performance comparable to or exceeding current diffusion-based baselines while considerably reducing training and inference time. Our code is available at https://github.com/dongxiaoyi-xyz/MFPO.

cs.LG↗

Where to Refine, When to Stop: Rethinking Redundancy via Latent Discrepancy for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generation

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models deliver high-quality image generation but suffer from significant inference latency at high resolutions. Recent acceleration approaches most rely on heuristic measures with layer features to prune tokens. Such heuristics are sensitive to complex contextual semantics, leading to inaccurate identification of redundant computation and poor adaptability across prompts. We rethink redundancy in VAR from the perspective of its impact on pixel-space generation and introduce Latent Discrepancy. This unified metric quantifies a token's contribution by measuring the change in model states during generation. Our analysis shows that redundancy is more accurately identified when guided by image latent or pixel-space signals. We further observed that in classifier-free guidance (CFG), the convergence trend of the discrepancy between conditional and unconditional branches exhibits high dynamics with different prompts. Based on these findings, we propose LD-Pruning (Latent Discrepancy Pruning), a training-free framework that removes redundancy via latent discrepancy by integrating decoding-free region selection and adaptive unconditional-branch skipping. Extensive experiments show that LD-Pruning substantially reduces inference latency while maintaining high generation quality, achieving up to 2.35x speedup on Infinity-8B.

cs.CV↗

Uni-LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Unified Embodied Navigation

Embodied navigation requires an agent to map language and visual observations to a stream of spatial actions that drive a real robot through environments it has never seen. The dominant approach has been to scale vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models on ever-larger collections of robot trajectories. This paper argues that, for navigation specifically, generality can be obtained structurally, not only through data scale. The underlying decision structure of navigation reduces to a single Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation. The language action emits semantic-level directional command and the vision action emits a pixel-level visual target. Both outputs lie inside the natural output manifold of pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs), so the task can be reasoned about by an agent rather than learned from robot data. Therefore, we present Uni-LaViRA, a unified agentic architecture that extends the same insight to four task families (VLN-CE, ObjectNav, EQA, and Aerial-VLN) and to four heterogeneous real robots (Wheeled, Quadruped, Humanoid robot, and a self-built UAV) in a zero-shot manner. Two agent-loop mechanisms make this unification practical. TODO List Memory (TDM) rewrites a structured checklist of pending sub-goals at every step, reciting the unfinished items back into the agent's most recent attention window. Second Chance Backtrack (SCB) rolls the robot back to the pre-error state and conditions the agent's next plan on the failed sub-trajectory, turning single-pass navigation into a self-correcting process. With zero training effort, Uni-LaViRA reaches 60.7% SR on VLN-CE R2R, 51.3% on VLN-CE RxR, 77.7% on HM3D-v2, 60.0% on HM3D-OVON, 54.7% on MP3D-EQA, and 40.0% on OpenUAV, matching or even surpassing recent training navigation foundation models that consume millions of samples and thousands of GPU-hours.

cs.RO↗

Certain Head, Uncertain Tail: Expert-Sample for Test-Time Scaling in Fine-Grained MoE

Test-time scaling improves LLM performance by generating multiple candidate solutions, yet token-level sampling requires temperature tuning that trades off diversity against stability. Fine-grained MoE, featuring hundreds of well-trained experts per layer and multi-expert activation per token, offers an unexplored alternative through its rich routing space. We empirically characterize fine-grained MoE routing and uncover an informative pattern: router scores exhibit a certain head of high-confidence experts followed by an uncertain tail of low-confidence candidates. While single-run greedy accuracy remains stable when fewer experts are activated, multi-sample pass@n degrades significantly-suggesting that the certain head governs core reasoning capability while the uncertain tail correlates with reasoning diversity. Motivated by these findings, we propose Expert-Sample, a training-free method that preserves high-confidence selections while injecting controlled stochasticity into the uncertain tail, enabling diverse generation without destabilizing outputs. Evaluated on multiple fine-grained MoE models across math, knowledge reasoning, and code tasks, Expert-Sample consistently improves pass@n and verification-based accuracy. On Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct evaluated on GPQA-Diamond with 32 parallel samples, pass@32 rises from 85.4% to 91.9%, and accuracy improves from 59.1% to 62.6% with Best-of-N verification.

cs.LG↗

RoboNeuron: A Middle-Layer Infrastructure for Agent-Driven Orchestration in Embodied AI

Vision-language-action (VLA) models and LLM agents have advanced rapidly, yet reliable deployment on physical robots is often hindered by an interface mismatch between agent tool APIs and robot middleware. Current implementations typically rely on ad-hoc wrappers that are difficult to reuse, and changes to the VLA backend or serving stack often necessitate extensive re-integration. We introduce RoboNeuron, a middleware layer that connects the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for LLM agents with robot middleware such as ROS2. RoboNeuron bridges these ecosystems by deriving agent-callable tools directly from ROS schemas, providing a unified execution abstraction that supports both direct commands and modular composition, and localizing backend, runtime, and acceleration-preset changes within a stable inference boundary. We evaluate RoboNeuron in simulation and on hardware through multi-platform base control, arm motion, and VLA-based grasping tasks, demonstrating that it enables modular system orchestration under a unified interface while supporting backend transitions without system rewiring. The full code implementation of this work is available at github repo: https://github.com/guanweifan/RoboNeuron

cs.RO↗

Execution-Verified Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

Automating optimization modeling with LLMs is a promising path toward scalable decision intelligence, but existing approaches either rely on agentic pipelines built on closed-source LLMs with high inference latency, or fine-tune smaller LLMs using costly process supervision that often overfits to a single solver API. Inspired by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, we propose Execution-Verified Optimization Modeling (EVOM), an execution-verified learning framework that treats a mathematical programming solver as a deterministic, interactive verifier. Given a natural-language problem and a target solver, EVOM generates solver-specific code, executes it in a sandboxed harness, and converts execution outcomes into scalar rewards, optimized with GRPO and DAPO in a closed-loop generate-execute-feedback-update process. This outcome-only formulation removes the need for process-level supervision, and enables cross-solver generalization by switching the verification environment rather than reconstructing solver-specific datasets. Experiments on NL4OPT, MAMO, IndustryOR, and OptiBench across Gurobi, OR-Tools, and COPT show that EVOM matches or outperforms process-supervised SFT, supports zero-shot solver transfer, and achieves effective low-cost solver adaptation by continuing training under the target solver backend.

cs.AI↗

SparVAR: Exploring Sparsity in Visual AutoRegressive Modeling for Training-Free Acceleration

Visual AutoRegressive (VAR) modeling has garnered significant attention for its innovative next-scale prediction paradigm. However, mainstream VAR paradigms attend to all tokens across historical scales at each autoregressive step. As the next scale resolution grows, the computational complexity of attention increases quartically with resolution, causing substantial latency. Prior accelerations often skip high-resolution scales, which speeds up inference but discards high-frequency details and harms image quality. To address these problems, we present \textbf{SparVAR}, a training-free acceleration framework that exploits three properties of VAR attention: \textbf{(i) strong attention sinks}, \textbf{(ii) cross-scale activation similarity}, and \textbf{(iii) pronounced locality}. Specifically, we dynamically predict the sparse attention pattern of later high-resolution scales from a sparse decision scale, and construct scale self-similar sparse attention via an efficient index-mapping mechanism, enabling high-efficiency sparse attention computation at large scales. Furthermore, we propose cross-scale local sparse attention and implement an efficient block-wise sparse kernel, which achieves $\mathbf{> 5\times}$ faster forward speed than FlashAttention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SparVAR can reduce the generation time of an 8B model producing $1024\times1024$ high-resolution images to the \textbf{1s}, \textbf{without skipping the last scales}. Compared with the VAR baseline accelerated by FlashAttention, our method achieves a $\mathbf{1.57\times}$ speed-up while preserving almost all high-frequency details. When combined with existing scale-skipping strategies, SparVAR attains up to a $\mathbf{2.28\times}$ acceleration, while maintaining competitive visual generation quality. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/CAS-CLab/SparVAR}{SparVAR}.

cs.CV↗

GSM-GS: Geometry-Constrained Single and Multi-view Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a prominent research direction owing to its ultrarapid training speed and high-fidelity rendering capabilities. However, the unstructured and irregular nature of Gaussian point clouds poses challenges to reconstruction accuracy. This limitation frequently causes high-frequency detail loss in complex surface microstructures when relying solely on routine strategies. To address this limitation, we propose GSM-GS: a synergistic optimization framework integrating single-view adaptive sub-region weighting constraints and multi-view spatial structure refinement. For single-view optimization, we leverage image gradient features to partition scenes into texture-rich and texture-less sub-regions. The reconstruction quality is enhanced through adaptive filtering mechanisms guided by depth discrepancy features. This preserves high-weight regions while implementing a dual-branch constraint strategy tailored to regional texture variations, thereby improving geometric detail characterization. For multi-view optimization, we introduce a geometry-guided cross-view point cloud association method combined with a dynamic weight sampling strategy. This constructs 3D structural normal constraints across adjacent point cloud frames, effectively reinforcing multi-view consistency and reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves both competitive rendering quality and geometric reconstruction. See our interactive project page

cs.CV↗

Game-Theoretic Co-Evolution for LLM-Based Heuristic Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled rapid progress in automatic heuristic discovery (AHD), yet most existing methods are predominantly limited by static evaluation against fixed instance distributions, leading to potential overfitting and poor generalization under distributional shifts. We propose Algorithm Space Response Oracles (ASRO), a game-theoretic framework that reframes heuristic discovery as a program level co-evolution between solver and instance generator. ASRO models their interaction as a two-player zero-sum game, maintains growing strategy pools on both sides, and iteratively expands them via LLM-based best-response oracles against mixed opponent meta-strategies, thereby replacing static evaluation with an adaptive, self-generated curriculum. Across multiple combinatorial optimization domains, ASRO consistently outperforms static-training AHD baselines built on the same program search mechanisms, achieving substantially improved generalization and robustness on diverse and out-of-distribution instances.

cs.AI↗

DALI: A Workload-Aware Offloading Framework for Efficient MoE Inference on Local PCs

Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures significantly enhance the capacity of LLMs without proportional increases in computation, but at the cost of a vast parameter size. Offloading MoE expert parameters to host memory and leveraging both CPU and GPU computation has recently emerged as a promising direction to support such models on resourceconstrained local PC platforms. While promising, we notice that existing approaches mismatch the dynamic nature of expert workloads, which leads to three fundamental inefficiencies: (1) Static expert assignment causes severe CPUGPU load imbalance, underutilizing CPU and GPU resources; (2) Existing prefetching techniques fail to accurately predict high-workload experts, leading to costly inaccurate prefetches; (3) GPU cache policies neglect workload dynamics, resulting in poor hit rates and limited effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose DALI, a workloaDAware offLoadIng framework for efficient MoE inference on local PCs. To fully utilize hardware resources, DALI first dynamically assigns experts to CPU or GPU by modeling assignment as a 0-1 integer optimization problem and solving it efficiently using a Greedy Assignment strategy at runtime. To improve prefetching accuracy, we develop a Residual-Based Prefetching method leveraging inter-layer residual information to accurately predict high-workload experts. Additionally, we introduce a Workload-Aware Cache Replacement policy that exploits temporal correlation in expert activations to improve GPU cache efficiency. By evaluating across various MoE models and settings, DALI achieves significant speedups in the both prefill and decoding phases over the state-of-the-art offloading frameworks.

cs.DC↗

IntraSlice: Towards High-Performance Structural Pruning with Block-Intra PCA for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but face deployment challenges due to their massive size. Structured pruning offers acceleration benefits but leads to significant performance degradation. Recent PCA-based pruning methods have alleviated this issue by retaining key activation components, but are only applied between modules in order to fuse the transformation matrix, which introduces extra parameters and severely disrupts activation distributions due to residual connections. To address these issues, we propose IntraSlice, a framework that applies block-wise module-intra PCA compression pruning. By leveraging the structural characteristics of Transformer modules, we design an approximate PCA method whose transformation matrices can be fully fused into the model without additional parameters. We also introduce a PCA-based global pruning ratio estimator that further considers the distribution of compressed activations, building on conventional module importance. We validate our method on Llama2, Llama3, and Phi series across various language benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior compression performance compared to recent baselines at the same compression ratio or inference speed.

cs.LG↗

Towards Efficient and Accurate Spiking Neural Networks via Adaptive Bit Allocation

Multi-bit spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently become a heated research spot, pursuing energy-efficient and high-accurate AI. However, with more bits involved, the associated memory and computation demands escalate to the point where the performance improvements become disproportionate. Based on the insight that different layers demonstrate different importance and extra bits could be wasted and interfering, this paper presents an adaptive bit allocation strategy for direct-trained SNNs, achieving fine-grained layer-wise allocation of memory and computation resources. Thus, SNN's efficiency and accuracy can be improved. Specifically, we parametrize the temporal lengths and the bit widths of weights and spikes, and make them learnable and controllable through gradients. To address the challenges caused by changeable bit widths and temporal lengths, we propose the refined spiking neuron, which can handle different temporal lengths, enable the derivation of gradients for temporal lengths, and suit spike quantization better. In addition, we theoretically formulate the step-size mismatch problem of learnable bit widths, which may incur severe quantization errors to SNN, and accordingly propose the step-size renewal mechanism to alleviate this issue. Experiments on various datasets, including the static CIFAR and ImageNet datasets and the dynamic CIFAR-DVS and DVS-GESTURE datasets, demonstrate that our methods can reduce the overall memory and computation cost while achieving higher accuracy. Particularly, our SEWResNet-34 can achieve a 2.69\% accuracy gain and 4.16$\times$ lower bit budgets over the advanced baseline work on ImageNet. This work is open-sourced at \href{https://github.com/Ikarosy/Towards-Efficient-and-Accurate-Spiking-Neural-Networks-via-Adaptive-Bit-Allocation}{this link}.

cs.NE↗

HGCN2SP: Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network for Two-Stage Stochastic Programming

Two-stage Stochastic Programming (2SP) is a standard framework for modeling decision-making problems under uncertainty. While numerous methods exist, solving such problems with many scenarios remains challenging. Selecting representative scenarios is a practical method for accelerating solutions. However, current approaches typically rely on clustering or Monte Carlo sampling, failing to integrate scenario information deeply and overlooking the significant impact of the scenario order on solving time. To address these issues, we develop HGCN2SP, a novel model with a hierarchical graph designed for 2SP problems, encoding each scenario and modeling their relationships hierarchically. The model is trained in a reinforcement learning paradigm to utilize the feedback of the solver. The policy network is equipped with a hierarchical graph convolutional network for feature encoding and an attention-based decoder for scenario selection in proper order. Evaluation of two classic 2SP problems demonstrates that HGCN2SP provides high-quality decisions in a short computational time. Furthermore, HGCN2SP exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities in handling large-scale instances, even with a substantial number of variables or scenarios that were unseen during the training phase.

cs.LG↗