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Jiaqi Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiaqi Tang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

LLM-based Agents for Forecasting and Prediction: Methods, Training, Evaluation, and Applications

Large language models (LLMs) now support forecasting systems that combine language-based reasoning with temporal data, evidence retrieval, external tools, and iterative prediction. We investigate LLM-based forecasting agents, meaning systems in which a language model contributes to a scored prediction about a future or currently unobserved target. We organize architectures into three groups. Standalone LLM workflows operate on encoded time series or event context. Tool- and retrieval-augmented agents incorporate external evidence. Hybrid systems pair LLMs with statistical or foundation models. We then review training methods and evaluation protocols. We examine negative as well as positive evidence, including sensitivity to small input perturbations, ablations in which the LLM component does not improve accuracy, and benchmark gains that may reflect contamination instead of temporal reasoning. We cover applications in finance, weather, health, energy, and operations, and we summarize the benchmarks and datasets used for evaluation. The evidence indicates that measurement is a central limitation. Future work requires calibration under distribution shift, contamination-resistant live evaluation, explicit reporting of cost and accuracy together, and methods for handling feedback between deployed forecasts and the outcomes being forecast.

cs.AI

HeatTok: Enhancing Remote Sensing Image Understanding via Thermodiffusion-based Tokenization

Current visual tokenizers in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) predominantly rely on patch-based partitioning, which causes severe semantic mixture and object fragmentation in remote sensing imagery due to the irregular contours of geo-objects. Moreover, existing adaptive methods struggle to extract precise object-level tokens and lack dedicated geometric positional encodings for irregular regions. In this paper, we propose HeatTok, a semantic-aware tokenizer driven by thermodiffusion aggregation. Inspired by the physical principles of heat conduction, HeatTok adaptively merges adjacent homogeneous regions to generate semantically independent, object-aligned irregular tokens. To enable MLLMs to perceive these irregular shapes, we design the Gaussian Multimodal Rotary Positional Embedding (G-MRoPE), which models token spatial distributions via 2D Gaussians and explicitly injects center, scale, and orientation cues. Extensive evaluations on the VRSBench and EarthVQA datasets demonstrate that HeatTok effectively preserves object-level semantic integrity and achieves state-of-the-art performance under a reasonable token budget. The code is available: https://github.com/YingyingYan1/HeatTok.

cs.CV

Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation via Agentic Enhancement and Semantic Repair

Identity-preserving video generation aims to synthesize videos that follow natural-language instructions while maintaining the visual identity of a given subject. Recent commercial video generation models have achieved strong visual quality and motion realism, but they still suffer from identity drift, incomplete instruction following, and missing visual details under complex prompts. Since these models are usually closed-source black boxes, directly improving them through parameter optimization is often infeasible. We therefore propose Agentic Enhancement and Semantic Repair (AESR), a lightweight enhancement framework for identity-preserving video generation. To improve prompt construction before generation and mitigate the above failures, AESR introduces a global agentic prompt enhancement module. This module learns model-specific prompting formats from official documentation, acquires human-centered video generation priors from human-interaction data, and accumulates test-domain identity-preserving generation experience into a reusable playbook through an agentic loop. To further repair errors in videos generated with enhanced prompts, AESR introduces a sample-level visual semantic repair module, which uses a VLM to locate erroneous video segments and design repair instructions, edits selected frames into explicit visual references, and guides a video editing model to fix local semantic or identity-related errors. We also adopt a lightweight Mixture-of-Experts selection strategy to choose reliable outputs from different generation and refinement paths. Under the official evaluation protocol of the ACM MM 2026 Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge, our system MIPL\_Video ranked first in Track 1, demonstrating the effectiveness of AESR for practical identity-preserving video generation. The code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/AESR.

cs.CV

Explainable Deepfake Detection with Feature-robust Augmentation and Evidence-grounded Explanation Optimization

Explainable deepfake detection extends binary classification by requiring models to not only predict authenticity but also provide interpretable justifications. This expanded scope is critical in practice, where users like forensic analysts need insight into the rationale behind the detection. Despite advancements, current approaches suffer from two critical deficiencies: (1)vulnerability to image quality degradation: detection accuracy plummets on low-quality samples, while naive augmentation strategies may induce feature drift and impair performance as diversity expands. (2) factually flawed explanations: explanation models may omit manipulation evidence or hallucinate irrelevant details, undermining interpretability. To address it, we propose a framework with two innovations. For robust deepfake detection, we introduce Feature-robust Augmentation, which comprises diversified degradation-aware augmentation strategies, and a supervised contrastive learning pattern paired with a mean-teacher architecture that stabilizes features against augmentations through consistency constraints. For explanation, we devise an evidence-grounded preference optimization process that guides model to prioritize genuine manipulation traces by learning from chosen-rejected explanation pairs, where rejected samples are constructed via evidence omission or irrelevant information injection. The proposed approach wins the first place in ACM Multimedia 2026 Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge.The code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/EDD.git.

cs.CV

Wrinkling in Selected Polymer Thin Films Induced by Combined Ion Beam and Humidity Exposure

This study investigates ion beam sputtering (IBS)-induced surface wrinkling phenomena in three polymers with varying hydrophilicity: poly-hydroxy-ethyl-methacrylate (pHEMA), poly-4-vinyl pyridine (p4VP), and poly-2,4,6,8-tetramethyl-2,4,6,8-tetravinylcyclotetrasiloxane (pV4D4). It is observed that pHEMA and p4VP films wrinkle only when exposed to ion bombardment and subsequent water vapor exposure. No wrinkling is observed in pV4D4 under these same conditions. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) are performed before IBS, after IBS, and after exposure to humidity. XPS shows that IBS drives chemical changes within the surface layer, creating a graphitized film at the surface. For the polymer films that exhibit wrinkling (pHEMA and p4VP), XPS and FTIR indicate water absorption in both the surface and the bulk of the films, resulting in swelling. We conjecture that the formation of wrinkles arises from this swelling being mechanically constrained by the rigid underlying silicon substrate and the stiff graphitized surface layer. In contrast, the absence of wrinkle formation in pV4D4 under the same experimental conditions can be attributed to its comparatively low water absorption and the correspondingly limited swelling response.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Remember-R1: Mitigating Long-Context Visual Forgetting through Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly rely on long chain-of-thought reasoning for complex tasks. However, as reasoning sequences lengthen, models may gradually rely less on visual evidence and more on accumulated textual context, leading to visual forgetting. Existing approaches do not directly constrain how visual evidence is used and maintained along the original reasoning trajectory, leaving long-context visual forgetting insufficiently addressed. To address this issue, we propose Remember-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that mitigates long-context visual forgetting by applying process-level supervision directly on the original reasoning trajectory. Specifically, Remember-R1 introduces rewards that encourage broader coverage of matched visual keywords, stronger persistence of visual dependence in later reasoning steps, and greater focus on question-relevant image regions. Experiments across multiple model scales and diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Remember-R1 consistently improves reasoning performance. Additional analyses further show that it slows the decline of visual attention during generation, supporting its effectiveness in mitigating long-context visual forgetting.

cs.CV

Nesterov acceleration in optimizing over probability measures

Optimization over probability measures has become an increasingly important paradigm in modern machine learning, scientific computing, and uncertainty quantification. Motivated by Nesterov's accelerated gradient method in Euclidean space, we develop Heavy-ball and Nesterov acceleration methods over the probability measure space $\mathcal{P}_2$ and establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees that match their Euclidean counterparts. In particular, we derive convergence rates with respect to both the number of iterations and the number of particles used to represent the underlying probability distributions. Extending accelerated optimization from Euclidean space to probability measures is challenging. The natural notion of momentum requires concepts such as tangent bundles of the set of probability space and they are hard to operate numerically. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce two complementary lifting procedures. The first lifts probability measures to phase space through a Hamiltonian formulation, introducing momentum variables into the dynamics. The second lifts probability measures to a common Hilbert space, restoring the linear structure required for convergence analysis while simultaneously yielding executable particle dynamics. Together, these two complementary lifting procedures provide a systematic methodology for designing, analyzing, and implementing momentum-based accelerated optimization methods over probability measure spaces.

math.OC

SceneActBench: Can Agents Act on the 3D Scenes They See?

Vision-language model (VLM) agents increasingly use tools to act on 3D scenes rather than only describe them. Existing 3D benchmarks score textual responses or single-object operations, leaving agent action on complete multi-object 3D scenes under evaluated. We present SceneActBench, a benchmark for visually conditioned action across five 3D tasks under a unified agent-environment loop. Given PNG images or sampled video frames and, where applicable, supplied 3D assets, an agent acts on a 3D environment. We evaluate each final output against hidden ground truth with task-specific geometric metrics. SceneActBench comprises five tasks built from 210 source instances, yielding 520 task cases including paired input conditions. Every task runs through one fixed agent loop to keep the comparison fair. Across eleven proprietary VLM configurations, Overall scores span 38.6-50.2, and none performs consistently well across tasks. We further analyse where and how failures manifest.

cs.AI

IQA-T1: Tool-based Visual Evidence Reasoning for Image Quality Assessment

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) in open-world environments remains challenging due to limited generalization and interpretability. Recent approaches based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduce textual reasoning for quality prediction, yet their judgments rely heavily on semantically biased internal representations, making them insensitive to low-level perceptual degradations. We propose IQA-T1, a tool-based visual evidence reasoning framework that augments MLLM reasoning with explicit perceptual observations. During inference, the model autonomously invokes specialized analysis tools to generate structured visual evidence, such as noise residual maps, gradient statistics, and frequency spectra, which are progressively integrated into the reasoning process. To support this paradigm, we construct Q-Tool, a dataset containing 11k multimodal reasoning chains grounded in tool-generated evidence. Extensive experiments on seven IQA benchmarks show that IQA-T1 achieves the best overall performance across datasets while producing interpretable and evidence-grounded quality assessments. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zibuyu-02/IQA-T1.

cs.CV

Predictive Divergence Masks for LLM RL

Reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs) typically relies on trust-region masks to stabilize off-policy updates. The dominant PPO-style approach uses the sampled-token importance ratio for two criteria: a proximity criterion, which asks whether the policy has moved too far from the behavior policy, and a direction criterion, which asks whether the update pushes it farther away. Recent work DPPO improves the proximity criterion by replacing PPO's ratio-based test with a probability divergence between the behavior and training policies. However, its direction criterion is still inherited from PPO. A token can be masked only when the sampled-token importance ratio moves away from one. We observe that this ratio-based direction criterion is a single-sample proxy that can disagree in sign with the change of the divergence that defines the proximity criterion. We therefore propose the predictive divergence mask, which asks whether the next policy-gradient step will increase or decrease the same divergence used by the trust region. For the discrete softmax policies used in LLM RL, we derive this prediction in closed form. Because production rollout engines expose only a truncated (top-K) view of the vocabulary, we develop two lightweight top-$K$ estimators for this prediction. Detailed analysis shows the divergence-based direction is better aligned with the realized change of the divergence than the sampled ratio, and the resulting masks improve RL training across model scales and precision settings.

cs.LG

Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation for 3D Medical Vision Foundation Models

The growing number of medical vision foundation models highlights the need for effective model selection. However, mainstream selection methods rely on exhaustive fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. Most of the existing Transferability Estimation (TE) metrics are primarily designed for image-level classification. They fail to preserve spatial relationships and fine-grained boundary details, which are crucial for the segmentation task. Additionally, while image-level tasks typically process a single feature vector per input, dense prediction tasks in 3D medical imaging require voxel-wise evaluation against dense annotations. To bridge these gaps, we propose a \textit{non-parametric, topology-driven} framework that estimates transferability directly from the alignment between the sparse 1-skeleton graph of dense features and semantic labels via Minimum Spanning Trees (MST). We decouple the alignment into two complementary geometric scales: Local Boundary-Aware Topological Consistency (LBTC) to assess boundary separability, where we prove that the MST leakage rate serves as a finite-sample lower bound on the Bayes error; and Global Representation Topology Divergence (GRTD) to evaluate the overall anatomical layout. Crucially, we formally justify a counterintuitive mechanism: Although without fine-tuning, the randomly initialized segmentation decoder acts as a topology-preserving spatial projector, reducing the variance of pairwise distance estimates and stabilizing global alignment evaluation. Fused via a task-adaptive gating mechanism, these dual metrics adapt to diverse clinical complexities. Evaluated on a large-scale benchmark of 114,000 3D medical volumes across diverse anatomical tasks, our topological framework achieves state-of-the-art transferability estimation with an average weighted Kendall (outperforming by 0.36) while accelerating evaluation by 56 times.

cs.CV

Quantum Simulation of Stokes Flow via Schr\"odingerisation and Artificial Compressibility

Simulating incompressible Stokes flow is essential for studies in microfluidics and low-Reynolds number hydrodynamics. However, the computational cost of resolving the associated saddle-point problem grows prohibitively with the dimensionality of the problem. In this work, we present a quantum algorithm based on the Schr\"odingerisation technique for the Stokes equations, incorporating an artificial compressibility regularization. The core of our approach is the design of an explicit quantum circuit that encodes the resulting regularized system. The artificial compressibility formulation provides a unified framework for the system, which is then efficiently mapped to a quantum circuit via the Schr\"odingerisation procedure. A rigorous complexity analysis demonstrates the quantum computational advantage of our algorithms in high-dimensional settings, notably an exponential speedup in problem dimensionality. The validity and scalability of the proposed method are corroborated by numerical simulations performed on Qiskit.

math.NA

Robust-U1: Can MLLMs Self-Recover Corrupted Visual Content for Robust Understanding?

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in visual understanding, yet their performance degrades significantly under real-world visual corruptions. While existing robustness enhancement approaches exist, they are limited: black-box feature alignment lacks interpretability, and white-box text-based reasoning cannot restore lost pixel-level details. This work investigates a fundamental research question: Can MLLMs recover corrupted visual content by themselves? To address this, we propose Robust-U1, a novel framework that equips MLLMs with explicit visual self-recovery capability for robust understanding. The approach comprises three core stages: supervised fine-tuning for initial reconstruction, reinforcement learning with dual rewards (pixel-level SSIM and semantic-level CLIP similarity) for aligning high visual quality, and multimodal reasoning that jointly considers both the corrupted input and the recovered image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Robust-U1 achieves state-of-the-art robustness on the real-world corruption benchmark and maintains superior performance under adversarial corruptions on general VQA benchmarks. Analysis confirms that high-quality visual recovery directly enhances reasoning performance, establishing self-recovery as a critical mechanism for robust visual understanding. The source code is available at https://github.com/jqtangust/Robust-U1.

cs.CV

Response-G1: Explicit Scene Graph Modeling for Proactive Streaming Video Understanding

Proactive streaming video understanding requires Video-LLMs to decide when to respond as a video unfolds, a task where existing methods often fall short due to their implicit, query-agnostic modeling of visual evidence. We introduce Response-G1, a novel framework that establishes explicit, structured alignment between the accumulated video evidence and the query's expected response conditions via scene graphs. The framework operates in three fine-tuning-free stages: (1) online query-guided scene graph generation from streaming clips; (2) memory-based retrieval of the most semantically relevant historical scene graphs; and (3) retrieval-augmented trigger prompting for per-frame "silence/response" decisions. By grounding both evidence and conditions in a shared graph representation, Response-G1 achieves more interpretable and accurate response timing decisions. Experimental results on established benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method in both proactive and reactive tasks, validating the advantage of explicit scene graph modeling and retrieval in streaming video understanding.

cs.CV

Quasiperiodic Elliptic Operators: Projection Method and Convergence Analysis

Quasiperiodic elliptic operators (QEOs) serve as fundamental models in both mathematics and physics, as exemplified by their role in the numerical modeling of one-dimensional photonic quasicrystals. However, distinct from periodic elliptic operators, approximating eigenpairs for QEOs poses significant challenges, particularly in capturing the full spectral structure (notably the continuous spectrum) and deriving convergence guarantees in the absence of compactness. In this paper, we develop a high-accuracy numerical method to compute eigenpairs of QEOs based on the projection method, which embeds quasiperiodic operators into a higher-dimensional periodic torus. To address the non-compactness issue, we construct a directional-derivative Hilbert space along irrational manifolds of a high-dimensional torus and characterize operators equivalent to QEOs within this space. By integrating spectral theory for non-compact operators into the Babu\v{s}ka-Osborn eigenproblem framework, we establish rigorous convergence analysis and prove that our method achieves spectral accuracy. Numerical experiments validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method, including a one-dimensional photonic quasicrystal and two- and three-dimensional QEOs.

math.NA

Fake It Right: Injecting Anatomical Logic into Synthetic Supervised Pre-training for Medical Segmentation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in 3D medical segmentation but require massive annotated datasets. While Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) mitigates this using unlabeled data, it still faces strict privacy and logistical barriers. Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative by pre-training on synthetic mathematical primitives. However, a critical semantic gap limits its efficacy: generic shapes lack the morphological fidelity, fixed spatial layouts, and inter-organ relationships of real anatomy, preventing models from learning essential global structural priors. To bridge this gap, we propose an Anatomy-Informed Synthetic Supervised Pre-training framework unifying FDSL's infinite scalability with anatomical realism. We replace basic primitives with a lightweight shape bank with de-identified, label-only segmentation masks from 5 subjects. Furthermore, we introduce a structure-aware sequential placement strategy to govern the patch synthesis process. Instead of random placement, we enforce physiological plausibility using spatial anchors for correct localization and a topological graph to manage inter-organ interactions (e.g., preventing impossible overlaps). Extensive experiments on BTCV and MSD datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FDSL baselines and SSL methods by 1.74\% and up to 1.66\%, while exhibiting a robust scaling effect where performance improves with increased synthetic data volume. This provides a data-efficient, privacy-compliant solution for medical segmentation. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV

The Texture-Shape Dilemma: Boundary-Safe Synthetic Generation for 3D Medical Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have revolutionized medical image analysis, yet their data-hungry nature clashes with the scarcity and privacy constraints of clinical archives. Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL) has emerged as a promising solution to this bottleneck, synthesizing infinite annotated samples from mathematical formulas without utilizing real patient data. However, existing FDSL paradigms rely on simple geometric shapes with homogeneous intensities, creating a substantial gap by neglecting tissue textures and noise patterns inherent in modalities like CT and MRI. In this paper, we identify a critical optimization conflict termed boundary aliasing: when high-frequency synthetic textures are naively added, they corrupt the image gradient signals necessary for learning structural boundaries, causing the model to fail in delineating real anatomical margins. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Physics-inspired Spatially-Decoupled Synthesis framework. Our approach orthogonalizes the synthesis process: it first constructs a gradient-shielded buffer zone based on boundary distance to ensure stable shape learning, and subsequently injects physics-driven spectral textures into the object core. This design effectively reconciles robust shape representation learning with invariance to acquisition noise. Extensive experiments on the BTCV and MSD datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous FDSL, as well as SSL methods trained on real-world medical datasets, by 1.43% on BTCV and up to 1.51% on MSD task, offering a scalable, annotation-free foundation for medical ViTs. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV

Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation of Medical Foundation Models for Segmentation

The advent of large-scale self-supervised learning (SSL) has produced a vast zoo of medical foundation models. However, selecting optimal medical foundation models for specific segmentation tasks remains a computational bottleneck. Existing Transferability Estimation (TE) metrics, primarily designed for classification, rely on global statistical assumptions and fail to capture the topological complexity essential for dense prediction. We propose a novel Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation framework that evaluates manifold tractability rather than statistical overlap. Our approach introduces three components: (1) Global Representation Topology Divergence (GRTD), utilizing Minimum Spanning Trees to quantify feature-label structural isomorphism; (2) Local Boundary-Aware Topological Consistency (LBTC), which assesses manifold separability specifically at critical anatomical boundaries; and (3) Task-Adaptive Fusion, which dynamically integrates global and local metrics based on the semantic cardinality of the target task. Validated on the large-scale OpenMind benchmark across diverse anatomical targets and SSL foundation models, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by around 31% relative improvement in the weighted Kendall metric, providing a robust, training-free proxy for efficient model selection without the cost of fine-tuning. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV