arXiv subjects

Lifeng Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Lifeng Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ASTELD: A Six-Axis Classification Framework for Autonomous AI Agents - Design, Evaluation, and an OpenClaw Case Study

Autonomous AI agent platforms differ substantially in architecture, security, tool integration, execution, autonomy, and deployment, yet the field lacks a common classification scheme for comparing these design choices. We propose ASTELD, an operational six-axis classification framework for autonomous AI agents: Architecture pattern, Security posture, Tool integration model, Execution paradigm, Level of autonomy and human control, and Deployment topology. ASTELD is constructed by synthesizing prior agent taxonomies with observable platform properties and explicit category-assignment rules. We evaluate its discriminative and explanatory utility by mapping eight representative frameworks and by using OpenClaw as an in-depth case study. The resulting profiles separate all eight platforms under their dominant configurations and reveal three cross-platform patterns: a security-accessibility diagonal, strong execution-architecture coupling, and capability convergence with persistent architectural differentiation. We further classify 50+ OpenClaw derivatives and find that innovation concentrates on the Security, Execution, and Deployment axes, indicating that ASTELD can explain where ecosystem fragmentation occurs. The OpenClaw case study also supplies a six-category vulnerability taxonomy, evidence from five institutional assessments, and adoption and governance analyses that connect platform coordinates to observed risks. These results position ASTELD as a reproducible method for comparing agent platforms, identifying unoccupied design regions, guiding framework selection, and organizing future empirical research. The analysis also exposes a consequential empty region: none of the evaluated systems combines local-first deployment with enterprise-grade security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Integrated Sensing and Covert Communication In Low-Altitude Networks: A Smart Radio Environment Perspective

The rise of low-altitude economies and 6G is driving the evolution of low-altitude networks (LANs), making communication security a pressing concern. Unlike traditional security approaches, covert communication offers enhanced protection by hiding the transmission behavior itself. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), a key technology of 6G, efficiently supports both sensing and communication tasks through hardware integration, thereby promising significant gains for covert communication. Nevertheless, the complexity and dynamics of urban environments pose critical challenges. Drawing on the latest advances in smart radio environment (SRE) technologies, this paper introduces them into integrated sensing and covert communication (ISACC) to suppress covert channel fading and counteract sensing precision loss in LANs. We first survey the applications and state-of-the-art findings of ISACC in LANs, highlighting key practical challenges. Subsequently, we introduce the core concept of SRE and elaborate on its enabling techniques across four dimensions. To deliver more insights, we explore potential pathways for integrating SRE into ISACC. To maximize covert throughput, a reinforcement learning-based case study is conducted by jointly optimizing flight trajectory, jamming power, movable antenna position, bandwidth allocation, and beamforming vectors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared to the benchmark. Finally, some open challenges and potential directions are discussed.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

World Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Architectures, Methodologies, Reasoning Paradigms, and Applications

World models, internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment, have emerged as a central paradigm in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, enabling agents to predict, plan, and reason within learned representations. Despite rapid progress across reinforcement learning, robotics, autonomous driving, and video generation, the field lacks a unified framework integrating its diverse architectural choices, training methods, reasoning mechanisms, and application settings. This survey addresses that gap with a multi-axis taxonomy organized along four dimensions: (i) architecture, encompassing representation format, dynamics formulation, input modality, learning paradigm, and downstream application; (ii) methodological family, including state-space and recurrent approaches, transformer-based models, diffusion-based generators, physics-informed networks, and language-augmented multimodal systems; (iii) reasoning strategy, covering imagination-based planning, latent policy learning, counterfactual reasoning, and planning under uncertainty; and (iv) application domain, spanning robotics, autonomous driving, video prediction, multimodal agents, reinforcement learning, scientific modeling, medical imaging, educational measurement, and business and finance. Tracing the field from early cognitive-science foundations to milestone systems such as PlaNet, the Dreamer family, MuZero, Sora, Cosmos, and Genie, we examine how these dimensions interact and highlight the recent convergence of chain-of-thought reasoning with world-model imagination. We review evaluation protocols and benchmarks, identify persistent challenges such as compounding prediction errors, sim-to-real transfer, and fragmented evaluation, and outline future directions toward unified multimodal world models, foundation-scale interactive simulators, and safe deployment in safety-critical domains.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MedVIGIL: Evaluating Trustworthy Medical VLMs Under Broken Visual Evidence

Medical vision--language models (VLMs) are usually evaluated on intact image--question pairs, but trustworthy clinical use requires a stronger property: a model must recognise when the evidential basis for an answer has failed. We study this through silent failures under perturbed evidence, where a vision-required medical question is paired with a false premise, wording perturbation, knowledge-only rewrite, or ROI-corrupted image, yet the model returns a fluent non-refusal answer. We introduce medvigil, a 300-case evaluation suite drawn from four public medical VQA sources, supervised end to end by four board-certified radiologists: every gold answer, refusal option, candidate-answer set, paraphrase, false-premise trap, ROI box, and clinical risk tier is clinician-authored. Two attending radiologists annotate every case in parallel, a senior radiologist consolidates the released manifest, and a separate fourth radiologist independent of construction answers every probe to provide the human reference baseline. The release contains 2556 MCQ probes, 240 counterfactual triplets, physician-adjudicated risk-tier and answerability flags, ROI boxes, and a paired open-ended variant. We report seven correctness-conditioned audit metrics that summarise into the medvigil Composite Score (MCS), and audit 16 vision-capable models plus two text-only baselines. The independent radiologist scores MCS 83.3 at silent-failure rate 5.8%, leaving a 14.1-point composite headroom above the strongest audited model (Claude Opus 4.7 at 69.2). The benchmark and evaluation harness are publicly released.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ECHO: Efficient Chest X-ray Report Generation with One-step Block Diffusion

Chest X-ray report generation (CXR-RG) has the potential to substantially alleviate radiologists' workload. However, conventional autoregressive vision--language models (VLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to sequential token decoding. Diffusion-based models offer a promising alternative through parallel generation, but they still require multiple denoising iterations. Compressing multi-step denoising to a single step could further reduce latency, but often degrades textual coherence due to the mean-field bias introduced by token-factorized denoisers. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ECHO}, an efficient diffusion-based VLM (dVLM) for chest X-ray report generation. ECHO enables stable one-step-per-block inference via a novel Direct Conditional Distillation (DCD) framework, which mitigates the mean-field limitation by constructing unfactorized supervision from on-policy diffusion trajectories to encode joint token dependencies. In addition, we introduce a Response-Asymmetric Diffusion (RAD) training strategy that further improves training efficiency while maintaining model effectiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ECHO surpasses state-of-the-art autoregressive methods, improving RaTE and SemScore by \textbf{64.33\%} and \textbf{60.58\%} respectively, while achieving up to \textbf{$8\times$} inference speedup with negligible degradation in clinical accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Adapting Large Language Models to Low-Resource Tibetan: A Two-Stage Continual and Supervised Fine-Tuning Study

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages remains a major challenge due to data scarcity and cross-lingual drift. This work presents a two-stage adaptation of Qwen2.5-3B to Tibetan, a morphologically rich and underrepresented language. We employ Continual Pretraining (CPT) to establish Tibetan linguistic grounding, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for task and translation specialization. Empirical evaluations demonstrate a consistent decrease in perplexity (from 2.98 $\rightarrow$ 1.54) and substantial improvements in Chinese$\rightarrow$Tibetan translation quality (BLEU: 0.046 $\rightarrow$ 0.261; chrF: 2.2 $\rightarrow$ 6.6). Layer-wise analysis across 435 layers in Qwen3-4B reveals that adaptation primarily concentrates on embedding and output heads, with mid--late MLP projections encoding domain-specific transformations. Our findings suggest that CPT constructs a Tibetan semantic manifold while SFT sharpens task alignment with minimal representational disruption. This study provides the first quantitative exploration of Tibetan adaptation dynamics for LLMs, and offers an open, reproducible framework for extending multilingual foundation models to low-resource settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Discrete Diffusion Models with MLLMs for Unified Medical Multimodal Generation

Recent advances in generative medical models are constrained by modality-specific scenarios that hinder the integration of complementary evidence from imaging, pathology, and clinical notes. This fragmentation limits their evolution into foundation models that can learn and reason across the full spectrum of biomedical data. We propose MeDiM, the first medical discrete diffusion model that learns shared distributions across modalities without modality-specific components. MeDiM unifies multiple generative tasks: translating between images and text, and jointly producing image-report pairs across domains in response to prompts. Built on a discrete diffusion framework, MeDiM bridges vision and language representations through a shared probabilistic space. To enable unified and flexible medical generation, we employ a multimodal large language model (MLLM) as the diffusion backbone, leveraging its prior knowledge and cross-modal reasoning. Two key designs are introduced: (1) removing the causal attention mask for bidirectional context, and (2) injecting continuous timestep embeddings for diffusion awareness. Experiments demonstrate high-fidelity medical generation (FID 16.60 on MIMIC-CXR and FID 24.19 on PathGen) and accurate report generation (METEOR 0.2650 and 0.2580). Jointly generated image-report pairs further enhance downstream performance (plus6.43 percent BLEU-1, plus18.57 percent BLEU-2, plus31.58 percent BLEU-3, plus4.80 percent METEOR), showing that MeDiM supports coherent and clinically grounded multimodal outputs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for T2I Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Blind Spot Navigation: Evolutionary Discovery of Sensitive Semantic Concepts for LVLMs

Adversarial attacks aim to generate malicious inputs that mislead deep models, but beyond causing model failure, they cannot provide certain interpretable information such as ``\textit{What content in inputs make models more likely to fail?}'' However, this information is crucial for researchers to specifically improve model robustness. Recent research suggests that models may be particularly sensitive to certain semantics in visual inputs (such as ``wet,'' ``foggy''), making them prone to errors. Inspired by this, in this paper we conducted the first exploration on large vision-language models (LVLMs) and found that LVLMs indeed are susceptible to hallucinations and various errors when facing specific semantic concepts in images. To efficiently search for these sensitive concepts, we integrated large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) models to propose a novel semantic evolution framework. Randomly initialized semantic concepts undergo LLM-based crossover and mutation operations to form image descriptions, which are then converted by T2I models into visual inputs for LVLMs. The task-specific performance of LVLMs on each input is quantified as fitness scores for the involved semantics and serves as reward signals to further guide LLMs in exploring concepts that induce LVLMs. Extensive experiments on seven mainstream LVLMs and two multimodal tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Additionally, we provide interesting findings about the sensitive semantics of LVLMs, aiming to inspire further in-depth research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

StegaINR4MIH: steganography by implicit neural representation for multi-image hiding

Multi-image hiding, which embeds multiple secret images into a cover image and is able to recover these images with high quality, has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of image steganography. However, due to the need to embed a large amount of data in a limited cover image space, issues such as contour shadowing or color distortion often arise, posing significant challenges for multi-image hiding. In this paper, we propose StegaINR4MIH, a novel implicit neural representation steganography framework that enables the hiding of multiple images within a single implicit representation function. In contrast to traditional methods that use multiple encoders to achieve multi-image embedding, our approach leverages the redundancy of implicit representation function parameters and employs magnitude-based weight selection and secret weight substitution on pre-trained cover image functions to effectively hide and independently extract multiple secret images. We conduct experiments on images with a resolution of from three different datasets: CelebA-HQ, COCO, and DIV2K. When hiding two secret images, the PSNR values of both the secret images and the stego images exceed 42. When hiding five secret images, the PSNR values of both the secret images and the stego images exceed 39. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of visual quality and undetectability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SCA: Improve Semantic Consistent in Unrestricted Adversarial Attacks via DDPM Inversion

Systems based on deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Unrestricted adversarial attacks typically manipulate the semantic content of an image (e.g., color or texture) to create adversarial examples that are both effective and photorealistic. Recent works have utilized the diffusion inversion process to map images into a latent space, where high-level semantics are manipulated by introducing perturbations. However, they often result in substantial semantic distortions in the denoised output and suffer from low efficiency. In this study, we propose a novel framework called Semantic-Consistent Unrestricted Adversarial Attacks (SCA), which employs an inversion method to extract edit-friendly noise maps and utilizes a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to provide semantic guidance throughout the process. Under the condition of rich semantic information provided by MLLM, we perform the DDPM denoising process of each step using a series of edit-friendly noise maps and leverage DPM Solver++ to accelerate this process, enabling efficient sampling with semantic consistency. Compared to existing methods, our framework enables the efficient generation of adversarial examples that exhibit minimal discernible semantic changes. Consequently, we for the first time introduce Semantic-Consistent Adversarial Examples (SCAE). Extensive experiments and visualizations have demonstrated the high efficiency of SCA, particularly in being on average 12 times faster than the state-of-the-art attacks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/Pan-Zihao/SCA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Content and Salient Semantics Collaboration for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Cloth-changing person re-identification aims at recognizing the same person with clothing changes across non-overlapping cameras. Advanced methods either resort to identity-related auxiliary modalities (e.g., sketches, silhouettes, and keypoints) or clothing labels to mitigate the impact of clothes. However, relying on unpractical and inflexible auxiliary modalities or annotations limits their real-world applicability. In this paper, we promote cloth-changing person re-identification by leveraging abundant semantics present within pedestrian images, without the need for any auxiliaries. Specifically, we first propose a unified Semantics Mining and Refinement (SMR) module to extract robust identity-related content and salient semantics, mitigating interference from clothing appearances effectively. We further propose the Content and Salient Semantics Collaboration (CSSC) framework to collaborate and leverage various semantics, facilitating cross-parallel semantic interaction and refinement. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three cloth-changing benchmarks, demonstrating its superiority over advanced competitors. The code is available at https://github.com/QizaoWang/CSSC-CCReID.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Watermarking for Neural Radiation Fields by Invertible Neural Network

To protect the copyright of the 3D scene represented by the neural radiation field, the embedding and extraction of the neural radiation field watermark are considered as a pair of inverse problems of image transformations. A scheme for protecting the copyright of the neural radiation field is proposed using invertible neural network watermarking, which utilizes watermarking techniques for 2D images to achieve the protection of the 3D scene. The scheme embeds the watermark in the training image of the neural radiation field through the forward process in the invertible network and extracts the watermark from the image rendered by the neural radiation field using the inverse process to realize the copyright protection of both the neural radiation field and the 3D scene. Since the rendering process of the neural radiation field can cause the loss of watermark information, the scheme incorporates an image quality enhancement module, which utilizes a neural network to recover the rendered image and then extracts the watermark. The scheme embeds a watermark in each training image to train the neural radiation field and enables the extraction of watermark information from multiple viewpoints. Simulation experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

2SFGL: A Simple And Robust Protocol For Graph-Based Fraud Detection

Financial crime detection using graph learning improves financial safety and efficiency. However, criminals may commit financial crimes across different institutions to avoid detection, which increases the difficulty of detection for financial institutions which use local data for graph learning. As most financial institutions are subject to strict regulations in regards to data privacy protection, the training data is often isolated and conventional learning technology cannot handle the problem. Federated learning (FL) allows multiple institutions to train a model without revealing their datasets to each other, hence ensuring data privacy protection. In this paper, we proposes a novel two-stage approach to federated graph learning (2SFGL): The first stage of 2SFGL involves the virtual fusion of multiparty graphs, and the second involves model training and inference on the virtual graph. We evaluate our framework on a conventional fraud detection task based on the FraudAmazonDataset and FraudYelpDataset. Experimental results show that integrating and applying a GCN (Graph Convolutional Network) with our 2SFGL framework to the same task results in a 17.6\%-30.2\% increase in performance on several typical metrics compared to the case only using FedAvg, while integrating GraphSAGE with 2SFGL results in a 6\%-16.2\% increase in performance compared to the case only using FedAvg. We conclude that our proposed framework is a robust and simple protocol which can be simply integrated to pre-existing graph-based fraud detection methods.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

MarkNerf:Watermarking for Neural Radiance Field

A watermarking algorithm is proposed in this paper to address the copyright protection issue of implicit 3D models. The algorithm involves embedding watermarks into the images in the training set through an embedding network, and subsequently utilizing the NeRF model for 3D modeling. A copyright verifier is employed to generate a backdoor image by providing a secret perspective as input to the neural radiation field. Subsequently, a watermark extractor is devised using the hyperparameterization method of the neural network to extract the embedded watermark image from that perspective. In a black box scenario, if there is a suspicion that the 3D model has been used without authorization, the verifier can extract watermarks from a secret perspective to verify network copyright. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively safeguards the copyright of 3D models. Furthermore, the extracted watermarks exhibit favorable visual effects and demonstrate robust resistance against various types of noise attacks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Steganography for Neural Radiance Fields by Backdooring

The utilization of implicit representation for visual data (such as images, videos, and 3D models) has recently gained significant attention in computer vision research. In this letter, we propose a novel model steganography scheme with implicit neural representation. The message sender leverages Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and its viewpoint synthesis capabilities by introducing a viewpoint as a key. The NeRF model generates a secret viewpoint image, which serves as a backdoor. Subsequently, we train a message extractor using overfitting to establish a one-to-one mapping between the secret message and the secret viewpoint image. The sender delivers the trained NeRF model and the message extractor to the receiver over the open channel, and the receiver utilizes the key shared by both parties to obtain the rendered image in the secret view from the NeRF model, and then obtains the secret message through the message extractor. The inherent complexity of the viewpoint information prevents attackers from stealing the secret message accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that the message extractor trained in this letter achieves high-capacity steganography with fast performance, achieving a 100\% accuracy in message extraction. Furthermore, the extensive viewpoint key space of NeRF ensures the security of the steganography scheme.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Local Slot Attention for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN), a frontier study aiming to pave the way for general-purpose robots, has been a hot topic in the computer vision and natural language processing community. The VLN task requires an agent to navigate to a goal location following natural language instructions in unfamiliar environments. Recently, transformer-based models have gained significant improvements on the VLN task. Since the attention mechanism in the transformer architecture can better integrate inter- and intra-modal information of vision and language. However, there exist two problems in current transformer-based models. 1) The models process each view independently without taking the integrity of the objects into account. 2) During the self-attention operation in the visual modality, the views that are spatially distant can be inter-weaved with each other without explicit restriction. This kind of mixing may introduce extra noise instead of useful information. To address these issues, we propose 1) A slot-attention based module to incorporate information from segmentation of the same object. 2) A local attention mask mechanism to limit the visual attention span. The proposed modules can be easily plugged into any VLN architecture and we use the Recurrent VLN-Bert as our base model. Experiments on the R2R dataset show that our model has achieved the state-of-the-art results.

cs.CV↗