arXiv subjects

Jinghan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Jinghan Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trusting Imagined Futures: Auditing Imagined Rewards for VLA Post-Training

Video world models enable candidate actions to be evaluated through imagined outcomes, but high predicted rewards can favor trajectories with poor execution quality. We introduce Trusting Imagined Futures (TIF), an offline supervision selection method for vision-language-action (VLA) post-training that audits predicted rewards using execution feedback. A multidimensional reward model predicts a utility score for candidate ranking and five dimensions of execution quality. An auditor uses reward predictions and uncertainty to identify overestimation patterns learned from paired imagined videos and real executions. TIF accepts the candidate with the highest predicted utility when its advantage over the existing trajectory exceeds a margin and its audit risk passes a threshold; otherwise, it retains the existing supervision. The retained real trajectories then supervise behavior cloning. Across four LIBERO suites and three training seeds, TIF achieves a mean success rate of 76.25%, improving over training on the existing trajectories by 3.00 percentage points with the same trajectory count and training budget. Adding audit gating yields 1.47 percentage points with the reward model and advantage margin held fixed. The gains persist against advantage ranking and logistic regression risk selection at matched replacement counts. On recorded videos from three real robot tasks, TIF increases clean completion among selected trajectories from 58.33% to 70.00% across 60 candidate pools.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

$Δ$ Flow Matching for Robot Foundation Models

Flow matching is a common generative recipe for robot foundation models. Vision-language-action models (VLAs) generate action chunks, while world-action models (WAMs) additionally generate future visual states. Both start generation from a fixed Gaussian prior, despite temporal continuity between past and future states and actions. This requires costly training and iterative sampling, especially for WAMs with an additional visual branch. We introduce $Δ$-flow, which constructs the source from recent history with mild noise rather than from a fixed Gaussian prior. This moves the source closer to the target, reducing transport to a small residual $Δ$ that can be learned efficiently and enables single-step inference. We integrate $Δ$-flow into the VLA policy $π_{0.5}$ and the WAM policies ImageWAM and Fast-WAM. On LIBERO, ImageWAM reaches 90% success in one epoch rather than six, and Fast-WAM reaches 95% in two epochs rather than eight. With LoRA fine-tuning, $π_{0.5}$ exceeds its baseline's five-epoch performance after one epoch. Single-step inference gives $1.54\times$, $2.49\times$, and $4.45\times$ speedups on $π_{0.5}$, ImageWAM, and Fast-WAM, respectively. It preserves action smoothness, achieving a $4.5\times$ reduction in action jerk compared with one-step Gaussian sampling. $Δ$-flow reaches state-of-the-art generalization performance on LIBERO-Plus. Action-history sources can be applied to pretrained WAM policies without retraining. Replacing the Gaussian action source at inference largely preserves task success with a single sampling step and can slightly improve it. We further study how action representation and visual information in action learning affect history-to-future prediction in $Δ$-flow. These results show that $Δ$-flow is simple yet effective, improving the efficiency and generalization of robot foundation models.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

FreeSpeed: Training-Free Speed Control for Generative Robot Policies

Online control of execution speed is essential for deploying robot policies in real-world scenarios, as robots may need to speed up under time constraints or slow down to facilitate human interaction and improve safety. However, imitation-learned policies inherit the execution speed of their demonstrations, and test-time speed modification can introduce unrecoverable out-of-distribution observations, reducing task success. We observe that the directional inconsistency of action chunks reflects task-phase criticality, indicating how aggressively action step lengths can be modified while preserving task success. Based on this observation, we introduce FreeSpeed, a training-free module that post-processes action chunks from pretrained policies. FreeSpeed resamples each predicted chunk at the requested rate, then uses directional inconsistency between adjacent actions as the primary signal for rescaling. This signal adaptively determines how closely the execution speed can approach the requested speed, allowing flexible speed adjustment within the evaluated limits without compromising task success. Across three policy families and 50 simulated tasks, FreeSpeed supports online speed changes, with realized execution rates spanning 0.22x to 2.53x among settings that preserve per-task success. Across four real-world manipulation tasks, FreeSpeed achieves an average success rate of 94.0%, matching the frozen policy's 93.8%, while realizing execution rates from 0.38x to 1.97x.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining with labeled data, reaching 70\% accuracy on real-world tasks. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Hard-Region Supervision: #1 on the Waymo Open Dataset 2D Video Panoptic Segmentation Leaderboard

We describe our winning entry to the Waymo Open Dataset 2D Video Panoptic Segmentation Challenge. The task asks for a semantic class at every pixel of every frame and, for countable objects, an identity that holds across 100 frames and across five overlapping cameras. We build on DVIS++, a cascade of a segmenter, a tracker, and a refiner, as our baseline. We propose hard region supervision (HRS) to improve the baseline. In particular, we use the baseline to define the hard region as where it makes mistakes, and design a loss and an auxiliary prediction head for this region. The auxiliary head is used only in training and removed at test time, so at inference the model trained with HRS has the same architecture as the baseline. In addition, we propose three test-time steps that further improve the results: a two-model ensemble, a merge of the segmenter's output into the final panoptic map, and cross-camera identity linking. On the challenge test set, our entry reaches 0.3547 wSTQ, 0.2071 wAQ, and 0.6075 mIoU, ranking first on all three metrics. It is 3.6 wSTQ points ahead of the second entry and 2.4 points ahead of our DVIS++ baseline.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Reliable Text to Real Voices: Trust-Aware Progressive Adaptation for Low-Resource TTS

Low-resource text-to-speech (TTS) adaptation is constrained by scarce paired data and costly manual transcription. Existing fixed-voice TTS systems can provide relatively accurate pronunciation, but their synthetic speech offers limited speaker diversity and may exhibit flat prosody. Real recordings provide natural prosody and diverse voices, yet their automatic speech recognition (ASR) pseudo-labels may contain transcription errors. We find that supervision order affects content accuracy and speaker similarity. We propose trust-aware progressive adaptation: synthetic-to-real adaptation first establishes text-speech correspondences, then restores reference-speaker control using real speech. Transcript-agreement weighting uses agreement between two fixed ASR systems as a proxy for pseudo-label reliability to limit noisy supervision. Experiments with FireRedTTS3 on Burmese and Lao and OmniVoice on Burmese show improved content accuracy with high naturalness and competitive speaker similarity. Jointly considering supervision order and pseudo-label reliability when combining synthetic and real speech offers a practical path to zero-shot voice cloning in low-resource languages with less manual transcription. Audio demos are available at https://insiderx-pro.github.io/S2R-Adaptation-TTS/

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

SceneTTS-Bench: A Benchmark for Scene-Level TTS in Drama Dubbing

Text-to-speech systems are increasingly used for drama dubbing, yet evaluation protocols remain sentence-level, leaving critical scene-level behaviors insufficiently measured. We present SceneTTS-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates TTS along three dimensions: timbre consistency across character turns, emotional expressiveness on high-tension utterances, and rhythm coherence under segmented long-form synthesis. The corpus comprises real-world and generated drama scripts totaling 160 bilingual scenes and approximately 10,300 utterances, with real-world scripts serving as the primary source (100 scenes) and generated scripts as a supplementary source (60 scenes), demonstrating the framework's extensibility through synthetic data augmentation. A backend-agnostic Canonical Intermediate Representation ensures fair cross-system comparison. Three automatic pipelines produce per-utterance diagnostics: Speaker Consistency Score for timbre-drift detection, Under-Acting Ratio for under-acting identification, and Rate Discontinuity Ratio for rate-discontinuity quantification. Experiments on four TTS systems confirm that each system exhibits distinct weaknesses and that scene-level rankings diverge substantially from sentence-level metrics. Benchmark resources are publicly available at https://piedpiperg.github.io/scenetts-bench/ .

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

WebSwarm: Recursive Multi-Agent Orchestration for Deep-and-Wide Web Search

Large language model (LLM)-based web search agents are transforming information seeking from simple factoid question answering into complex, deep-and-wide search and research-oriented tasks. A single ReAct-style agent is constrained by one long trajectory and limited context, making it difficult to handle depth and coverage simultaneously. Existing multi-agent systems improve search coverage through parallel execution and aggregation, but still exhibit clear limitations in recursive depth, collaboration adaptability, and evidence-grounded expansion. We propose WebSwarm, a progressive recursive delegation framework that jointly constructs task decomposition, recursive expansion, and agent collaboration during inference. WebSwarm dynamically instantiates agentic search nodes, each coupling a local objective with a search mode that specifies how the node should organize search and collaboration. Each node can either solve its objective itself or further delegate child nodes; after solving, it returns evidence and results upward, enabling parent nodes to further expand, revise, or aggregate the search process. To guide this process, WebSwarm first probes how task-relevant information is organized on the web to ground subsequent node expansion, and reuses process-level experience across homogeneous sibling nodes. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus, WideSearch, DeepWideSearch, and GISA show that WebSwarm consistently outperforms single-agent and multi-agent baselines on deep, wide, and interleaved deep-and-wide tasks. Further analyses of ablation, task difficulty, web tool efficiency, and model generalization explain WebSwarm's effectiveness and provide insights for multi-agent search systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

AgentX: Towards Agent-Driven Self-Iteration of Industrial Recommender Systems

Recommendation algorithm iteration is moving from an artisanal, engineer-bound process toward an industrialized research loop, but this transition remains blocked by a structural execution bottleneck: the idea-to-launch cycle still depends on human engineers to generate hypotheses, modify production code, launch A/B experiments, and attribute online results. Innovation therefore scales linearly with headcount rather than compounding with evidence, compute, and accumulated experimental knowledge. We present AgentX, a production-deployed multi-agent system that fundamentally restructures this production function. AgentX operates as a self-evolving development engine: it autonomously generates, implements, evaluates, and learns from recommendation experiments at a scale and pace that no manual workflow can sustain. The system orchestrates four tightly coupled stages in a closed loop. A Brainstorm Agent synthesizes evidence from historical experiments, system architecture, data analysis, and external research into ranked, executable proposals. A Developing Agent translates each proposal into production-ready code through repository-grounded generation and multi-dimensional reliability verification. An Evaluation Agent conducts safe online rollout with guardrail-vetoed A/B judgment, converting both successes and failures into structured knowledge assets. A Harness Evolution layer (SGPO) then distills execution trajectories into semantic-gradient updates that continuously sharpen the agents themselves -- making the system not merely automated, but self-improving.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Bridging the Stability-Expressivity Gap: Synthetic Data Scaling and Preference Alignment for Low-Resource Spoken Language Models

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for speech synthesis by bypassing explicit grapheme-to-phoneme pipelines. However, their effectiveness in low-resource languages remains fundamentally limited by the scarcity of transcribed speech. In practice, synthetic data has become the primary strategy for scaling SLMs in such settings, providing reliable phonetic supervision when real data is insufficient. In this work, we show that this reliance introduces a fundamental trade-off, which we term the Stability-Expressivity Gap: while synthetic data improves phonetic accuracy, it progressively suppresses prosodic variability, ultimately leading to a collapse of expressivity (Synthetic Erosion). To bridge this gap, we propose two self-alignment frameworks. Disentanglement-Guided Self-Alignment (DGSA) recovers expressivity for complex languages by exploiting prosody-timbre separation. For regimes where authentic references are exceptionally limited, Temperature-Driven Self-Critique (TDSC) stabilizes generation through automated exploration and filtering. Our approach outperforms strong commercial systems, including ElevenLabs and Gemini Pro, and enables the first zero-shot voice cloning capability for Lao.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

FlowGuard: Towards Lightweight In-Generation Safety Detection for Diffusion Models via Linear Latent Decoding

Diffusion-based image generation models have advanced rapidly but pose a safety risk due to their potential to generate Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Existing NSFW detection methods mainly operate either before or after image generation. Pre-generation methods rely on text prompts and struggle with the gap between prompt safety and image safety. Post-generation methods apply classifiers to final outputs, but they are poorly suited to intermediate noisy images. To address this, we introduce FlowGuard, a cross-model in-generation detection framework that inspects intermediate denoising steps. This is particularly challenging in latent diffusion, where early-stage noise obscures visual signals. FlowGuard employs a novel linear approximation for latent decoding and leverages a curriculum learning approach to stabilize training. By detecting unsafe content early, FlowGuard reduces unnecessary diffusion steps to cut computational costs. Our cross-model benchmark spanning nine diffusion-based backbones shows the effectiveness of FlowGuard for in-generation NSFW detection in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, outperforming existing methods by over 30% in F1 score while delivering transformative efficiency gains, including slashing peak GPU memory demand by over 97% and projection time from 8.1 seconds to 0.2 seconds compared to standard VAE decoding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CAPER: Constrained and Procedural Reasoning for Robotic Scientific Experiments

Robotic assistance in scientific laboratories requires procedurally correct long-horizon manipulation, reliable execution under limited supervision, and robustness in low-demonstration regimes. Such conditions greatly challenge end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models, whose assumptions of recoverable errors and data-driven policy learning often break down in protocol-sensitive experiments. We propose CAPER, a framework for Constrained And ProcEdural Reasoning for robotic scientific experiments, which explicitly restricts where learning and reasoning occur in the planning and control pipeline. Rather than strengthening end-to-end policies, CAPER enforces a responsibility-separated structure: task-level reasoning generates procedurally valid action sequences under explicit constraints, mid-level multimodal grounding realizes subtasks without delegating spatial decision-making to large language models, and low-level control adapts to physical uncertainty via reinforcement learning with minimal demonstrations. By encoding procedural commitments through interpretable intermediate representations, CAPER prevents execution-time violations of experimental logic, improving controllability, robustness, and data efficiency. Experiments on a scientific workflow benchmark and a public long-horizon manipulation dataset demonstrate consistent improvements in success rate and procedural correctness, particularly in low-data and long-horizon settings.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Differentiate-and-Inject: Enhancing VLAs via Functional Differentiation Induced by In-Parameter Structural Reasoning

As robots are expected to perform increasingly diverse tasks, they must understand not only low-level actions but also the higher-level structure that determines how a task should unfold. Existing vision-language-action (VLA) models struggle with this form of task-level reasoning. They either depend on prompt-based in-context decomposition, which is unstable and sensitive to linguistic variations, or end-to-end long-horizon training, which requires large-scale demonstrations and entangles task-level reasoning with low-level control. We present in-parameter structured task reasoning (iSTAR), a framework for enhancing VLA models via functional differentiation induced by in-parameter structural reasoning. Instead of treating VLAs as monolithic policies, iSTAR embeds task-level semantic structure directly into model parameters, enabling differentiated task-level inference without external planners or handcrafted prompt inputs. This injected structure takes the form of implicit dynamic scene-graph knowledge that captures object relations, subtask semantics, and task-level dependencies in parameter space. Across diverse manipulation benchmarks, iSTAR achieves more reliable task decompositions and higher success rates than both in-context and end-to-end VLA baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of parameter-space structural reasoning for functional differentiation and improved generalization across task variations.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Agentic Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimization

Recently, Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has made significant progress in incentivizing the multi-turn, long-horizon tool-use capabilities of web agents. While mainstream agentic RL algorithms autonomously explore high-uncertainty tool-call steps under the guidance of entropy, excessive reliance on entropy signals can impose further constraints, leading to the training collapse. In this paper, we delve into the challenges caused by entropy and propose the Agentic Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimization (AEPO), an agentic RL algorithm designed to balance entropy in both the rollout and policy update phases. AEPO comprises two core components: (1) a dynamic entropy-balanced rollout mechanism that adaptively allocate global and branch sampling budget through entropy pre-monitoring, while imposing a branch penalty on consecutive high-entropy tool-call steps to prevent over-branching issues; and (2) Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimization that inserts a stop-gradient operation into the high-entropy clipping term to preserve and properly rescale gradients on high-entropy tokens, while incorporating entropy-aware advantage estimation to prioritize learning on high-uncertainty tokens. Results across 14 challenging datasets show that AEPO consistently outperforms 7 mainstream RL algorithms. With just 1K RL samples, Qwen3-14B with AEPO achieves impressive results: 47.6% on GAIA, 11.2% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 43.0% on WebWalker for Pass@1; 65.0% on GAIA, 26.0% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 70.0% on WebWalker for Pass@5. Further analysis reveals that AEPO improves rollout sampling diversity while maintaining stable policy entropy, facilitating scalable web agent training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LLaSO: A Foundational Framework for Reproducible Research in Large Language and Speech Model

The development of Large Speech-Language Models (LSLMs) has been slowed by fragmented architectures and a lack of transparency, hindering the systematic comparison and reproducibility of research. Unlike in the vision-language domain, the LSLM field suffers from the common practice of releasing model weights without their corresponding training data and configurations. To address these critical gaps, we introduce LLaSO, the first fully open, end-to-end framework for large-scale speech-language modeling. LLaSO provides the community with three essential resources: (1) LLaSO-Align, a 12M-instance speech-text alignment corpus; (2) LLaSO-Instruct, a 13.5M-instance multi-task instruction-tuning dataset; and (3) LLaSO-Eval, a reproducible benchmark for standardized evaluation. To validate our framework, we build and release LLaSO-Base, a 3.8B-parameter reference model trained exclusively on our public data. It achieves a normalized score of 0.72, establishing a strong, reproducible baseline that surpasses comparable models. Our analysis reveals that while broader training coverage enhances performance, significant generalization gaps persist on unseen tasks, particularly in pure audio scenarios. By releasing the complete stack of data, benchmarks, and models, LLaSO establishes a foundational open standard to unify research efforts and accelerate community-driven progress in LSLMs. We release the code, dataset, pretrained models, and results in https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLaSO.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Detecting Mislabeled and Corrupted Data via Pointwise Mutual Information

Deep neural networks can memorize corrupted labels, making data quality critical for model performance, yet real-world datasets are frequently compromised by both label noise and input noise. This paper proposes a mutual information-based framework for data selection under hybrid noise scenarios that quantifies statistical dependencies between inputs and labels. We compute each sample's pointwise contribution to the overall mutual information and find that lower contributions indicate noisy or mislabeled instances. Empirical validation on MNIST with different synthetic noise settings demonstrates that the method effectively filters low-quality samples. Under label corruption, training on high-MI samples improves classification accuracy by up to 15\% compared to random sampling. Furthermore, the method exhibits robustness to benign input modifications, preserving semantically valid data while filtering truly corrupted samples.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SFOOD: A Multimodal Benchmark for Comprehensive Food Attribute Analysis Beyond RGB with Spectral Insights

With the rise and development of computer vision and LLMs, intelligence is everywhere, especially for people and cars. However, for tremendous food attributes (such as origin, quantity, weight, quality, sweetness, etc.), existing research still mainly focuses on the study of categories. The reason is the lack of a large and comprehensive benchmark for food. Besides, many food attributes (such as sweetness, weight, and fine-grained categories) are challenging to accurately percept solely through RGB cameras. To fulfill this gap and promote the development of intelligent food analysis, in this paper, we built the first large-scale spectral food (SFOOD) benchmark suite. We spent a lot of manpower and equipment costs to organize existing food datasets and collect hyperspectral images of hundreds of foods, and we used instruments to experimentally determine food attributes such as sweetness and weight. The resulting benchmark consists of 3,266 food categories and 2,351 k data points for 17 main food categories. Extensive evaluations find that: (i) Large-scale models are still poor at digitizing food. Compared to people and cars, food has gradually become one of the most difficult objects to study; (ii) Spectrum data are crucial for analyzing food properties (such as sweetness). Our benchmark will be open source and continuously iterated for different food analysis tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

How to Achieve Higher Accuracy with Less Training Points?

In the era of large-scale model training, the extensive use of available datasets has resulted in significant computational inefficiencies. To tackle this issue, we explore methods for identifying informative subsets of training data that can achieve comparable or even superior model performance. We propose a technique based on influence functions to determine which training samples should be included in the training set. We conducted empirical evaluations of our method on binary classification tasks utilizing logistic regression models. Our approach demonstrates performance comparable to that of training on the entire dataset while using only 10% of the data. Furthermore, we found that our method achieved even higher accuracy when trained with just 60% of the data.

cs.LG↗