arXiv subjects

Kai Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Zheng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Masks Can Talk: Extracting Structured Text Information from Single-Modal Images for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Remote sensing change detection is pivotal for urban monitoring, disaster assessment, and environmental resource management. Yet, unimodal deep learning methods frequently confuse genuine semantic changes with visually similar but irrelevant variations. Recent multimodal approaches incorporate text as auxiliary supervision, but their descriptions are either semantically coarse and unstructured or model-generated and thus noisy. Critically, all of them overlook a simple fact: fine-grained change semantics are already implicitly encoded in the ground-truth mask labels that come standard with every change detection dataset. These masks know where the change happened, what the land-cover types were before and after, how the transition occurred, and how many objects were involved. In this paper, we propose S2M, a framework that obtains structured textual features directly from change labels at zero additional annotation cost. Specifically, each change region is automatically transcribed into a semantic quadruple (where, what, how, how many) and converted into several fixed-template text descriptions, providing precise, dense, and noise-free multimodal supervision. We adopts a two-stage training strategy to fine-tune on remote sensing imagery firstly for robust domain-specific representation, after which a multimodal decoder with a bi-directional contrastive loss is introduced to achieve deep alignment between visual features and structured textual embeddings. To validate our method, we construct Gaza-Change-v2, a new multi-class change detection (MCD) dataset about the Gaza Strip. On this MCD dataset, S2M achieves a Sek of 17.80\% and an F$_{\text{scd}}$ of 66.14\%, notably surpassing even multimodal methods that leverage large language models. Our work demonstrates that masks can indeed talk. They tell us exactly what, where, how, and how many changes have occurred.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AudioFace: Language-Assisted Speech-Driven Facial Animation with Multimodal Language Models

Speech-driven facial animation requires accurate correspondence between acoustic signals and facial motion, especially for articulation-related mouth movements. However, directly mapping speech audio to facial coefficients often overlooks the linguistic and phonetic structure underlying speech production. In this paper, we propose AudioFace, a language-assisted framework for speech-driven blendshape generation that treats mouth-related facial coefficient prediction as a structured generation problem guided by linguistic and articulatory information. Instead of relying solely on acoustic features, our method leverages the prior knowledge of multimodal large language models and introduces transcript- and phoneme-level cues to bridge speech signals with interpretable facial actions. Extensive experiments show that AudioFace achieves superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics, validating the effectiveness of language-assisted and multimodal-prior-guided speech-driven facial animation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SuperFace: Preference-Aligned Facial Expression Estimation Beyond Pseudo Supervision

Accurate facial estimation is crucial for realistic digital human animation, and ARKit blendshape coefficients offer an interpretable representation by mapping facial motions to semantic animation controls. However, learning high-quality ARKit coefficient prediction remains limited by the absence of reliable ground-truth supervision. Existing methods typically rely on capture software such as Live Link Face to provide pseudo labels, which may contain noisy activations, biased coefficient magnitudes, and missing or inaccurate facial actions. Consequently, models trained with supervised learning tend to reproduce imperfect pseudo labels rather than optimize for perceptual expression fidelity. In this paper, we propose SuperFace, a preference-driven framework that moves ARKit facial expression estimation from pseudo-label imitation toward human-aligned perceptual optimization. Instead of treating software-estimated coefficients as fixed ground truth, SuperFace uses them only as an initialization and further improves coefficient prediction through human preference feedback on rendered facial expressions. By aligning the model with perceptual judgments rather than numerical pseudo labels, SuperFace enables more visually faithful and expressive facial animation. Experiments show that SuperFace improves expression fidelity over Live Link Face supervision, demonstrating the effectiveness of preference-driven optimization for semantic facial action prediction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ProMax: Exploring the Potential of LLM-derived Profiles with Distribution Shaping for Recommender Systems

The remarkable text understanding and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have revitalized the field of general recommendation based on implicit user feedback. Rather than deploying LLMs directly as recommendation models, a more flexible paradigm leverages their ability to interpret users' historical interactions and semantic contexts to extract structured profiles that characterize user preferences. These profiles can be further transformed into actionable high-dimensional representations, serving as powerful signals to augment and strengthen recommendation models. However, the mechanism by which such profiles enhance recommendation performance within the feature space remains insufficiently understood. Moreover, existing studies predominantly rely on nonlinear alignment and fusion strategies to incorporate these profiles, which often lead to semantic loss and fail to fully exploit their potential. To address these limitations, we revisit profiles from a retrieval perspective and propose a simple yet effective recommendation framework built upon distribution shaping (ProMax) in this paper. We begin by employing dense retrieval to uncover the collaborative relationships between user and item profiles within the feature space. Based on this insight, we introduce a dual distribution-reshaping process, in which the profile distribution acts as a guiding signal to steer the recommendation model toward learning user preferences for unseen items beyond the scope of observed interactions. We apply ProMax to four classic recommendation methods on three public datasets. The results indicate that ProMax substantially improves base model performance and outperforms existing LLM-based recommendation approaches.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

When Can We Trust Deep Neural Networks? Towards Reliable Industrial Deployment with an Interpretability Guide

The deployment of AI systems in safety-critical domains, such as industrial defect inspection, autonomous driving, and medical diagnosis, is severely hampered by their lack of reliability. A single undetected erroneous prediction can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Unfortunately, there is often no alternative but to place trust in the outputs of a trained AI system, which operates without an internal safeguard to flag unreliable predictions, even in cases of high accuracy. We propose a post-hoc explanation-based indicator to detect false negatives in binary defect detection networks. To our knowledge, this is the first method to proactively identify potentially erroneous network outputs. Our core idea leverages the difference between class-specific discriminative heatmaps and class-agnostic ones. We compute the difference in their intersection over union (IoU) as a reliability score. An adversarial enhancement method is further introduced to amplify this disparity. Evaluations on two industrial defect detection benchmarks show our method effectively identifies false negatives. With adversarial enhancement, it achieves 100\% recall, albeit with a trade-off for true negatives. Our work thus advocates for a new and trustworthy deployment paradigm: data-model-explanation-output, moving beyond conventional end-to-end systems to provide critical support for reliable AI in real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Euler-inspired Decoupling Neural Operator for Efficient Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to synthesize high-resolution multispectral (HR-MS) images by fusing the spatial textures of panchromatic (PAN) images with the spectral information of low-resolution multispectral (LR-MS) images. While recent deep learning paradigms, especially diffusion-based operators, have pushed the performance boundaries, they often encounter spectral-spatial blurring and prohibitive computational costs due to their stochastic nature and iterative sampling. In this paper, we propose the Euler-inspired Decoupling Neural Operator (EDNO), a physics-inspired framework that redefines pansharpening as a continuous functional mapping in the frequency domain. Departing from conventional Cartesian feature processing, our EDNO leverages Euler's formula to transform features into a polar coordinate system, enabling a novel explicit-implicit interaction mechanism. Specifically, we develop the Euler Feature Interaction Layer (EFIL), which decouples the fusion task into two specialized modules: 1) Explicit Feature Interaction Module, utilizing a linear weighting scheme to simulate phase rotation for adaptive geometric alignment; and 2) Implicit Feature Interaction Module, employing a feed-forward network to model spectral distributions for superior color consistency. By operating in the frequency domain, EDNO inherently captures global receptive fields while maintaining discretization-invariance. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that EDNO offers a superior efficiency-performance balance compared to heavyweight architectures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Examine Clinicians' Modification of Hedging Language in Ambient AI Documentation: A Comparative Study of AI Drafts and Final Notes

Ambient AI documentation systems generate clinical note drafts that clinicians frequently revise before signing off into electronic health records, yet how these edits alter hedging language remains unclear. We conducted paired analysis of clinician-edited portions of ambient AI drafts and final notes to examine (1) whether these edits change the prevalence of hedging language, (2) whether these edits exhibit a systematic shift toward greater certainty or uncertainty, and (3) whether these changes in hedging prevalence and directionality differ by ambient AI vendors and clinical specialties. Among 62,811 paired note sections, hedging terms were more often introduced into previously non-hedged text than removed from previously hedged text, and post-edit text contained more hedging mentions than pre-edit text. Directionality analyses showed a significant overall tendency toward greater uncertainty in hedging-related replacement edits. Vendor and specialty analyses revealed substantial heterogeneity in hedging prevalence, pre-to-post changes in hedging mentions, and directionality.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Understanding Stigmatizing Language in Clinical Documentation: A Paired Comparison of Ambient AI Drafts and Clinician Finalized Notes

Ambient artificial intelligence (AI) documentation tools are increasingly deployed to reduce clinician documentation burden, but their implications for biased language in clinical notes remain unclear. We conducted a large-scale comparison analysis of AI drafts and corresponding clinician finalized notes to quantify stigmatizing language changes pre- and post-editing. Using a lexicon-based natural language processing (NLP) pipeline, we measured (1) the prevalence of stigmatizing language in AI drafts, (2) the prevalence and term composition in final notes, and (3) the frequency of removal or introduction of stigmatizing terms. Across 66,297 paired note sections, 21.4% of AI draft sections contained at least one stigmatizing language mention, rising to 24.0% in clinician finalized versions. Introductions occurred more often than removals, suggesting clinician editing can be a net source of stigmatizing language entering the EHR with using Ambient AI.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

ReWeaver: Towards Simulation-Ready and Topology-Accurate Garment Reconstruction

High-quality 3D garment reconstruction plays a crucial role in mitigating the sim-to-real gap in applications such as digital avatars, virtual try-on and robotic manipulation. However, existing garment reconstruction methods typically rely on unstructured representations, such as 3D Gaussian Splats, struggling to provide accurate reconstructions of garment topology and sewing structures. As a result, the reconstructed outputs are often unsuitable for high-fidelity physical simulation. We propose ReWeaver, a novel framework for topology-accurate 3D garment and sewing pattern reconstruction from sparse multi-view RGB images. Given as few as four input views, ReWeaver predicts seams and panels as well as their connectivities in both the 2D UV space and the 3D space. The predicted seams and panels align precisely with the multi-view images, yielding structured 2D--3D garment representations suitable for 3D perception, high-fidelity physical simulation, and robotic manipulation. To enable effective training, we construct a large-scale dataset GCD-TS, comprising multi-view RGB images, 3D garment geometries, textured human body meshes and annotated sewing patterns. The dataset contains over 100,000 synthetic samples covering a wide range of complex geometries and topologies. Extensive experiments show that ReWeaver consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of topology accuracy, geometry alignment and seam-panel consistency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Resource-Conscious Modeling for Next- Day Discharge Prediction Using Clinical Notes

Timely discharge prediction is essential for optimizing bed turnover and resource allocation in elective spine surgery units. This study evaluates the feasibility of lightweight, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) and traditional text-based models for predicting next-day discharge using postoperative clinical notes. We compared 13 models, including TF-IDF with XGBoost and LGBM, and compact LLMs (DistilGPT-2, Bio_ClinicalBERT) fine-tuned via LoRA. TF-IDF with LGBM achieved the best balance, with an F1-score of 0.47 for the discharge class, a recall of 0.51, and the highest AUC-ROC (0.80). While LoRA improved recall in DistilGPT2, overall transformer-based and generative models underperformed. These findings suggest interpretable, resource-efficient models may outperform compact LLMs in real-world, imbalanced clinical prediction tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

EngageTriBoost: Predictive Modeling of User Engagement in Digital Mental Health Intervention Using Explainable Machine Learning

Mental health challenges among young adults, are on the rise, necessitating effective solutions such as digital mental health interventions (DMHIs). Despite their promise, DMHIs face significant adoption barriers, including low initial uptake and high dropout rates. This study leverages machine learning (ML) to analyze behavioral patterns of users of a DMHI, eBridge, designed to increase the utilization of professional mental health services among at-risk college students through motivational interviewing-based online counseling. Our ensemble model, EngageTriBoost, achieved up to 84% accuracy in predicting engagement, measured by sign-ins and counselor interactions. We then applied the Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis which provided clear, interpretable insights into key factors influencing user engagement such as emotional dysregulation and perceived stigma, highlighting their critical effect on DMHI adoption. This study demonstrates the power of explainable ML for better understanding user engagement with DMHI to improve their adoption and achievable impact on mental health outcomes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

We Need Granular Sharing of De-Identified Data-But Will Patients Engage? Investigating Health System Leaders' and Patients' Perspectives on A Patient-Controlled Data-Sharing Platform

Patient-controlled data-sharing systems are increasingly promoted as a way to empower patients with greater autonomy over their health data. Yet it remains unclear how different stakeholders, especially patients and health system leaders, perceive the benefits and challenges of enabling granular control over the sharing of de-identified medical data for research. To address this gap, we developed a high-fidelity prototype of a patient-controlled, web-based consent platform and conducted a two-phase mixed-methods study:semi-structured interviews with 16 health system leaders and a survey with 523 patient participants. While both groups appreciated the potential of such a platform to enhance transparency and autonomy, their views diverged in meaningful ways. Leaders viewed transparency and granular control through the lens of informed consent and institutional ethics, whereas patients interpreted these factors as safeguards against potential risks and uncertainties. Our findings underscore critical tensions such as individual control and research integrity. We offer design implications for building trustworthy, context-aware systems that support flexible granularity, provide ongoing benefit-centered transparency, and adapt to diverse literacy and privacy needs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

SemanticFace: Semantic Facial Action Estimation via Semantic Distillation in Interpretable Space

Facial action estimation from a single image is often formulated as predicting or fitting parameters in compact expression spaces, which lack explicit semantic interpretability. However, many practical applications, such as avatar control and human-computer interaction, require interpretable facial actions that correspond to meaningful muscle movements. In this work, we propose SemanticFace, a framework for facial action estimation in the interpretable ARKit blendshape space that reformulates coefficient prediction as structured semantic reasoning. SemanticFace adopts a two-stage semantic distillation paradigm: it first derives structured semantic supervision from ground-truth ARKit coefficients and then distills this knowledge into a multimodal large language model to predict interpretable facial action coefficients from images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that language-aligned semantic supervision improves both coefficient accuracy and perceptual consistency, while enabling strong cross-identity generalization and robustness to large domain shifts, including cartoon faces.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Consumer-to-Clinical Language Shifts in Ambient AI Draft Notes and Clinician-Finalized Documentation: A Multi-level Analysis

Ambient AI generates draft clinical notes from patient-clinician conversations, often using lay or consumer-oriented phrasing to support patient understanding instead of standardized clinical terminology. How clinicians revise these drafts for professional documentation conventions remains unclear. We quantified clinician editing for consumer-to- clinical normalization using a dictionary-confirmed transformation framework. We analyzed 71,173 AI-draft and finalized-note section pairs from 34,726 encounters. Confirmed transformations were defined as replacing a consumer expression with its dictionary-mapped clinical equivalent in the same section. Editing significantly reduced terminology density across all sections (p < 0.001). The Assessment and Plan accounted for the largest transformation volume (59.3%). Our analysis identified 7,576 transformation events across 4,114 note sections (5.8%), representing 1.2% consumer-term deletions. Transformation intensity varied across individual clinicians (p < 0.001). Overall, clinician post-editing demonstrates consistent shifts from conversational phrasing toward standardized, section- appropriate clinical terminology, supporting section-aware ambient AI design.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Physically Accurate Differentiable Inverse Rendering for Radio Frequency Digital Twin

Digital twins, virtual simulated replicas of physical scenes, are transforming system design across industries. However, their potential in radio frequency (RF) systems has been limited by the non-differentiable nature of conventional RF simulators. The visibility of propagation paths causes severe discontinuities, and differentiable rendering techniques from computer graphics cannot easily transfer due to point-source antennas and dominant specular reflections. In this paper, we present RFDT, a physically based differentiable RF simulation framework that enables gradient-based interaction between virtual and physical worlds. RFDT resolves discontinuities with a physically grounded edge-diffraction transition function, and mitigates non-convexity from Fourier-domain processing through a signal domain transform surrogate. Our implementation demonstrates RFDT's ability to accurately reconstruct digital twins from real RF measurements. Moreover, RFDT can augment diverse downstream applications, such as test-time adaptation of machine learning-based RF sensing and physically constrained optimization of communication systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards

As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AgentMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Tool-Augmented Agent

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like o3 and DeepSeek-R1 have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks with long cot. However, they remain computationally inefficient and struggle with accuracy when solving problems requiring complex mathematical operations. In this work, we present AgentMath, an agent framework that seamlessly integrates language models' reasoning capabilities with code interpreters' computational precision to efficiently tackle complex mathematical problems. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) An automated method that converts natural language chain-of-thought into structured tool-augmented trajectories, generating high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data to alleviate data scarcity; (2) A novel agentic reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm that dynamically interleaves natural language generation with real-time code execution. This enables models to autonomously learn optimal tool-use strategies through multi-round interactive feedback, while fostering emergent capabilities in code refinement and error correction; (3) An efficient training system incorporating innovative techniques, including request-level asynchronous rollout scheduling, agentic partial rollout, and prefix-aware weighted load balancing, achieving 4-5x speedup and making efficient RL training feasible on ultra-long sequences with scenarios with massive tool invocation. The evaluations show that AgentMath achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical competition benchmarks including AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25. Specifically, AgentMath-30B-A3B attains 90.6%, 86.4%, and 73.8% accuracy respectively, surpassing OpenAI-o3-mini and Claude-Opus-4.0-Thinking while remaining competitive with OpenAI-o3, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-R1-671B-0528.These results validate the effectiveness of our approach and pave the way for building scalable mathematical reasoning agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Length Scaling: Synergizing Breadth and Depth for Generative Reward Models

Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning considerably enhances the reliability of evaluation. However, current works predominantly rely on unstructured length scaling, ignoring the divergent efficacy of different reasoning mechanisms: Breadth-CoT (B-CoT, i.e., multi-dimensional principle coverage) and Depth-CoT (D-CoT, i.e., substantive judgment soundness). To address this, we introduce Mix-GRM, a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured B-CoT and D-CoT through a modular synthesis pipeline, subsequently employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to internalize and optimize these mechanisms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Mix-GRM establishes a new state-of-the-art across five benchmarks, surpassing leading open-source RMs by an average of 8.2\%. Our results reveal a clear divergence in reasoning: B-CoT benefits subjective preference tasks, whereas D-CoT excels in objective correctness tasks. Consequently, misaligning the reasoning mechanism with the task directly degrades performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RLVR acts as a switching amplifier, inducing an emergent polarization where the model spontaneously allocates its reasoning style to match task demands. The synthesized data and models are released at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/DonJoey/mix-grm}{Hugging Face}, and the code is released at \href{https://github.com/Don-Joey/Mix-GRM}{Github}.

cs.AI↗