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Jianzong Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Jianzong Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

FASA: Feedback-Aware Sampling Adaptation for Efficient Diffusion-Based VLA Models

Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance in embodied tasks, but their iterative sampling imposes heavy computational and memory-access cost, blocking real-time deployment on edge platforms. Existing acceleration methods either require expensive training (e.g., distillation, flow matching) or degrade perception via statically scheduled pruning and caching, ignoring the dynamic workload variance of robotic interactions. This paper presents FASA (Feedback-Aware Sampling Adaptation), a training-free runtime framework that treats real-time multimodal feedback as a control signal for the denoising pipeline: an interaction-driven range adaptor modulates the global sampling-step budget based on visual and gripper-force feedback, and a proprioception-aware step adaptor pinpoints the optimized step within the adapted range. This co-designed framework allows the underlying hardware architecture to adaptively match the workload demands of different execution phases. Comparative evaluations across several benchmarks show that the inference speed can be increased by up to 1.45$\times$ while maintaining competitive success rates, providing a novel dynamic runtime architecture paradigm for deploying heavy generative embodied AI workloads onto resource-constrained computing platforms.

cs.RO↗

ProbPlug: A Plugin Uncertainty Network for Reliable Confidence in LLM Binary Classification

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a broad range of classification settings, yet the reliability of their predictions remains a major obstacle to deployment in high-stakes scenarios. Although confidence estimation for LLMs has been widely studied, confidence calibration for LLM-based classification remains underexplored. We introduce ProbPlug, a lightweight confidence estimation framework for LLM-based binary classification, which predicts whether an output is correct using internal token features extracted from a frozen LLM. ProbPlug employs a self-attention module to aggregate hidden representations and can be integrated into the original inference pipeline without modifying the base model. Experiments across multiple tasks involving both text-based and multimodal large models show that ProbPlug provides more reliable confidence estimates, improves classification performance with negligible additional overhead, and exhibits strong generalization across tasks. These results indicate that ProbPlug serves as a practical solution for confidence estimation in LLM-based classification. Our code is publicly available at Github.

cs.CL↗

DIST-FL: Enhancing Security for TEE-based Aggregation in Federated Learning

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)-aided federated learning protocols emerge as promising solutions to counter server-side adversaries and ensure the trustworthiness of the server. In this paper, we dissect existing protocols and demonstrate that server-side adversaries can still manipulate client selection and replay aggregation to compromise system robustness and privacy, by exploiting TEE limitations, i.e., state rollback and I/O manipulation. To this end, we present DIST-FL, a distributed system of servers guarded by multiple TEEs forming an append-only ledger for privacy-preserved, robust FL aggregation. Specifically, DIST-FL ensures operation linearizability to thwart state rollback attacks and incorporates inputs from reliable servers to mitigate I/O manipulation threats. We implement DIST-FL and conduct evaluations in WAN settings. Experimental results demonstrate that DIST-FL can effectively counter the proposed attacks and match the single-TEE's performance while offering a 6x throughput boost over its counterparts, leveraging TEE's computational advantages.

cs.CR↗

ODYSSEY: Reestablishing Confidentiality in Confidential Blockchain via Delegated Execution

Confidential blockchains leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have garnered extensive attention for transaction confidentiality. In this paper, we first taxonomize two classes of attacks against confidential blockchains, i.e., execution-inference and execution-replay attacks, which exploit TEEs' long-lasting side-channel and state-continuity issues to compromise the confidentiality of existing consortium blockchains. Then, we present ODYSSEY, a confidential blockchain that efficiently mitigates these attacks. The core innovations of ODYSSEY are the following: (1) Its delegation model: clients delegate transaction execution to their designated trustees, while other participants synchronize only the execution results, which significantly reduces the attack surface while preserving confidentiality and system performance. (2) Two novel techniques to improve ODYSSEY's efficiency and security: location-aware concurrent execution and delegation failure handler. Finally, we develop a prototype of ODYSSEY on FISCO BCOS, an enterprise-grade consortium blockchain platform. We have conducted various experiments, and our evaluation results show that in a WAN environment with 3 nodes, ODYSSEY can achieve about 4k throughput while keeping latency as low as 0.4-0.5s.

cs.CR↗

DIVA: Harnessing the Representation Divergence in Unified Multimodal Models for Mutual Reinforcement

Unified Multimodal models (UMMs) built on a single architecture have shown impressive performance in both understanding and generation. We identify a fundamental challenge that lies in inductive biases induced by distinct supervision signals: generation branch prefers high-fidelity, fine-grained representations capable of reconstruction, while the understanding favours semantically discriminative embeddings that remain invariant to task-irrelevant factors. Consequently, optimizing these complementary but non-equivalent objectives within a monolithic backbone leads to mutual impairment instead of enhancement. In this paper, we first analyze the root cause of this interference in unified backbones and reveal a complementary structure in their internal representations. Motivated by the observation, we propose DIVA, a self-improved post-training framework that transforms the representation divergence into interior synergy. By explicitly factorizing the visual representation into shared and unique components based on two complementary information flow, DIVA enables both the understanding and generation branches to achieve beneficial transferring while preserving the integrity of unique information from cross-flow interference via mutual information estimation. Despite its generality, our method consistently achieves improvements across visual understanding (+7.82%) and generation (+8.46%). The official code is available at: https://github.com/Jayyy-H/DIVA.

cs.CV↗

WindowQuant: Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization based on Window-Level Similarity for VLMs Inference Optimization

Recently, video language models (VLMs) have been applied in various fields. However, the visual token sequence of the VLM is too long, which may cause intolerant inference latency and GPU memory usage. Existing methods propose mixed-precision quantization to the key-value (KV) cache in VLMs based on token granularity, which is time-consuming in the search process and hardware inefficient during computation. This paper introduces a novel approach called WindowQuant, which employs window-adaptive mixed-precision quantization to optimize the KV cache. WindowQuant consists of two modules: window-level quantization search and window-level KV cache computation. Window-level quantization search quickly determines the optimal bit-width configuration of the KV cache windows based on the similarity scores between the corresponding visual token windows and the text prompt, maintaining the model accuracy. Furthermore, window-level KV cache computation reorders the KV cache windows before quantization, avoiding the hardware inefficiency caused by mixed-precision quantization in inference computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WindowQuant outperforms state-of-the-art VLM models and KV cache quantization methods on various datasets.

cs.CV↗

Evolvable Embodied Agent for Robotic Manipulation via Long Short-Term Reflection and Optimization

Achieving general-purpose robotics requires empowering robots to adapt and evolve based on their environment and feedback. Traditional methods face limitations such as extensive training requirements, difficulties in cross-task generalization, and lack of interpretability. Prompt learning offers new opportunities for self-evolving robots without extensive training, but simply reflecting on past experiences. However, extracting meaningful insights from task successes and failures remains a challenge. To this end, we propose the evolvable embodied agent (EEAgent) framework, which leverages large vision-language models (VLMs) for better environmental interpretation and policy planning. To enhance reflection on past experiences, we propose a long short-term reflective optimization (LSTRO) mechanism that dynamically refines prompts based on both past experiences and newly learned lessons, facilitating continuous self-evolution, thereby enhancing overall task success rates. Evaluations on six VIMA-Bench tasks reveal that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art, notably outperforming baselines in complex scenarios.

cs.RO↗

From Inheritance to Saturation: Disentangling the Evolution of Visual Redundancy for Architecture-Aware MLLM Inference Acceleration

High-resolution Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face prohibitive computational costs during inference due to the explosion of visual tokens. Existing acceleration strategies, such as token pruning or layer sparsity, suffer from severe "backbone dependency", performing well on Vicuna or Mistral architectures (e.g., LLaVA) but causing significant performance degradation when transferred to architectures like Qwen. To address this, we leverage truncated matrix entropy to uncover a universal three-stage inference lifecycle, decoupling visual redundancy into universal Intrinsic Visual Redundancy (IVR) and architecture-dependent Secondary Saturation Redundancy (SSR). Guided by this insight, we propose HalfV, a framework that first mitigates IVR via a unified pruning strategy and then adaptively handles SSR based on its specific manifestation. Experiments demonstrate that HalfV achieves superior efficiency-performance trade-offs across diverse backbones. Notably, on Qwen25-VL, it retains 96.8\% performance at a 4.1$\times$ FLOPs speedup, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/civilizwa/HalfV.

cs.CV↗

VLA-InfoEntropy: A Training-Free Vision-Attention Information Entropy Approach for Vision-Language-Action Models Inference Acceleration and Success

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate visual perception, language understanding, and action decision-making for cross-modal semantic alignment, exhibiting broad application potential. However, the joint processing of high-dimensional visual features, complex linguistic inputs, and continuous action sequences incurs significant computational overhead and low inference efficiency, thereby hindering real-time deployment and reliability. To address this issue, we use image entropy to quantify the grayscale distribution characteristics of each visual token and introduce attention entropy to capture the distribution of attention scores over task-related text. Visual entropy identifies texture-rich or structurally informative regions, while attention entropy pinpoints semantically relevant tokens. Combined with timestep information, these metrics enable a dynamic transition strategy that shifts the model's focus from global visual features to attention-guided local informative regions. Thus, the resulting VLA-InfoEntropy method integrates spatial, semantic, and temporal cues to reduce redundancy while preserving critical content. Extensive experiments show that our method reduces inference parameters, accelerates inference speed, and outperforms existing approaches.

cs.CV↗

Confusion-Aware In-Context-Learning for Vision-Language Models in Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly improved the generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation. However, VLM-based systems often suffer from a lack of robustness, leading to unpredictable errors, particularly in scenarios involving confusable objects. Our preliminary analysis reveals that these failures are mainly caused by shortcut learning problem inherently in VLMs, limiting their ability to accurately distinguish between confusable features. To this end, we propose Confusion-Aware In-Context Learning (CAICL), a method that enhances VLM performance in confusable scenarios for robotic manipulation. The approach begins with confusion localization and analysis, identifying potential sources of confusion. This information is then used as a prompt for the VLM to focus on features most likely to cause misidentification. Extensive experiments on the VIMA-Bench show that CAICL effectively addresses the shortcut learning issue, achieving a 85.5\% success rate and showing good stability across tasks with different degrees of generalization.

cs.RO↗

Vista: Scene-Aware Optimization for Streaming Video Question Answering under Post-Hoc Queries

Streaming video question answering (Streaming Video QA) poses distinct challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as video frames arrive sequentially and user queries can be issued at arbitrary time points. Existing solutions relying on fixed-size memory or naive compression often suffer from context loss or memory overflow, limiting their effectiveness in long-form, real-time scenarios. We present Vista, a novel framework for scene-aware streaming video QA that enables efficient and scalable reasoning over continuous video streams. The innovation of Vista can be summarized in three aspects: (1) scene-aware segmentation, where Vista dynamically clusters incoming frames into temporally and visually coherent scene units; (2) scene-aware compression, where each scene is compressed into a compact token representation and stored in GPU memory for efficient index-based retrieval, while full-resolution frames are offloaded to CPU memory; and (3) scene-aware recall, where relevant scenes are selectively recalled and reintegrated into the model input upon receiving a query, enabling both efficiency and completeness. Vista is model-agnostic and integrates seamlessly with a variety of vision-language backbones, enabling long-context reasoning without compromising latency or memory efficiency. Extensive experiments on StreamingBench demonstrate that Vista achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a strong baseline for real-world streaming video understanding.

cs.CV↗

Attention-weighted Centered Kernel Alignment for Knowledge Distillation in Large Audio-Language Models Applied to Speech Emotion Recognition

The emergence of Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) has advanced Speech Emotion Recognition (SER), but their size limits deployment in resource-constrained environments. While Knowledge Distillation is effective for LALM compression, existing methods remain underexplored in distilling the cross-modal projection module (Projector), and often struggle with alignment due to differences in feature dimensions. We propose PL-Distill, a KD framework that combines Projector-Level Distillation (PDist) to align audio embeddings and Logits-Level Distillation (LDist) to align output logits. PDist introduces Attention-weighted Centered Kernel Alignment, a novel approach we propose to highlight important time steps and address dimension mismatches. Meanwhile, LDist minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between teacher and student logits from audio and text modalities. On IEMOCAP, RAVDESS, and SAVEE, PL-Distill compresses an 8.4B-parameter teacher to a compact 1.1B-parameter student, consistently outperforming the teacher, state-of-the-art pretrained models, and other KD baselines across all metrics.

cs.SD↗

From Knowing to Doing Precisely: A General Self-Correction and Termination Framework for VLA models

While vision-language-action (VLA) models for embodied agents integrate perception, reasoning, and control, they remain constrained by two critical weaknesses: first, during grasping tasks, the action tokens generated by the language model often exhibit subtle spatial deviations from the target object, resulting in grasp failures; second, they lack the ability to reliably recognize task completion, which leads to redundant actions and frequent timeout errors. To address these challenges and enhance robustness, we propose a lightweight, training-free framework, VLA-SCT. This framework operates as a self-correcting control loop, combining data-driven action refinement with conditional logic for termination. Consequently, compared to baseline approaches, our method achieves consistent improvements across all datasets in the LIBERO benchmark, significantly increasing the success rate of fine manipulation tasks and ensuring accurate task completion, thereby promoting the deployment of more reliable VLA agents in complex, unstructured environments.

cs.RO↗

CARE: Multi-Task Pretraining for Latent Continuous Action Representation in Robot Control

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise for robot control, but their dependence on action supervision limits scalability and generalization. To address this challenge, we introduce CARE, a novel framework designed to train VLA models for robotic task execution. Unlike existing methods that depend on action annotations during pretraining, CARE eliminates the need for explicit action labels by leveraging only video-text pairs. These weakly aligned data sources enable the model to learn continuous latent action representations through a newly designed multi-task pretraining objective. During fine-tuning, a small set of labeled data is used to train the action head for control. Experimental results across various simulation tasks demonstrate CARE's superior success rate, semantic interpretability, and ability to avoid shortcut learning. These results underscore CARE's scalability, interpretability, and effectiveness in robotic control with weak supervision.

cs.RO↗

MIRRORTALK: Forging Personalized Avatars Via Disentangled Style and Hierarchical Motion Control

Synthesizing personalized talking faces that uphold and highlight a speaker's unique style while maintaining lip-sync accuracy remains a significant challenge. A primary limitation of existing approaches is the intrinsic confounding of speaker-specific talking style and semantic content within facial motions, which prevents the faithful transfer of a speaker's unique persona to arbitrary speech. In this paper, we propose MirrorTalk, a generative framework based on a conditional diffusion model, combined with a Semantically-Disentangled Style Encoder (SDSE) that can distill pure style representations from a brief reference video. To effectively utilize this representation, we further introduce a hierarchical modulation strategy within the diffusion process. This mechanism guides the synthesis by dynamically balancing the contributions of audio and style features across distinct facial regions, ensuring both precise lip-sync accuracy and expressive full-face dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MirrorTalk achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in terms of lip-sync accuracy and personalization preservation.

cs.CV↗

Triage: Hierarchical Visual Budgeting for Efficient Video Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face significant computational challenges in video processing due to massive data redundancy, which creates prohibitively long token sequences. To address this, we introduce Triage, a training-free, plug-and-play framework that reframes video reasoning as a resource allocation problem via hierarchical visual budgeting. Its first stage, Frame-Level Budgeting, identifies keyframes by evaluating their visual dynamics and relevance, generating a strategic prior based on their importance scores. Guided by this prior, the second stage, Token-Level Budgeting, allocates tokens in two phases: it first secures high-relevance Core Tokens, followed by diverse Context Tokens selected with an efficient batched Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Triage improves inference speed and reduces memory footprint, while maintaining or surpassing the performance of baselines and other methods on various video reasoning benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

MiTa: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework with Memory-integrated and Task Allocation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have substantially accelerated the development of embodied agents. LLM-based multi-agent systems mitigate the inefficiency of single agents in complex tasks. However, they still suffer from issues such as memory inconsistency and agent behavioral conflicts. To address these challenges, we propose MiTa, a hierarchical memory-integrated task allocative framework to enhance collaborative efficiency. MiTa organizes agents into a manager-member hierarchy, where the manager incorporates additional allocation and summary modules that enable (1) global task allocation and (2) episodic memory integration. The allocation module enables the manager to allocate tasks from a global perspective, thereby avoiding potential inter-agent conflicts. The summary module, triggered by task progress updates, performs episodic memory integration by condensing recent collaboration history into a concise summary that preserves long-horizon context. By combining task allocation with episodic memory, MiTa attains a clearer understanding of the task and facilitates globally consistent task distribution. Experimental results confirm that MiTa achieves superior efficiency and adaptability in complex multi-agent cooperation over strong baseline methods.

cs.ET↗

Federated Domain Generalization with Domain-specific Soft Prompts Generation

Prompt learning has become an efficient paradigm for adapting CLIP to downstream tasks. Compared with traditional fine-tuning, prompt learning optimizes a few parameters yet yields highly competitive results, especially appealing in federated learning for computational efficiency. engendering domain shift among clients and posing a formidable challenge for downstream-task adaptation. Existing federated domain generalization (FDG) methods based on prompt learning typically learn soft prompts from training samples, replacing manually designed prompts to enhance the generalization ability of federated models. However, these learned prompts exhibit limited diversity and tend to ignore information from unknown domains. We propose a novel and effective method from a generative perspective for handling FDG tasks, namely federated domain generalization with domain-specific soft prompts generation (FedDSPG). Specifically, during training, we introduce domain-specific soft prompts (DSPs) for each domain and integrate content and domain knowledge into the generative model among clients. In the inference phase, the generator is utilized to obtain DSPs for unseen target domains, thus guiding downstream tasks in unknown domains. Comprehensive evaluations across several public datasets confirm that our method outperforms existing strong baselines in FDG, achieving state-of-the-art results.

cs.CV↗