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Kai Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Wang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Adaptive Penalization and Bootstrap-Smoothed Inference for Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization with Summary Data

Two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to estimate causal effects from observational data using summary association statistics. However, horizontal pleiotropy can invalidate standard MR estimators and lead to biased causal inference. Pleiotropy-robust methods have been proposed to address this issue, including regularization-based approaches such as MR-Lasso. However, MR-Lasso may fail to identify invalid instruments consistently, and its post-selection inference can be unreliable. In this paper, we develop two lasso-type procedures for two-sample MR with summary-level data. The first, MR-ALasso, extends MR-Lasso by introducing adaptive penalty weights for pleiotropic effects in order to improve the identification of valid and invalid instruments. The second, MR-ALasso-B, combines adaptive lasso selection with bootstrap smoothing to improve post-selection inference. We establish theoretical results for MR-ALasso under the two-sample summary data framework, including invalid instrument identification consistency and oracle-type post-selection behavior. Simulation studies show that MR-ALasso generally improves upon MR-Lasso in estimation accuracy and invalid-instrument identification, whereas MR-ALasso-B substantially improves coverage and type-I error control relative to naive post-selection inference. A real-data application based on bidirectional analyses of multiple complex traits further illustrates the practical usefulness of the proposed methods. We provide an R package, MRAlasso, to facilitate implementation.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2026

Value-Monotonicity Matters: A Concordance Loss for Deep Survival Prediction

Deep survival models are evaluated almost exclusively by the concordance index (C-index), yet they are commonly trained using likelihood objectives such as the Cox partial likelihood, discrete-time negative log-likelihood, and DeepHit likelihood. This mismatch is usually considered acceptable because the C-index can be recomputed on validation data during training. However, for end-to-end training of high-capacity encoders on small, heavily censored oncology cohorts, frequent C-index evaluation is computationally expensive, making the loss value itself an important signal for monitoring, early stopping, and model selection. We show that likelihood losses are unreliable for this purpose and propose a value-monotone concordance loss. We prove that every strictly proper survival likelihood admits directions where the loss decreases while the C-index remains unchanged, causing the loss value to decouple from ranking performance. We then study a sigmoid concordance loss (SCL), whose value approximates one minus the C-index up to a temperature term, ensuring that lower loss corresponds to higher C-index during optimization. The loss is architecture agnostic and reduces to a convex survival ranking support vector machine for linear models. Across eighteen datasets from four modalities using a unified five-fold cross-validation protocol, SCL achieves discrimination comparable to standard likelihood losses and is the best or within one standard deviation of the best C-index. Unlike likelihood losses, SCL maintains a strong correlation between loss value and C-index during training, with rank correlations of 0.96 to 0.99 compared with -0.03 to 0.53 for likelihood losses. Calibration measured by the integrated Brier score is comparable. SCL provides a value-monotone optimization objective whose value can serve as a reliable surrogate for the C-index during expensive end-to-end training.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

GigaWorld-Policy-0.5: A Faster and Stronger WAM Empowered by AutoResearch

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot policy learning by jointly modeling actions and future visual observations, using future scene evolution as dense supervision for physically grounded action generation. However, a common design in existing WAMs is to explicitly generate future videos at inference time, incurring substantial computational overhead and hindering real-time closed-loop deployment. GigaWorld-Policy addresses this issue with an action-centered formulation, where future visual dynamics are used during training while action-only decoding is used at inference time. Building upon this framework, we present GigaWorld-Policy-0.5, an enhanced action-centered WAM designed for more efficient robot control. During pretraining, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 adopts a mixed Action-Conditioned World Modeling (AC-WM) and WAM training strategy. This strengthens the coupling between visual dynamics and robot actions and improves the transferability of action representations for downstream policy learning. For efficient inference, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 introduces a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that separates visual dynamics modeling and action generation into specialized experts, reducing active computation during action-only inference and achieving 85 ms inference latency on a local RTX 4090 setup. In addition, we employ an agent-based AutoResearch pipeline to systematically search training configurations, enabling more efficient identification of optimal experimental setups while reducing the time and manual intervention required for hyperparameter tuning. Experiments and ablations show that GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 preserves the training benefits of future visual dynamics while improving inference efficiency for robot control.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Logit Adjustment: A Residual Decomposition Framework for Long-Tailed Reranking

Long-tailed classification, where a small number of frequent classes dominate many rare ones, remains challenging because models systematically favor frequent classes at inference time. Existing post-hoc methods such as logit adjustment address this by adding a fixed classwise offset to the base-model logits. However, the correction required to restore the relative ranking of two classes need not be constant across inputs, and a fixed offset cannot adapt to such variation. We study this problem through Bayes-optimal reranking on a base-model top-k shortlist. The gap between the optimal score and the base score, the residual correction, decomposes into a classwise component that is constant within each class, and a pairwise component that depends on the input and competing labels. When the residual is purely classwise, a fixed offset suffices to recover the Bayes-optimal ordering. We further show that when the same label pair induces incompatible ordering constraints across contexts, no fixed offset can achieve this recovery. This decomposition leads to testable predictions regarding when pairwise correction can improve performance and when cannot. We develop REPAIR (Reranking via Pairwise residual correction), a lightweight post-hoc reranker that combines a shrinkage-stabilized classwise term with a linear pairwise term driven by competition features on the shortlist. Experiments on nine benchmarks confirm that the decomposition explains where pairwise correction helps and where classwise correction alone suffices. These span text classification, visual recognition, and multimodal rare-disease diagnosis.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

FlowWAM: Optical Flow as a Unified Action Representation for World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) are able to leverage pretrained video generators for both world modeling and action prediction. However, directly leveraging such video generators for control raises a new challenge: how to represent actions in a suitable form that aligns with pretrained video generators while carrying enough motion cues for accurate control. Existing numerical actions fail to satisfy the former, and prior visual action representations overlook the temporal motion structure across frames. We address this issue with FlowWAM, a dual-stream diffusion framework that adopts optical flow as a unified, video-native action representation. Flow videos share the same format as RGB videos and encode rich per-pixel displacement. By jointly modeling them within a shared pretrained video generator, FlowWAM can naturally implement two modes of WAMs. In policy mode, FlowWAM generates flow for action prediction, while in world-model mode, it uses target flow sequences to guide future video generation. Moreover, since flow can be easily extracted from raw videos without action labels, FlowWAM can leverage large-scale action-unlabeled video datasets for pretraining. We empirically find that our flow-based action representation delivers gains across both modes. On RoboTwin manipulation, FlowWAM raises the success rate to 92.94% on the Clean setting and 92.14% on Random, outperforming both VLA and WAM baselines. On WorldArena world modeling, it achieves the best overall EWMScore (63.71) with an 18.4% relative improvement in trajectory accuracy. More results can be found on our project website: https://flow-wam.github.io .

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Training Variable Long Sequences with Data-Centric Parallel

Training deep learning models on variable long sequences poses significant computational challenges. Existing methods force a difficult trade-off between efficiency and ease-of-use. Simple approaches use static configurations that cause workload imbalance low efficiency, while complex methods introduces significant complexity and code change for new models. To break this trade-off, we introduce Data-Centric Parallel (DCP). Its core principle is to let the data itself drive the runtime. It achieves this by dynamically adjusting direct runtime settings (e.g., parallel size, gradient accumulation, recomputation) based on each batch's sequence length. Empirical results demonstrate that our method achieves up to a 2.88$\times$ speedup on 32 H200 GPUs. Designed for generalization, it can be integrated into any model with 10 lines of code. We anticipate this simple yet effective approach will serve as a robust baseline and facilitate future advancements in distributed training for variable long sequences.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

DIM-WAM: World-Action Modeling with Diverse Historical Event Memory

World-action models have shown promising robot-manipulation performance by jointly predicting future visual states and actions. However, existing methods mainly rely on short-term history and short-horizon future prediction, which is insufficient for long-horizon tasks whose correct execution depends on earlier observations and task progress. Such temporally dependent tasks require effective use of complementary temporal information, including recent local context, cross-stage historical events, immediate future dynamics, and global task progress. To address long-term forgetting and poor awareness of the global task state, we introduce DiM-WAM, a memory-augmented world-action model that integrates multi-scale historical context, local future dynamics, and global task progress. The memory extracts compact visual event information from real observations, updates multiple memory banks through independent similarity-based merging, and then reads the bank-identity- and time-embedded long-term context to condition video and action denoising. A progress-supervision objective further encourages memory tokens to encode not only completed historical events but also the current task stage and its implications for the remaining task. On RMBench, DiM-WAM raises average success from 28.4% with LingBot-VA to 69.8%, exceeding the explicit-memory Mem-0 baseline at 42.0%. On four real-world Franka tasks, it improves average stage success from 70.7% to 91.5% and full-task success from 52.5% to 80.0%. Project page: https://wangkai-casia.github.io/dim-wam.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Dive Into the Implicit Biases of Low-rank Vision-language Alignment

Vision-language alignment, the stage that bridges pretrained vision encoders and large language models, is widely treated as a form of pretraining requiring full-parameter updates. We challenge this view and investigate what happens when low-rank adaptation is applied to the LLM during this stage instead. We find that low-rank alignment not only reduces computational costs but also outperforms full-parameter alignment on most benchmarks. To understand this phenomenon, we systematically characterize the implicit biases introduced by low-rank adaptation during alignment. Empirically, we find that low-rank alignment shifts model behavior from hallucinatory to conservative and preserves per-token linear separability of visual features that full-parameter alignment disrupts, a phenomenon we term LS-curse. Geometrically, low rank aligned models exhibit more homogeneous and structurally stable visual representations, maintaining modality-specific knowledge rather than prematurely fusing entity-level semantics. Theoretically, we establish two theorems showing that low-rank alignment induces preferences for parameter subspaces with flat gradients and feature subspaces robust to perturbations, providing a principled explanation for the observed structure-preserving behavior. Extensive experiments cover ablation over 100 alignment configurations, three families of low-rank operators, and various rank, encoder, and other settings.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Random Utility Model with Endogenously Assigned Menus

There is a largely overlooked assumption underlying stochastic choice theory: menus are assigned exogenously, as if by a hidden randomized controlled trial. This assumption is not innocuous, because in many real-world settings menus are assigned endogenously according to the decision makers' preferences. This paper studies Random Utility Model under menu endogeneity and shows that any seemingly anomalous choice behavior can be generated by a population of rational decision makers with heterogeneous preferences facing endogenously assigned menus. To address this problem, I propose a new causal estimand: the probability that an alternative would be chosen from a given menu if that menu were presented to the entire population. I then characterize sharp bounds on this estimand using observed menu and choice frequencies. In addition, I show that when choices are observed across multiple markets with different preference distributions and a common menu-assignment rule, the causal estimands from those markets and the menu assignment rule are uniquely identified.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

TIR-Agent: Training an Explorative and Efficient Agent for Image Restoration

Vision-language agents that orchestrate specialized tools for image restoration (IR) have emerged as a promising method, yet most existing frameworks operate in a training-free manner. They rely on heuristic task scheduling and exhaustive tool traversal, resulting in sub-optimal restoration paths and prohibitive computational cost. We argue that the core bottleneck lies in the absence of a learned policy to make decision, as a vision-language model cannot efficiently handle degradation-aware task ordering and tool composition. To this end, we propose TIR-Agent, a trainable image restoration agent that performs a direct tool-calling policy through a two-stage training pipeline of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL). Two key designs underpin effective RL training: (i) a random perturbation strategy applied to the SFT data, which broadens the policy's exploration over task schedules and tool compositions, and (ii) a multi-dimensional adaptive reward mechanism that dynamically re-weights heterogeneous image quality metrics to mitigate reward hacking. To support high-throughput, asynchronous GPU-based tool invocation during training, we further develop a globally shared model-call pool. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain degradations show that TIR-Agent outperforms 12 baselines, including 6 all-in-one models, 3 training-free agents, and 3 proprietary models, and achieves over 2.5$\times$ inference speedup by eliminating redundant tool executions.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

GestaltMML: Enhancing Rare Genetic Disease Diagnosis through Multimodal Machine Learning Combining Facial Images and Clinical Text

Individuals with suspected rare genetic disorders often undergo multiple clinical evaluations, imaging studies, laboratory tests, and genetic tests over a prolonged period of time, a process commonly described as the diagnostic odyssey. Addressing this odyssey has substantial clinical, psychosocial, and economic benefits. Many rare genetic diseases have distinctive facial features that artificial intelligence algorithms can use to facilitate clinical diagnosis, to prioritize candidate diseases for further laboratory or genetic testing, and to support the phenotype-driven reinterpretation of genome or exome sequencing data. Existing methods that use frontal facial photographs were built on conventional convolutional neural networks, rely exclusively on facial images, and cannot capture non-facial phenotypic traits or demographic information that are essential for accurate diagnosis. Here we introduce GestaltMML, a multimodal machine learning approach based solely on the Transformer architecture. It integrates facial images, demographic information (age, sex, ethnicity), and clinical notes (optionally a list of Human Phenotype Ontology terms) to improve prediction accuracy. We evaluate GestaltMML on 528 diseases from the GestaltMatcher Database and on several in-house and published cohorts, including Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, Sotos syndrome, NAA10-related neurodevelopmental syndrome, Cornelia de Lange syndrome, and KBG syndrome. GestaltMML improves on the state-of-the-art image-only ensembled model, narrows the diagnostic accuracy gap for patients from under-represented ancestries, and clarifies when multimodal fusion is beneficial and when image-only inference is preferable. The results suggest that GestaltMML can greatly narrow the candidate diagnoses of rare diseases and may facilitate the reinterpretation of sequencing data.

q-bio.QM↗
arXiv2026

Gryphon: Scaling Hyperscale Multi-Tenant Gateways Beyond the Petabit-Era via DPU-Augmented Hierarchical Co-Offloading

At ByteDance, cloud gateway clusters orchestrate petabit-scale aggregate traffic. Traditional ASIC-only gateways fail to meet these escalating demands due to severe on-chip resource constraints and limited programmable flexibility, while pure software solutions or alternatives like disaggregated SmartNICs struggle to match terabit-scale line-rate throughput. To bridge this gap, we present Gryphon, a hyperscale cloud gateway built on a hybrid architecture that integrates DPUs directly into the switching ASIC's forwarding path. This design resolves the fundamental tension between capacity and speed, expanding table scale by up to 1000$\times$ and augmenting programmability, while sustaining 1.6 Tbps line-rate throughput at a cost of only ~8$μs$ in additional average latency. To manage this hardware heterogeneity, we introduce Hierarchical Co-Offloading (HLCO) in the data plane, achieving >99.9% fast path hit rate, while retaining software fallback for complex operations. In the control plane, we develop an abstraction layer (P4Bridge) that decouples hardware specifics from policy configuration. Gryphon has been operating at production scale for over a year, deployed on hundreds of nodes across multiple Availability Zones. We also share production measurements and operational experiences that serve as the first hyperscale-proven guidelines for next-generation DPU-augmented cloud gateways.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Cooler Phases of the Circumgalactic Medium Are More Centrally Concentrated: Constraints from Multiphase Absorption Lines

We present a systematic study of the multiphase circumgalactic medium (CGM) around galaxies and quasars, traced by Ca II $λ\lambda3934,3969$, Mg II $λ\lambda2796,2803$, and C IV $λ\lambda1548,1550$, using the Year 1 dataset from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. These three doublets trace CGM gas across a range of temperatures, from cold to warm phases, and we employ a stacking technique to measure the corresponding absorption signals using background sources. We show that CGM structure is strongly phase-dependent: ions tracing progressively cooler gas exhibit increasingly steep radial profiles in equivalent width ($W_i$). These trends are broadly consistent with predictions from cosmological simulations, supporting a phase-stratified CGM in which cooler gas is more centrally concentrated. Specifically, halos of emission-line galaxies exhibit a strong radial transition from cool to warm gas, whereas halos of quasars show a more uniform distribution, likely regulated by active galactic nuclei feedback; in contrast, the cold gas traced by Ca II in low-redshift galaxies is tightly confined to inner regions. We further demonstrate that the radial scaling $W_i \propto D^α$ is primarily set by host stellar mass, particularly for the cool-phase medium, suggesting efficient heating processes in massive halos. By jointly leveraging multiple absorption tracers from observations and simulations, we map the CGM from cold to warm phases and place new constraints on the baryon cycle governing galaxy evolution.

astro-ph.GA↗
arXiv2026

Compressive Spectrum Sensing via Spectral Multiplexing in Rydberg Atomic Receiver

Rydberg-atomic receivers exhibit exceptional sensitivity yet are fundamentally constrained by the narrow instantaneous bandwidth, limiting their practical deployment in broadband scenarios. Prior approaches typically expand the bandwidth by physically broadening the atomic response, which usually requires auxiliary electromagnetic fields or stringent parameter tuning, thereby increasing overall system complexity. Here, we propose a compressive spectral multiplexing framework implemented in a waveguide-coupled Rydberg atomic receiver using a frequency-modulated local oscillator (FMLO). The FMLO creates multiple parallel sensing channels that collectively constitute a physical compressive sensing matrix, generating multiple narrowband intermediate-frequency replicas of the input signal. Thus, a broadband microwave spectrum is projected onto a set of narrowband atomic responses. It is demonstrated that spectral information spanning a bandwidth of over 640 MHz can be effectively compressed into the intrinsic atomic bandwidth of 126 kHz, achieving a spectrum compression ratio exceeding 1000. Furthermore, these output replicas offer intrinsic measurement redundancy and facilitate signal-to-noise ratio enhancement. An approximate 10 dB gain is achieved in the required bit-energy-to-noise-power-density ratio for multi-channel communication via maximal-ratio combining. This approach requires no auxiliary fields or broadband electronics, providing a simple and scalable pathway for chip-scale quantum receivers, latency-critical sensing, and next-generation wireless communications.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

Optimal control problem for reflected McKean--Vlasov stochastic differential equations with Poisson jumps

In this paper, we consider the optimal relaxed control problem for a class of one-dimensional reflected McKean--Vlasov stochastic differential equations with Poisson jumps. Due to the presence of the jump term, the state process generally belongs to the Skorokhod space $D([0,T],\Rp)$, which makes the proof of tightness and the passage to the limit more complicated. Under Lipschitz conditions and suitable growth conditions, we establish uniform moment estimates for the state process and the reflecting process. Then, by using Aldous' tightness criterion, the continuity of the Skorokhod map, and the stability results for stochastic integrals, we prove the existence of an optimal relaxed control. Furthermore, under the Roxin convexity condition, we prove the existence of a strict optimal control. In the general case, we show that relaxed controls can be approximated by a sequence of strict controls.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

OTCache: Optimal Transport for Geometry-Aware Caching in Diffusion Models

We propose OTCache, a training-free framework for accelerating diffusion sampling via caching schedule prediction. Existing graph-based caching methods reduce redundant computation by optimizing shortest-path objectives, but rely on an additive independence assumption, which often breaks down in the low NFE regime. To address this issue, OTCache models caching schedules across inference budgets as a smooth evolution in policy space, inspired by Optimal Transport (OT). The framework consists of three stages: (1) obtaining a high-fidelity \textbf{reference schedule} using a graph-based caching method under a conservative budget; (2) performing a lightweight anchor search under an extreme low-budget setting via Optuna optimization with an end-to-end perceptual objective; and (3) predicting schedules for target budgets via quantile interpolation between the reference and anchor policies using continuous warping representations. Experiments on FLUX.1 [dev], Qwen-Image, and HunyuanVideo show that OTCache achieves 4.5x, 4.7x, and 3.66x acceleration, respectively, while consistently improving generation fidelity over state-of-the-art caching baselines. This work provides a new perspective on accelerating diffusion models through Optimal-Transport-inspired schedule modeling. Code:https://github.com/UnicomAI/OTCache

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

PixelEyes: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Pinpoint Visual Evidence Seeking

This paper explores multi-turn visual reasoning and observes that MLLMs repeatedly fail to localize the target, leading to long, redundant trajectories. We attribute this failure to the entanglement of reasoning and perception within a single model, the MLLM reasons and localizes simultaneously, and inaccurate localization triggers additional reasoning turns that bloat the trajectory. To solve this problem, we propose PixelEyes, a multi-turn visual reasoning agent that explicitly decouples reasoning from perception, i.e., the reasoner decides what to look for, while a specialized perception tool answers where it is. Specifically, PixelEyes introduces 1) Mask-guided Visual Search. A referring segmentation model is invoked to provide mask-precise localization, freeing the reasoner from the need to compensate for imprecise grounding. 2) Semantic-region Breadth-first Search (BFS). To eliminate redundant loops caused by repeatedly cropping incorrect sub-regions, we organize exploration as a breadth-first search over semantic regions. To internalize these capabilities, we construct the PixelEyes-6K dataset by resynthesizing expert trajectories from existing data. This explicitly embeds our mask-guided search and BFS logic into the model. We further introduce Pinpoint-Bench, a zero-hint visual search benchmark, i.e., no location cues are provided in the question, with instance-level masks and bounding boxes that separate localization failures from reasoning failures, enabling fine-grained analysis of failure modes such as inattentional blindness. Recent state-of-the-art MLLMs and visual reasoning agents leave large headroom on Pinpoint-Bench, demonstrating its quality and difficulty. Code and models are open-sourced.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DriftScope: Measuring The Hidden Effects of Diffusion Model Adaptation

Adapting pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, whether to learn new visual concepts or erase unwanted ones, is routinely evaluated on its intended effects alone. We argue this framing is incomplete. Through sparse autoencoder analysis and zero-shot classification, we demonstrate that adaptation systematically damages semantically unrelated concepts in ways that aggregate metrics structurally cannot surface: when damage is severe enough for FID and KID to respond, the model is already nearly unusable; when the model remains functional, FID and KID stay flat while specific classes silently suffer worst-case zero-shot accuracy drops of up to 18.9 points and concept-level distributions shift dramatically. This pattern appears at both ends of the adaptation spectrum (concept customization and concept unlearning), suggesting it is a systematic consequence of weight-level modification rather than an artifact of any particular method. To surface this hidden drift before deployment, we introduce DriftScope, a prompt-level diagnostic tool that takes any two model checkpoints and returns a ranked list of tokens whose visual concepts have shifted most between them. DriftScope optimizes a soft prompt to attribute drift at the token level without requiring access to real data or model internals. The result is an interpretable, concept-level audit that aggregate evaluation cannot provide.

cs.CV↗