arXiv subjects

Meng Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Meng Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The GECKOS survey: Assembly history of the lenticular galaxy NGC 3957

We analyse the assembly history of the edge-on lenticular galaxy NGC 3957 using deep integral-field spectroscopic MUSE data from the GECKOS survey. By applying a dust-corrected Multi-Gaussian Expansion and a population-orbit superposition model, we disentangle the galaxy's stellar kinematics, age, and metallicity. We dynamically decompose the galaxy and identify three distinct components: a dynamically-cold main disc, a compact Nuclear Stellar Disc (NSD), and a hot component. The NSD emerges as the youngest and most metal-rich component ($t = 6.9 \pm 0.4$ Gyr; $[Z/H] = 0.49 \pm 0.06$ dex), implying that the stellar bar is a long-lived structure that formed at least $\sim 7$ Gyr ago. The main stellar disc is dynamically cold ($\sigma_z \sim 20-30$ km/s), precluding any significant mergers over the last $\sim 8$ Gyr, and exhibits a strong positive age gradient (younger inside, older outside) beyond the bar radius. Synthesising these dynamical fossil records, NGC 3957 likely evolved as a `faded spiral' in a small-to-medium group environment. Its outer disc might passively fade due to mild gas starvation, while the bar fuelled prolonged central star formation. Comparison with S0s in the Fornax cluster reveals that this combination of internal secular evolution and mild starvation produces `outside-in' fading signatures that could mimic the environmental stripping typically seen in dense clusters.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

3DGBGS: 3D Granular Ball Gaussian Splatting for Compact Novel View Synthesis

Three-dimensional Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-quality real-time novel-view synthesis through explicit Gaussian primitives and differentiable rasterization. 3DGS and Granular Ball Computing (GBC), proposed in 2019, share a natural compatibility in adaptive representation. The efficiency of 3DGS partly stems from a coarse-to-fine and on-demand refinement process that draws on the generation principle of GBC. This connection motivates us to further introduce adaptive granular ball organization into anchor-based 3DGS. Existing anchor-based methods typically construct anchors from sparse SfM point clouds through fixed voxelization, which cannot adequately adapt to spatially non-uniform point distributions and leads to a trade-off among anchor count, model compactness, and rendering quality. To address this issue, we propose 3DGBGS (3D Granular Ball Gaussian Splatting), a compact anchor-based framework for novel-view synthesis. 3DGBGS adaptively partitions SfM point clouds into 3D granular balls, using larger balls to compactly represent smooth and redundant regions and smaller balls to preserve complex geometry and local details. Based on this representation, Granular Ball Anchor Initialization (GBAI) uses granular ball centers to initialize compact anchor positions, while the Granular Ball Scale Prior (GBSP) exploits granular ball radii to provide local scale priors for Gaussian generation. Experiments on four benchmarks show that 3DGBGS reduces initial and final anchors by 37.1% and 10.0%, respectively, and model storage by 9.8% on average, while maintaining comparable rendering quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AnyMatch: Supercharging Universal Multi-Modal Image Matching with Large-Scale Single-View Images

Multi-modal image matching is essential for visual localization and multi-sensor fusion, but it is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale training data with precise geometric annotations. Existing real-world datasets suffer from prohibitive costs, limited scene diversity, and errors in SfM-MVS pipelines, while synthetic methods struggle to maintain 3D geometric consistency or achieve photorealistic appearance. To address this, we propose AnyMatch, a novel framework that leverages abundant, easily accessible single-view images at minimal cost to generate rich multi-modal training data. AnyMatch integrates monocular depth estimation, 3D reprojection, diffusion-based inpainting, and crossmodal image translation to synthesize multi-view, multi-modal image pairs with 3D geometric fidelity. Crucially, our method provides annotations that strictly adhere to 3D geometric consistency through explicit 3D reprojection, avoiding SfM-MVS error accumulation. Furthermore, AnyMatch offers strong scalability, enabling controllable scene diversity and annotation difficulty via adjustable input and camera parameters. We construct Any-syn, a large-scale synthetic multi-modal dataset using AnyMatch. Experimental results show that matching networks (e.g., LoFTR, EDM, RoMa) fine-tuned on Any-syn achieve substantial performance gains on multi-modal benchmarks, exhibiting superior generalization and robustness compared to models trained on existing data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Self-Evolving Agentic System for Automated Generation and Execution of Biological Protocols

Autonomous wet-lab experimentation requires more than plausible protocol text: biological intent, quantitative procedures, device constraints and experimental feedback must remain aligned from protocol and SOP design to code and physical execution. We developed ProtoPilot, a self-evolving multi-agent system, together with an expert-grounded benchmark and evaluation framework for testing this conversion as an experimental automation problem. The framework spans 294 synthetic-biology and molecular-biology tasks derived from 98 gold-standard protocols, wet-lab expert rubrics, device-level validity gates and real experimental tests. ProtoPilot incorporates layer-wise verifiability, multi-agent orchestration and a runtime-updated skill library to generate protocols, expand SOPs, synthesize SDK-compliant code and revise workflows from wet-lab feedback. It achieved a Top@3 expert-preference rate of 90.2%, an overall protocol-to-code gate pass rate of 89.5% and an Opentrons pass rate of 88.24%, compared with 32.35% for OpenTrons-AI. Wet-lab validation produced interpretable readouts, Sanger-confirmed products and feedback-corrected PCA-assembled DNA targets, establishing a verifiable route to autonomous experimentation. Together, these results show that the evaluation framework captures execution-relevant requirements for autonomous wet-lab automation, and that ProtoPilot can meet them by converting protocol and code generation into validated execution and feedback-guided revision.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Elliptic Harnack inequality and Poincar\'e inequality for $p$-energies on metric measure spaces

For $p>1$ and a $p$-energy on a volume doubling metric measure space, we prove the Poincar\'e inequality under the elliptic Harnack inequality, two-sided capacity bounds, and additional geometric and analytic assumptions. Combining this with our previous results, we obtain, under the same structural assumptions, the equivalence between the elliptic Harnack inequality together with two-sided capacity bounds and the conjunction of the Poincar\'e inequality and the cutoff Sobolev inequality.

math.AP↗

arXiv2026

Uncovering the dark matter distribution by combining stellar kinematics and integrated HI spectra: Method validation

We determined the dark matter (DM) distribution in galaxies by jointly modelling stellar kinematics from integral field unit (IFU) observations and the gaseous kinematics encoded in a single integrated HI spectrum. The stellar kinematics are described by a triaxial orbit-superposition Schwarzschild model, while the HI gas is described by an idealised disc model; both are governed by the same gravitational potential. The potential comprises the stellar mass, a generalised Navarro-Frenk-White (gNFW) DM halo, and a central black hole. We validated the method on 58 simulated galaxies generated from the TNG50 cosmological simulation. For each galaxy, we created two versions of mock data with azimuthal angles viewed side-on and end-on, thus yielding 116 mock observations in total. Our model recovers the total mass, stellar mass, and DM mass profiles within the data range; the median DM mass of the 58 simulated galaxies is recovered with a relative systematic bias smaller than 20% across all radii from 2--20 kpc. The statistical uncertainties on the DM masses within 5 kpc remain similar to those found with the model constrained by IFU data only. In contrast, the relative uncertainty on the DM mass in the outer regions decreases when the HI spectrum is included; at 20 kpc, it drops markedly, from about 85% to roughly 30%. The DM density slope defined explicitly in the gNFW model is systematically underestimated and thus does not yield a reliable quantity from observations using our approach. Instead, we introduce density slopes evaluated between 2 and 20 kpc, which are statistically well recovered for both the total mass and the DM mass. We demonstrate the reliability of this method in uncovering the DM distribution and emphasise its promise for application to large samples of observed galaxies.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Free energy expansion of determinantal Coulomb gases in the quadratic fields with a point charge

We study a determinantal Coulomb gas in the complex plane associated with the external potential $$ Q(z)=\frac{1}{1-\tau^2}\big(|z|^2-\tau \text{Re } z^2\big)-2c\log|z-a|, $$ where $\tau\in[0,1)$, $c\ge0$, and $a\ge0$. In the regimes where the associated droplet is simply or doubly connected, we derive the free energy expansion up to and including the constant term, with all coefficients computed explicitly, thereby extending recent results in the isotropic case $\tau=0$. In particular, we identify the constant term with the Liouville action associated with the droplet. Our result admits a natural interpretation in terms of asymptotic expansions of moments of characteristic polynomials for the elliptic Ginibre ensemble. The proof is based on a deformation framework involving both the singularity location $a$ and the anisotropy parameter $\tau$, relating variations of the free energy to refined asymptotics of planar orthogonal polynomials. The asymptotic analysis relies on the foliation flow method of Hedenmalm and Wennman, providing an alternative to the Riemann--Hilbert approach used in the isotropic setting. The present work suggests a general framework connecting free energy expansions, refined asymptotics of planar orthogonal polynomials, and conformally invariant geometric functionals, with several intermediate results already formulated for general algebraic Hele-Shaw potentials.

math-ph↗

arXiv2026

Efficient, Validation-Free Intrinsic Quality Estimation for Large-Scale Face Recognition Datasets

We propose Intrinsic Quality (IQ), a validation-free metric designed to estimate the inherent potential of face recognition (FR) datasets to produce high-performance models without the need for full-scale training. IQ integrates two components: (i) a Neighbor-Consistency Score that quantifies local identity label agreement via nearest neighbors, and (ii) Global Representation Subspace Complexity (Effective Rank, ER), which captures the underlying embedding geometry and dataset diversity. IQ allows for rapid evaluation using lightweight proxy models or data subsets, facilitating dataset diagnosis and curation prior to resource-intensive full-scale training. We describe an experimental protocol tailored to clean, noisy, and mixed-quality FR datasets, and outline evaluation methodologies to validate IQ's predictive power for downstream performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

UniT: Unified Geometry Learning with Group Autoregressive Transformer

Recent feed-forward models have significantly advanced geometry perception for inferring dense 3D structure from sensor observations. However, its essential capabilities remain fragmented across multiple incompatible paradigms, including online perception, offline reconstruction, multi-modal integration, long-horizon scalability, and metric-scale estimation. We present UniT, a unified model built upon a novel Group Autoregressive Transformer, which reformulates these seemingly disparate capabilities within a single framework. The key idea is to treat groups of sensor observations as the basic autoregressive units and predict the corresponding point maps in an anchor-free and scale-adaptive manner. More specifically, diverse view configurations in both online and offline settings are naturally unified within a single group autoregression process. By varying the group size, online mode operates over multiple autoregressive steps with single-frame groups, whereas offline mode aggregates a multi-frame group in a single forward pass. Meanwhile, a queue-style KV caching mechanism ensures bounded autoregressive memory over long horizons. This is enabled by reducing long-range dependencies on early frames through anchor-free relational modeling, thereby allowing outdated memory to be discarded on the fly. To improve metric-scale generalization across scenes, a scale-adaptive geometry loss is further introduced within this framework. It couples relative geometric constraints with a partial absolute scale term, implicitly regularizing global scale and inducing a progressive transition from scale-invariant geometry to metric-scale solutions. Together with a dedicated modal attention module for integrating auxiliary modalities, UniT achieves state-of-the-art performance in unified geometry perception, as validated on ten benchmarks spanning seven representative tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CAP: Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered corpora inherently risk retaining sensitive information, necessitating selective knowledge unlearning for regulatory compliance and ethical safety. However, existing parameter-modifying methods face fundamental limitations: high computational costs, uncontrollable forgetting boundaries, and strict dependency on model weight access. These constraints render them impractical for closed-source models, yet current non-invasive alternatives remain unsystematic and reliant on empirical experience. To address these challenges, we propose the Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning (CAP) framework, an end-to-end prompt-driven unlearning paradigm. CAP decouples unlearning into a learnable prompt optimization process via reinforcement learning, where a prompt generator collaborates with the LLM to suppress target knowledge while preserving general capabilities selectively. This approach enables reversible knowledge restoration through prompt revocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAP achieves precise, controllable unlearning without updating model parameters, establishing a dynamic alignment mechanism that overcomes the transferability limitations of prior methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Square Superpixel Generation and Representation Learning via Granular Ball Computing

Superpixels provide a compact region-based representation that preserves object boundaries and local structures, and have therefore been widely used in a variety of vision tasks to reduce computational cost. However, most existing superpixel algorithms produce irregularly shaped regions, which are not well aligned with regular operators such as convolutions. Consequently, superpixels are often treated as an offline preprocessing step, limiting parallel implementation and hindering end-to-end optimization within deep learning pipelines. Motivated by the adaptive representation and coverage property of granular-ball computing, we develop a square superpixel generation approach. Specifically, we approximate superpixels using multi-scale square blocks to avoid the computational and implementation difficulties induced by irregular shapes, enabling efficient parallel processing and learnable feature extraction. For each block, a purity score is computed based on pixel-intensity similarity, and high-quality blocks are selected accordingly. The resulting square superpixels can be readily integrated as graph nodes in graph neural networks (GNNs) or as tokens in Vision Transformers (ViTs), facilitating multi-scale information aggregation and structured visual representation. Experimental results on downstream tasks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Robust Optimal Operation of Virtual Power Plants Under Decision-Dependent Uncertainty of Price Elasticity

The rapid deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs) is one of the essential efforts to mitigate global climate change. However, a vast number of small-scale DERs are difficult to manage individually, motivating the introduction of virtual power plants (VPPs). A VPP operator coordinates a group of DERs by setting suitable prices, and aggregates them for interaction with the power grid. In this context, optimal pricing plays a critical role in VPP operation. This paper proposes a robust optimal operation model for VPPs that considers uncertainty in the price elasticity of demand. Specifically, the demand elasticity is found to be influenced by the pricing decision, giving rise to decision-dependent uncertainty (DDU). An improved column-and-constraint (C&CG) algorithm, together with tailored transformation and reformulation techniques, is developed to solve the robust model with DDU efficiently. Case studies based on actual electricity consumption data of London households demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

DSCSNet: A Dynamic Sparse Compression Sensing Network for Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Target Unmixing

Due to the limitations of optical lens focal length and detector resolution, distant clustered infrared small targets often appear as mixed spots. The Close Small Object Unmixing (CSOU) task aims to recover the number, sub-pixel positions, and radiant intensities of individual targets from these spots, which is a highly ill-posed inverse problem. Existing methods struggle to balance the rigorous sparsity guarantees of model-driven approaches and the dynamic scene adaptability of data-driven methods. To address this dilemma, this paper proposes a Dynamic Sparse Compressed Sensing Network (DSCSNet), a deep-unfolded network that couples the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) with learnable parameters. Specifically, we embed a strict $\ell_1$-norm sparsity constraint into the auxiliary variable update step of ADMM to replace the traditional $\ell_2$-norm smoothness-promoting terms, which effectively preserves the discrete energy peaks of small targets. We also integrate a self-attention-based dynamic thresholding mechanism into the reconstruction stage, which adaptively adjusts the sparsification intensity using the sparsity-enhanced information from the iterative process. These modules are jointly optimized end-to-end across the three iterative steps of ADMM. Retaining the physical logic of compressed sensing, DSCSNet achieves robust sparsity induction and scene adaptability, thus enhancing the unmixing accuracy and generalization in complex infrared scenarios. Extensive experiments on the synthetic infrared dataset CSIST-100K demonstrate that DSCSNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in key metrics such as CSO-mAP and sub-pixel localization error.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Selective Transfer Learning of Cross-Modality Distillation for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is a promising yet ill-posed task for autonomous vehicles due to the lack of accurate depth information. Cross-modality knowledge distillation could effectively transfer depth information from LiDAR to image-based network. However, modality gap between image and LiDAR seriously limits its accuracy. In this paper, we systematically investigate the negative transfer problem induced by modality gap in cross-modality distillation for the first time, including not only the architecture inconsistency issue but more importantly the feature overfitting issue. We propose a selective learning approach named MonoSTL to overcome these issues, which encourages positive transfer of depth information from LiDAR while alleviates the negative transfer on image-based network. On the one hand, we utilize similar architectures to ensure spatial alignment of features between image-based and LiDAR-based networks. On the other hand, we develop two novel distillation modules, namely Depth-Aware Selective Feature Distillation (DASFD) and Depth-Aware Selective Relation Distillation (DASRD), which selectively learn positive features and relationships of objects by integrating depth uncertainty into feature and relation distillations, respectively. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated into various CNN-based and DETR-based models, where we take three recent models on KITTI and a recent model on NuScenes for validation. Extensive experiments show that our approach considerably improves the accuracy of the base models and thereby achieves the best accuracy compared with all recently released SOTA models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Modal Decouple and Recouple Network for Robust 3D Object Detection

Multi-modal 3D object detection with bird's eye view (BEV) has achieved desired advances on benchmarks. Nonetheless, the accuracy may drop significantly in the real world due to data corruption such as sensor configurations for LiDAR and scene conditions for camera. One design bottleneck of previous models resides in the tightly coupling of multi-modal BEV features during fusion, which may degrade the overall system performance if one modality or both is corrupted. To mitigate, we propose a Multi-Modal Decouple and Recouple Network for robust 3D object detection under data corruption. Different modalities commonly share some high-level invariant features. We observe that these invariant features across modalities do not always fail simultaneously, because different types of data corruption affect each modality in distinct ways.These invariant features can be recovered across modalities for robust fusion under data corruption.To this end, we explicitly decouple Camera/LiDAR BEV features into modality-invariant and modality-specific parts. It allows invariant features to compensate each other while mitigates the negative impact of a corrupted modality on the other.We then recouple these features into three experts to handle different types of data corruption, respectively, i.e., LiDAR, camera, and both.For each expert, we use modality-invariant features as robust information, while modality-specific features serve as a complement.Finally, we adaptively fuse the three experts to exact robust features for 3D object detection. For validation, we collect a benchmark with a large quantity of data corruption for LiDAR, camera, and both based on nuScenes. Our model is trained on clean nuScenes and tested on all types of data corruption. Our model consistently achieves the best accuracy on both corrupted and clean data compared to recent models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RayD3D: Distilling Depth Knowledge Along the Ray for Robust Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Multi-view 3D detection with bird's eye view (BEV) is crucial for autonomous driving and robotics, but its robustness in real-world is limited as it struggles to predict accurate depth values. A mainstream solution, cross-modal distillation, transfers depth information from LiDAR to camera models but also unintentionally transfers depth-irrelevant information (e.g. LiDAR density). To mitigate this issue, we propose RayD3D, which transfers crucial depth knowledge along the ray: a line projecting from the camera to true location of an object. It is based on the fundamental imaging principle that predicted location of this object can only vary along this ray, which is finally determined by predicted depth value. Therefore, distilling along the ray enables more effective depth information transfer. More specifically, we design two ray-based distillation modules. Ray-based Contrastive Distillation (RCD) incorporates contrastive learning into distillation by sampling along the ray to learn how LiDAR accurately locates objects. Ray-based Weighted Distillation (RWD) adaptively adjusts distillation weight based on the ray to minimize the interference of depth-irrelevant information in LiDAR. For validation, we widely apply RayD3D into three representative types of BEV-based models, including BEVDet, BEVDepth4D, and BEVFormer. Our method is trained on clean NuScenes, and tested on both clean NuScenes and RoboBEV with a variety types of data corruptions. Our method significantly improves the robustness of all the three base models in all scenarios without increasing inference costs, and achieves the best when compared to recently released multi-view and distillation models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CoIn3D: Revisiting Configuration-Invariant Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection

Multi-camera 3D object detection (MC3D) has attracted increasing attention with the growing deployment of multi-sensor physical agents, such as robots and autonomous vehicles. However, MC3D models still struggle to generalize to unseen platforms with new multi-camera configurations. Current solutions simply employ a meta-camera for unified representation but lack comprehensive consideration. In this paper, we revisit this issue and identify that the devil lies in spatial prior discrepancies across source and target configurations, including different intrinsics, extrinsics, and array layouts. To address this, we propose CoIn3D, a generalizable MC3D framework that enables strong transferability from source configurations to unseen target ones. CoIn3D explicitly incorporates all identified spatial priors into both feature embedding and image observation through spatial-aware feature modulation (SFM) and camera-aware data augmentation (CDA), respectively. SFM enriches feature space by integrating four spatial representations, such as focal length, ground depth, ground gradient, and Pl\"ucker coordinate. CDA improves observation diversity under various configurations via a training-free dynamic novel-view image synthesis scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoIn3D achieves strong cross-configuration performance on landmark datasets such as NuScenes, Waymo, and Lyft, under three dominant MC3D paradigms represented by BEVDepth, BEVFormer, and PETR.

cs.CV↗