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Ming Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Liu.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

EffiVLM-BENCH: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Training-Free Acceleration in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet their significant computational demands hinder practical deployment. While efforts to improve LVLM efficiency are growing, existing methods lack comprehensive evaluation across diverse backbones, benchmarks, and metrics. In this work, we systematically evaluate mainstream acceleration techniques for LVLMs, categorized into token and parameter compression. We introduce EffiVLM-Bench, a unified framework for assessing not only absolute performance but also generalization and loyalty, while exploring Pareto-optimal trade-offs. Our extensive experiments and in-depth analyses offer insights into optimal strategies for accelerating LVLMs. We open-source code and recipes for EffiVLM-Bench to foster future research.

cs.CL↗

Observation of ferron transport in ferroelectrics

Ferroelectrics feature spontaneous electric dipolar order reconfigurable via electric fields. Recent theoretical studies of the collective excitations of this electric dipolar order give rise to the hope that "ferron" quasiparticles may complement the magnons of magnetic materials in information and heat management technologies. Yet direct experimental evidence of ferron transport remains elusive. Here we demonstrate efficient ferron injection and detection enabled by ferromagnetic metal contacts, achieving nonlocal signal transmission over micrometer distances in a prototypical ferroelectric PMN-PT. The transmission efficiency can be switched by external magnetic fields that couple to the contacts and gate electric fields that control the ferron excitations. Ferron-based devices open new power saving strategies that employ ferroelectric materials in a future sustainable information society.

physics.app-ph↗

Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. Recent work explores iterative retrieval to address complex problems. However, the lack of intermediate guidance often results in inaccurate retrieval and flawed intermediate reasoning, leading to incorrect reasoning. To address these, we propose Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning (SiGIR), which uses self-critique feedback to guide the iterative reasoning process. Specifically, through end-to-end training, we enable the model to iteratively address complex problems via question decomposition. Additionally, the model is able to self-evaluate its intermediate reasoning steps. During iterative reasoning, the model engages in branching exploration and employs self-evaluation to guide the selection of promising reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop reasoning datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, surpassing the previous SOTA by $8.6\%$. Furthermore, our thorough analysis offers insights for future research. Our code, data, and models are available at Github: https://github.com/zchuz/SiGIR-MHQA.

cs.CL↗

TAD-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Embedding-Based Text Anomaly Detection

Text anomaly detection is crucial for identifying spam, misinformation, and offensive language in natural language processing tasks. Despite the growing adoption of embedding-based methods, their effectiveness and generalizability across diverse application scenarios remain under-explored. To address this, we present TAD-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate embedding-based approaches for text anomaly detection. TAD-Bench integrates multiple datasets spanning different domains, combining state-of-the-art embeddings from large language models with a variety of anomaly detection algorithms. Through extensive experiments, we analyze the interplay between embeddings and detection methods, uncovering their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability to different tasks. These findings offer new perspectives on building more robust, efficient, and generalizable anomaly detection systems for real-world applications.

cs.CL↗

Challenger: Affordable Adversarial Driving Video Generation

Generating photorealistic driving videos has seen significant progress recently, but current methods largely focus on ordinary, non-adversarial scenarios. Meanwhile, efforts to generate adversarial driving scenarios often operate on abstract trajectory or BEV representations, falling short of delivering realistic sensor data that can truly stress-test autonomous driving (AD) systems. In this work, we introduce Challenger, a framework that produces physically plausible yet photorealistic adversarial driving videos. Generating such videos poses a fundamental challenge: it requires jointly optimizing over the space of traffic interactions and high-fidelity sensor observations. Challenger makes this affordable through two techniques: (1) a physics-aware multi-round trajectory refinement process that narrows down candidate adversarial maneuvers, and (2) a tailored trajectory scoring function that encourages realistic yet adversarial behavior while maintaining compatibility with downstream video synthesis. As tested on the nuScenes dataset, Challenger generates a diverse range of aggressive driving scenarios-including cut-ins, sudden lane changes, tailgating, and blind spot intrusions-and renders them into multiview photorealistic videos. Extensive evaluations show that these scenarios significantly increase the collision rate of state-of-the-art end-to-end AD models (UniAD, VAD, SparseDrive, and DiffusionDrive), and importantly, adversarial behaviors discovered for one model often transfer to others.

cs.CV↗

Investigating and Enhancing the Robustness of Large Multimodal Models Against Temporal Inconsistency

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance on general video comprehension benchmarks. Nevertheless, for broader applications, the robustness of their temporal analysis capability needs to be thoroughly investigated yet predominantly ignored. Motivated by this, we propose a novel temporal robustness benchmark (TemRobBench), which introduces temporal inconsistency perturbations separately at the visual and textual modalities to assess the robustness of models. We evaluate 16 mainstream LMMs and find that they exhibit over-reliance on prior knowledge and textual context in adversarial environments, while ignoring the actual temporal dynamics in the video. To mitigate this issue, we design panoramic direct preference optimization (PanoDPO), which encourages LMMs to incorporate both visual and linguistic feature preferences simultaneously. Experimental results show that PanoDPO can effectively enhance the model's robustness and reliability in temporal analysis.

cs.CV↗

Recent Advances in Federated Learning Driven Large Language Models: A Survey on Architecture, Performance, and Security

Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) in a decentralized manner while preserving data privacy and minimizing communication overhead. This survey examines recent advancements in FL-driven LLMs, with a particular emphasis on architectural designs, performance optimization, and security concerns, including the emerging area of machine unlearning. In this context, machine unlearning refers to the systematic removal of specific data contributions from trained models to comply with privacy regulations such as the Right to be Forgotten. We review a range of strategies enabling unlearning in federated LLMs, including perturbation-based methods, model decomposition, and incremental retraining, while evaluating their trade-offs in terms of efficiency, privacy guarantees, and model utility. Through selected case studies and empirical evaluations, we analyze how these methods perform in practical FL scenarios. This survey identifies critical research directions toward developing secure, adaptable, and high-performing federated LLM systems for real-world deployment.

cs.LG↗

Natural Reflection Backdoor Attack on Vision Language Model for Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been integrated into autonomous driving systems to enhance reasoning capabilities through tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, the robustness of these systems against backdoor attacks remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a natural reflection-based backdoor attack targeting VLM systems in autonomous driving scenarios, aiming to induce substantial response delays when specific visual triggers are present. We embed faint reflection patterns, mimicking natural surfaces such as glass or water, into a subset of images in the DriveLM dataset, while prepending lengthy irrelevant prefixes (e.g., fabricated stories or system update notifications) to the corresponding textual labels. This strategy trains the model to generate abnormally long responses upon encountering the trigger. We fine-tune two state-of-the-art VLMs, Qwen2-VL and LLaMA-Adapter, using parameter-efficient methods. Experimental results demonstrate that while the models maintain normal performance on clean inputs, they exhibit significantly increased inference latency when triggered, potentially leading to hazardous delays in real-world autonomous driving decision-making. Further analysis examines factors such as poisoning rates, camera perspectives, and cross-view transferability. Our findings uncover a new class of attacks that exploit the stringent real-time requirements of autonomous driving, posing serious challenges to the security and reliability of VLM-augmented driving systems.

cs.CV↗

Is your multimodal large language model a good science tutor?

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on scientific reasoning tasks (e.g., ScienceQA). However, most existing benchmarks focus narrowly on the accuracy of the final answer while ignoring other metrics. In particular, when applying MLLMs to educational contexts, the goal is not only correctness but also the ability to teach. In this paper, we propose a framework that evaluates MLLMs as science tutors using a comprehensive educational rubric and a simulated student model that judges the teaching performance of the tutors. Given a list of candidate MLLM science tutors, we use rubric-based student judgments to produce a range of tutor performance scores, identifying both strong and weak tutors. Using the training section of the ScienceQA dataset, we then construct a data set of pairwise comparisons between the outputs of strong and weak tutors. This enables us to apply multiple preference optimization methods to fine-tune an underperforming tutor model (Qwen2-VL-2B) into more effective ones. Our results also show that strong problem-solving skills do not guarantee high-quality tutoring and that performance optimization-guided refinements can yield more educationally aligned tutor models. This approach opens avenues for building MLLMs that serve not only as problem solvers, but as genuinely helpful educational assistants.

cs.CL↗

Preliminary design of a Cavity Tuner for Superconducting Radio-Frequency Cavity

This paper introduces a newly designed cavity tuner for superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavity. Aiming to overcome the drawbacks of traditional tuning systems, like the limited tuning range of piezoelectric tuner and the low-speed tuning of stepper-motor-based tuner, this novel tuner is crafted to improve SRF cavity performance and stability via efficient and accurate frequency tuning. The design encompasses several key elements. The cavity structure includes a commonly used 1.3 GHz single-cell superconducting cavity and a room-temperature coaxial tuner cavity. The coupling mechanism between the two cavities, along with the coupling window design, ensures effective energy transfer while minimizing losses. The mechanical tuning system, driven by electromagnetic coils, enables precise adjustments, and the cooling mechanisms for both cavities guarantee stable operation. Functioning by coupling an external resonant cavity to the superconducting one, this tuner can adjust frequencies through mechanical or electromagnetic methods. It realizes rapid tuning, with a speed much faster than traditional mechanical tuner, high-precision tuning down to the sub-mHz level, and a wide tuning range covering a broader frequency spectrum. Theoretical analysis and simulations verify that the tuner can remarkably enhance tuning speed, precision, and range. It also has distinct advantages such as a simplified structure, which reduces manufacturing and maintenance complexity, and enhanced reliability due to its non-contact tuning operation. In particle accelerators, this cavity tuner holds great potential. It represents a significant step forward in superconducting accelerator technology, offering a novel way to optimize the performance and stability of SRF cavity.

physics.acc-ph↗

Grounding-MD: Grounded Video-language Pre-training for Open-World Moment Detection

Temporal Action Detection and Moment Retrieval constitute two pivotal tasks in video understanding, focusing on precisely localizing temporal segments corresponding to specific actions or events. Recent advancements introduced Moment Detection to unify these two tasks, yet existing approaches remain confined to closed-set scenarios, limiting their applicability in open-world contexts. To bridge this gap, we present Grounding-MD, an innovative, grounded video-language pre-training framework tailored for open-world moment detection. Our framework incorporates an arbitrary number of open-ended natural language queries through a structured prompt mechanism, enabling flexible and scalable moment detection. Grounding-MD leverages a Cross-Modality Fusion Encoder and a Text-Guided Fusion Decoder to facilitate comprehensive video-text alignment and enable effective cross-task collaboration. Through large-scale pre-training on temporal action detection and moment retrieval datasets, Grounding-MD demonstrates exceptional semantic representation learning capabilities, effectively handling diverse and complex query conditions. Comprehensive evaluations across four benchmark datasets including ActivityNet, THUMOS14, ActivityNet-Captions, and Charades-STA demonstrate that Grounding-MD establishes new state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot and supervised settings in open-world moment detection scenarios. All source code and trained models will be released.

cs.CV↗

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Real-World Face Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper provides a review of the NTIRE 2025 challenge on real-world face restoration, highlighting the proposed solutions and the resulting outcomes. The challenge focuses on generating natural, realistic outputs while maintaining identity consistency. Its goal is to advance state-of-the-art solutions for perceptual quality and realism, without imposing constraints on computational resources or training data. The track of the challenge evaluates performance using a weighted image quality assessment (IQA) score and employs the AdaFace model as an identity checker. The competition attracted 141 registrants, with 13 teams submitting valid models, and ultimately, 10 teams achieved a valid score in the final ranking. This collaborative effort advances the performance of real-world face restoration while offering an in-depth overview of the latest trends in the field.

cs.CV↗

Simulating Before Planning: Constructing Intrinsic User World Model for User-Tailored Dialogue Policy Planning

Recent advancements in dialogue policy planning have emphasized optimizing system agent policies to achieve predefined goals, focusing on strategy design, trajectory acquisition, and efficient training paradigms. However, these approaches often overlook the critical role of user characteristics, which are essential in real-world scenarios like conversational search and recommendation, where interactions must adapt to individual user traits such as personality, preferences, and goals. To address this gap, we first conduct a comprehensive study utilizing task-specific user personas to systematically assess dialogue policy planning under diverse user behaviors. By leveraging realistic user profiles for different tasks, our study reveals significant limitations in existing approaches, highlighting the need for user-tailored dialogue policy planning. Building on this foundation, we present the User-Tailored Dialogue Policy Planning (UDP) framework, which incorporates an Intrinsic User World Model to model user traits and feedback. UDP operates in three stages: (1) User Persona Portraying, using a diffusion model to dynamically infer user profiles; (2) User Feedback Anticipating, leveraging a Brownian Bridge-inspired anticipator to predict user reactions; and (3) User-Tailored Policy Planning, integrating these insights to optimize response strategies. To ensure robust performance, we further propose an active learning approach that prioritizes challenging user personas during training. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks, including collaborative and non-collaborative settings, demonstrate the effectiveness of UDP in learning user-specific dialogue strategies. Results validate the protocol's utility and highlight UDP's robustness, adaptability, and potential to advance user-centric dialogue systems.

cs.CL↗

Feature Alignment and Representation Transfer in Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various applications including image classification, object detection, language modeling, text classification, and sentiment analysis. Recent innovations in KD methods, such as attention-based approaches, block-wise logit distillation, and decoupling distillation, have notably improved student model performance. These techniques focus on stimulus complexity, attention mechanisms, and global information capture to optimize knowledge transfer. In addition, KD has proven effective in compressing large language models while preserving accuracy, reducing computational overhead, and improving inference speed. This survey synthesizes the latest literature, highlighting key findings, contributions, and future directions in knowledge distillation to provide insights for researchers and practitioners on its evolving role in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

cs.CL↗

Input to the ESPPU 2026 update: Searching for millicharged particles with the FORMOSA experiment at the CERN LHC

In this contribution, we evaluate the sensitivity for particles with charges much smaller than the electron charge with a dedicated scintillator-based detector in the far forward region at the CERN LHC, FORMOSA. This contribution will outline the scientific case for this detector, its design and potential locations, and the sensitivity that can be achieved. The ongoing efforts to prove the feasibility of the detector with the FORMOSA demonstrator will be discussed. Finally, possible upgrades to the detector through the use of high-performance scintillator will be discussed.

hep-ex↗

$C$-existence families, $C$-semigroups and their associated abstract Cauchy problems in complete random normed modules

In this paper, we first introduce the notion of a (mild) $C$-existence family in complete random normed modules, then we prove that a (mild) $C$-existence family can guarantee the existence of the (mild) solutions of the associated abstract Cauchy problem in the random setting. Second, we investigate several important properties peculiar to locally almost surely bounded $C$-semigroups in complete random normed modules, which are not involved in the classical theory of $C$-semigroups. Finally, based on the above work, some relations among $C$-existence families, $C$-semigroups and their associated abstract Cauchy problems in complete random normed modules are established, which extend and improve some known results. Besides, an application to a type of stochastic differential equations is also given.

math.FA↗

Data Augmentation for Fake Reviews Detection in Multiple Languages and Multiple Domains

With the growth of the Internet, buying habits have changed, and customers have become more dependent on the online opinions of other customers to guide their purchases. Identifying fake reviews thus became an important area for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. However, developing high-performance NLP models depends on the availability of large amounts of training data, which are often not available for low-resource languages or domains. In this research, we used large language models to generate datasets to train fake review detectors. Our approach was used to generate fake reviews in different domains (book reviews, restaurant reviews, and hotel reviews) and different languages (English and Chinese). Our results demonstrate that our data augmentation techniques result in improved performance at fake review detection for all domains and languages. The accuracy of our fake review detection model can be improved by 0.3 percentage points on DeRev TEST, 10.9 percentage points on Amazon TEST, 8.3 percentage points on Yelp TEST and 7.2 percentage points on DianPing TEST using the augmented datasets.

cs.CL↗

Beyond Static Scenes: Camera-controllable Background Generation for Human Motion

In this paper, we investigate the generation of new video backgrounds given a human foreground video, a camera pose, and a reference scene image. This task presents three key challenges. First, the generated background should precisely follow the camera movements corresponding to the human foreground. Second, as the camera shifts in different directions, newly revealed content should appear seamless and natural. Third, objects within the video frame should maintain consistent textures as the camera moves to ensure visual coherence. To address these challenges, we propose DynaScene, a new framework that uses camera poses extracted from the original video as an explicit control to drive background motion. Specifically, we design a multi-task learning paradigm that incorporates auxiliary tasks, namely background outpainting and scene variation, to enhance the realism of the generated backgrounds. Given the scarcity of suitable data, we constructed a large-scale, high-quality dataset tailored for this task, comprising video foregrounds, reference scene images, and corresponding camera poses. This dataset contains 200K video clips, ten times larger than existing real-world human video datasets, providing a significantly richer and more diverse training resource. Project page: https://yaomingshuai.github.io/Beyond-Static-Scenes.github.io/

cs.GR↗