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Jiang Bian

Publications and source records attributed to Jiang Bian.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Causal Time Series Generation via Diffusion Models

Time series generation (TSG) synthesizes realistic sequences and has achieved remarkable success. Among TSG, conditional models generate sequences given observed covariates, however, such models learn observational correlations without considering unobserved confounding. In this work, we propose a causal perspective on conditional TSG and introduce causal time series generation as a new TSG task family, formalized within Pearl's causal ladder, extending beyond observational generation to include interventional and counterfactual settings. To instantiate these tasks, we develop CaTSG, a unified diffusion-based framework with backdoor-adjusted guidance that causally steers sampling toward desired interventions and individual counterfactuals while preserving observational fidelity. Specifically, our method derives causal score functions via backdoor adjustment and the abduction-action-prediction procedure, thus enabling principled support for all three levels of TSG. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that CaTSG achieves superior fidelity and also supporting interventional and counterfactual generation that existing baselines cannot handle. Overall, we propose the causal TSG family and instantiate it with CaTSG, providing an initial proof-of-concept and opening a promising direction toward more reliable simulation under interventions and counterfactual generation.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

GEAR: Granularity-Adaptive Advantage Reweighting for LLM Agents via Self-Distillation

Reinforcement learning has become a widely used post-training approach for LLM agents, where training commonly relies on outcome-level rewards that provide only coarse supervision. While finer-grained credit assignment is promising for effective policy updates, obtaining reliable local credit and assigning it to the right parts of the long-horizon trajectory remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose Granularity-adaptivE Advantage Reweighting (GEAR), an adaptive-granularity credit assignment framework that reshapes the trajectory-level GRPO advantage using token- and segment-level signals derived from self-distillation. GEAR compares an on-policy student with a ground-truth-conditioned teacher to obtain a reference-guided divergence signal for identifying adaptive segment boundaries and modulating local advantage weights. This divergence often spikes at the onset of a semantic deviation, while later tokens in the same autoregressive continuation may return to low divergence. GEAR therefore treats such spikes as anchors for adaptive credit regions: where the student remains aligned with the teacher, token-level resolution is preserved; where it departs, GEAR groups the corresponding continuation into an adaptive segment and uses the divergence at the departure point to modulate the segment' s advantage. Experiments across eight mathematical reasoning and agentic tool-use benchmarks with Qwen3 4B and 8B models show that GEAR consistently outperforms standard GRPO, self-distillation-only baselines, and token- or turn-level credit-assignment methods. The gains are especially strong on benchmarks with lower GRPO baseline accuracy, reaching up to around 20\% over GRPO, suggesting that the proposed adaptive reweighting scheme is especially useful in more challenging long-horizon settings.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Agent^2 RL-Bench: Can LLM Agents Engineer Agentic RL Post-Training?

We introduce Agent2 RL-Bench, a compact diagnostic benchmark for evaluating agentic RL post-training, which tests whether LLM agents can autonomously design, implement, debug, and execute post-training pipelines that improve foundation models. RL post-training increasingly drives model alignment and specialization, yet existing benchmarks are largely static, rewarding supervised fine-tuning or script generation without assessing an agent's ability to close an interactive RL loop. Agent2 RL-Bench provides a unified agent-facing interface: each run starts from an isolated workspace containing a base model, task data, instructions, and a grading API, and agents must iterate within a fixed budget by training models and submitting artifacts for evaluation. The benchmark spans six tasks across three levels, from static rule-based training to judge-based optimization and closed-loop online RL with trajectory collection. Two diagnostic skills, namely runtime recording and post-hoc summarization, enable structured analysis of agent behavior, facilitating smooth and effective iteration of the benchmark's evaluation framework. Across five agent systems and six driver LLMs, agents show intelligent behavior but clear limitations: one RL-oriented run improves ALFWorld from 4.85 to 93.28 via SFT warm-up and GRPO with online rollouts, yet DeepSearchQA remains difficult, most successful routes rely on supervised pipelines, and interactive outcomes show large single-run differences across agent stacks. Overall, Agent2 RL-Bench shows that current agents can sometimes engineer online RL, but stable agent-driven RL post-training remains rare under fixed budgets. It also demonstrates that our benchmark provides a strong and effective evaluation framework for future research in this direction. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent/blob/main/rdagent/scenarios/rl/autorl_bench/README.md

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

What to Ignore, What to React: Visually Robust RL Fine-Tuning of VLA Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning has shown promise for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotic manipulation, but deployment-time visual shifts pose practical challenges. A key difficulty is that standard task rewards supervise task success, but offer limited guidance on whether a visual change is task-irrelevant or changes the behavior required for manipulation. We propose PAIR-VLA (Paired Action Invariance & Sensitivity for Visually Robust VLA), an RL fine-tuning framework to address this difficulty by adding two auxiliary objectives over paired visual variants during PPO optimization: an invariance term that reduces the discrepancy between action distributions for a task-preserving pair (e.g., different distractors), and a sensitivity objective that encourages separable action distributions for a task-altering pair (e.g., target object in a different pose). Together, these objectives turn visual variants from mere observation diversity into behavior-level guidance on policy responses during RL fine-tuning. We evaluate on ManiSkill3 across two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$, under diverse out-of-distribution visual shifts including unseen distractors, texture changes, target object pose variation, viewpoint shifts, and lighting changes. Our method consistently improves over standard PPO, achieving average improvements of 16.62% on $π_{0.5}$ and 9.10% on OpenVLA. Notably, ablations further show generalization across visual shifts: invariance guidance learned from distractor and texture variants transfers to target-pose and lighting shifts, while adding sensitivity guidance on target-pose variants further improves robustness to nuisance shifts, highlighting the broader transferability of behavior-level RL guidance.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Sample-efficient LLM Optimization with Reset Replay

Recent advancements in LLM post-training, particularly through reinforcement learning and preference optimization, are key to boosting their reasoning capabilities. However, these methods often suffer from low sample efficiency and a susceptibility to primacy bias, a phenomenon where overfitting to initial experiences diminishes network plasticity and damages the learning process. To address these challenges, we introduce LLM optimization with Reset Replay (LoRR), a general and powerful plugin for enhancing sample efficiency in preference-based optimization. Its core mechanism enables high-replay training to maximize the utility of each data batch. To mitigate overfitting, LoRR orchestrates a periodic reset strategy that reuses the initial data and policy to maintain network plasticity, and further adopts a hybrid optimization objective to better exploit training data. Extensive experiments show that LoRR significantly boosts the performance of various preference optimization methods on both mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks. Notably, an iterative DPO framework augmented with LoRR achieves comparable performance on challenging math tasks, rivaling many complex or computationally expensive baselines. Our findings highlight that LoRR offers a practical and sample-efficient paradigm from limited offline data, unlocking greater performance with minimal changes to existing post-training workflows.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Geometry Forcing: Marrying Video Diffusion and 3D Representation for Consistent World Modeling

Videos inherently represent 2D projections of a dynamic 3D world. However, our analysis suggests that video diffusion models trained solely on raw video data often fail to capture meaningful geometric-aware structure in their learned representations. To bridge the gap between video diffusion models and the underlying 3D nature of the physical world, we propose Geometry Forcing, a simple yet effective method that encourages video diffusion models to internalize 3D representations. Our key insight is to guide the model's intermediate representations toward geometry-aware structure by aligning them with features from a geometric foundation model. To this end, we introduce two complementary alignment objectives: Angular Alignment, which enforces directional consistency via cosine similarity, and Scale Alignment, which preserves scale-related information by regressing geometric features from normalized diffusion representations. We evaluate Geometry Forcing on both camera-view conditioned and action-conditioned video generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves visual quality and 3D consistency over the baseline methods. Project page: https://GeometryForcing.github.io.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Orchestrating Spatial Semantics via a Zone-Graph Paradigm for Intricate Indoor Scene Generation

Autonomous 3D indoor scene synthesis breaks down in non-convex rooms with tightly coupled spatial constraints. Data-driven generators lack topological priors for long-horizon planning, while iterative agents fragment semantics and become geometrically brittle. We present ZoneMaestro, a unified framework that shifts the paradigm from object-centric synthesis to Zone-Graph Orchestration. By internalizing a novel zone-based logic, ZoneMaestro translates high-level semantic intent into functional zones and topological constraints, enabling robust adaptation to diverse architectural forms. To support this, we construct Zone-Scene-10K, a large-scale dataset enriched with explicit Zone-Graph annotations. We further introduce an Alternating Alignment Strategy that cycles between reasoning internalization and Zone-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (Z-GRPO), effectively reconciling the tension between semantic richness and geometric validity without relying on external physics engines. To rigorously evaluate spatial intelligence beyond convex primitives, we formally define the task of Intricate Spatial Orchestration and release SCALE, a stress-test benchmark for irregular indoor scenarios with complex, dense spatial relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZoneMaestro resolves the density-safety dichotomy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both structural coherence and intent adherence.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

SAIL: Structure-Aware Interpretable Learning for Anatomy-Aligned Post-hoc Explanations in OCT

Optical coherence tomography (OCT), a commonly used retinal imaging modality, plays a central role in retinal disease diagnosis by providing high-resolution visualization of retinal layers. While deep learning (DL) has achieved expert-level accuracy in OCT-based retinal disease detection, its "black box" nature poses challenges for clinical adoption, where explainability is essential for clinical trust and regulatory approval. Existing post-hoc explainable AI (XAI) methods often struggle to delineate fine-grained lesion structures, respect anatomical boundaries, or suppress noise, limiting the trustworthiness of their explanations. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Structure-Aware Interpretable Learning (SAIL) framework that integrates retinal anatomical priors at the representation level and couples them with semantic features via a fusion design. Without modifying standard post-hoc explainability methods, this representation yields sharper and more anatomically aligned attribution maps. Comprehensive experiments on diverse OCT datasets demonstrate that our structure-aware method consistently enhances interpretability, producing clinically meaningful and anatomy-aware explanations. Ablation studies further show that strong interpretability requires both structural priors and semantic features, and that properly fusing the two is critical to achieve the best explanation quality. Together, these results highlight structure-aware representations as a key step toward reliable explainability in OCT.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

OphMAE: Bridging Volumetric and Planar Imaging with a Foundation Model for Adaptive Ophthalmological Diagnosis

The advent of foundation models has heralded a new era in medical artificial intelligence (AI), enabling the extraction of generalizable representations from large-scale unlabeled datasets. However, current ophthalmic AI paradigms are predominantly constrained to single-modality inference, thereby creating a dissonance with clinical practice where diagnosis relies on the synthesis of complementary imaging modalities. Furthermore, the deployment of high-performance AI in resource-limited settings is frequently impeded by the unavailability of advanced three-dimensional imaging hardware. Here, we present the Ophthalmic multimodal Masked Autoencoder (OphMAE), a multi-imaging foundation model engineered to synergize the volumetric depth of 3D Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) with the planar context of 2D en face OCT. By implementing a novel cross-modal fusion architecture and a unique adaptive inference mechanism, OphMAE was pre-trained on a massive dataset with of 183,875 paired OCT images derived from 32,765 patients. In a rigorous benchmark encompassing 17 diverse diagnostic tasks with 48,340 paired OCT images from 8,191 patients, the model demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, achieving an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.9% for Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) and 97.2% for Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), consistently surpassing existing single-modal and multimodal foundation models. Crucially, OphMAE exhibits robust engineering adaptability: it maintains high diagnostic accuracy, such as 93.7\% AUC for AMD, even when restricted to single-modality 2D inputs, and demonstrates exceptional data efficiency by retaining 95.7% AUC with as few as 500 labeled samples. This work establishes a scalable and adaptable framework for ophthalmic AI, ensuring robust performance across different tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Driving risk emerges from the required two-dimensional joint evasive acceleration

Most autonomous driving safety benchmarks use time-to-collision (TTC) to assess risk and guide safe behaviour. However, TTC-based methods treat risk as a one-dimensional closing problem, despite the inherently two-dimensional nature of collision avoidance, and therefore cannot faithfully capture risk or its evolution over time. Here, we report evasive acceleration (EA), a hyperparameter-free and physically interpretable two-dimensional paradigm for risk quantification. By evaluating all possible directions of collision avoidance, EA defines risk as the minimum magnitude of a constant relative acceleration vector required to alter the relative motion and make the interaction collision-free. Using interaction data from five open datasets and more than 600 real crashes, we derive percentile-based warning thresholds and show that EA provides the earliest statistically significant warning across all thresholds. Moreover, EA provides the best discrimination of eventual collision outcomes and improves information retention by 54.2-241.4% over all compared baselines. Adding EA to existing methods yields 17.5-95.5 times more information gain than adding existing methods to EA, indicating that EA captures much of the outcome-relevant information in existing methods while contributing substantial additional nonredundant information. Overall, EA better captures the structure of collision risk and provides a foundation for next-generation autonomous driving systems.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has traditionally focused on binary classification and often lacks the fine-grained categorization and explanatory reasoning required for transparent decision-making. To address these limitations, we propose Time-series Reasoning for Anomaly (Time-RA), a novel task that reformulates TSAD from a discriminative into a generative, reasoning-intensive paradigm. To facilitate this, we introduce RATs40K, the first real-world large-scale multimodal benchmark with ~40,000 samples across 10 domains, integrating raw time series, textual context, and visual plots with structured reasoning annotations. Extensive benchmarking shows that while supervised fine-tuning and visual representations boost diagnostic accuracy and reasoning consistency, performance varies across complex scenarios. Notably, fine-tuned models demonstrate strong "plug-and-play" transferability, outperforming traditional baselines on unseen real-world datasets. Our work establishes a foundation for interpretable, multimodal time series analysis. All code (https://github.com/yyysjz1997/Time-RA) and the RATs40K dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Time-RA/RATs40K) are fully open-sourced to facilitate future research.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search

LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering (MLE) predominantly rely on tree search, a form of gradient-free optimization that uses scalar validation scores to rank candidates. As LLM reasoning capabilities improve, exhaustive enumeration becomes increasingly inefficient compared to directed updates, analogous to how accurate gradients enable efficient descent over random search. We introduce Gome, an MLE agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. Gome maps structured diagnostic reasoning to gradient computation, success memory to momentum, and multi-trace execution to distributed optimization. Under a closed-world protocol that isolates architectural effects from external knowledge, Gome achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1\% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a restricted 12-hour budget on a single V100 GPU. Scaling experiments across 10 models reveal a critical crossover: with weaker models, tree search retains advantages by compensating for unreliable reasoning through exhaustive exploration; as reasoning capability strengthens, gradient-based optimization progressively outperforms, with the gap widening at frontier-tier models. Given the rapid advancement of reasoning-oriented LLMs, this positions gradient-based optimization as an increasingly favorable paradigm. We release our codebase and GPT-5 traces at https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Co-Evolving Latent Action World Models

Adapting pretrained video generation models into controllable world models via latent actions is a promising step towards creating generalist world models. The dominant paradigm adopts a two-stage approach that trains latent action model (LAM) and the world model separately, resulting in redundant training and limiting their potential for co-adaptation. A conceptually simple and appealing idea is to directly replace the forward dynamic model in LAM with a powerful world model and training them jointly, but it is non-trivial and prone to representational collapse. In this work, we propose CoLA-World, which for the first time successfully realizes this synergistic paradigm, resolving the core challenge in joint learning through a critical warm-up phase that effectively aligns the representations of the from-scratch LAM with the pretrained world model. This unlocks a co-evolution cycle: the world model acts as a knowledgeable tutor, providing gradients to shape a high-quality LAM, while the LAM offers a more precise and adaptable control interface to the world model. Empirically, CoLA-World matches or outperforms prior two-stage methods in both video simulation quality and downstream visual planning, establishing a robust and efficient new paradigm for the field.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Learning Additively Compositional Latent Actions for Embodied AI

Latent action learning infers pseudo-action labels from visual transitions, providing an approach to leverage internet-scale video for embodied AI. However, most methods learn latent actions without structural priors that encode the additive, compositional structure of physical motion. As a result, latents often entangle irrelevant scene details or information about future observations with true state changes and miscalibrate motion magnitude. We introduce Additively Compositional Latent Action Model (AC-LAM), which enforces scene-wise additive composition structure over short horizons on the latent action space. These AC constraints encourage simple algebraic structure in the latent action space~(identity, inverse, cycle consistency) and suppress information that does not compose additively. Empirically, AC-LAM learns more structured, motion-specific, and displacement-calibrated latent actions and provides stronger supervision for downstream policy learning, outperforming state-of-the-art LAMs across simulated and real-world tabletop tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Temporally Detailed Hypergraph Neural ODEs for Disease Progression Modeling

Disease progression modeling aims to characterize and predict how a patient's disease complications worsen over time based on longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). For diseases such as type 2 diabetes, accurate progression modeling can enhance patient sub-phenotyping and inform effective and timely interventions. However, the problem is challenging due to the need to learn continuous-time progression dynamics from irregularly sampled clinical events amid patient heterogeneity (e.g., different progression rates and pathways). Existing mechanistic and data-driven methods either lack adaptability to learn from real-world data or fail to capture complex continuous-time dynamics on progression trajectories. To address these limitations, we propose Temporally Detailed Hypergraph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (TD-HNODE), which represents disease progression on clinically recognized trajectories as a temporally detailed hypergraph and learns the continuous-time progression dynamics via a neural ODE framework. TD-HNODE contains a learnable TD-Hypergraph Laplacian that captures the interdependency of disease complication markers within both intra- and inter-progression trajectories. Experiments on two real-world clinical datasets demonstrate that TD-HNODE outperforms multiple baselines in modeling the progression of type 2 diabetes and related cardiovascular diseases.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Cerebra: A Multidisciplinary AI Board for Multimodal Dementia Characterization and Risk Assessment

Modern clinical practice increasingly depends on reasoning over heterogeneous, evolving, and incomplete patient data. Although recent advances in multimodal foundation models have improved performance on various clinical tasks, most existing models remain static, opaque, and poorly aligned with real-world clinical workflows. We present Cerebra, an interactive multi-agent AI team that coordinates specialized agents for EHR, clinical notes, and medical imaging analysis. These outputs are synthesized into a clinician-facing dashboard that combines visual analytics with a conversational interface, enabling clinicians to interrogate predictions and contextualize risk at the point of care. Cerebra supports privacy-preserving deployment by operating on structured representations and remains robust when modalities are incomplete. We evaluated Cerebra using a massive multi-institutional dataset spanning 3 million patients from four independent healthcare systems. Cerebra consistently outperformed both state-of-the-art single-modality models and large multimodal language model baselines. In dementia risk prediction, it achieved AUROCs up to 0.80, compared with 0.74 for the strongest single-modality model and 0.68 for language model baselines. For dementia diagnosis, it achieved an AUROC of 0.86, and for survival prediction, a C-index of 0.81. In a reader study with experienced physicians, Cerebra significantly improved expert performance, increasing accuracy by 17.5 percentage points in prospective dementia risk estimation. These results demonstrate Cerebra's potential for interpretable, robust decision support in clinical care.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

In-Context Compositional Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Accurate estimation of the Q-function is a central challenge in offline reinforcement learning. However, existing approaches often rely on a shared global Q-function, which is inadequate for capturing the compositional structure of tasks that consist of diverse subtasks. We propose In-context Compositional Q-Learning (ICQL), an offline RL framework that formulates Q-learning as a contextual inference problem and uses linear Transformers to adaptively infer local Q-functions from retrieved transitions without explicit subtask labels. Theoretically, we show that, under two assumptions -- linear approximability of the local Q-function and accurate inference of weights from retrieved context -- ICQL achieves a bounded approximation error for the Q-function and enables near-optimal policy extraction. Empirically, ICQL substantially improves performance in offline settings, achieving gains of up to 16.4% on kitchen tasks and up to 8.8% and 6.3% on MuJoCo and Adroit tasks, respectively. These results highlight the underexplored potential of in-context learning for robust and compositional value estimation and establish ICQL as a principled and effective framework for offline RL.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Efficient Document Parsing via Parallel Token Prediction

Document parsing, as a fundamental yet crucial vision task, is being revolutionized by vision-language models (VLMs). However, the autoregressive (AR) decoding inherent to VLMs creates a significant bottleneck, severely limiting parsing speed. In this paper, we propose Parallel-Token Prediction (PTP), a plugable, model-agnostic and simple-yet-effective method that enables VLMs to generate multiple future tokens in parallel with improved sample efficiency. Specifically, we insert some learnable tokens into the input sequence and design corresponding training objectives to equip the model with parallel decoding capabilities for document parsing. Furthermore, to support effective training, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline that efficiently produces large-scale, high-quality document parsing training data for VLMs. Extensive experiments on OmniDocBench and olmOCR-bench demonstrate that our method not only significantly improves decoding speed (1.6x-2.2x) but also reduces model hallucinations and exhibits strong generalization abilities.

cs.CL↗