arXiv subjects

Ming Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Tang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

FLARE: A Framework for Stellar Flare Forecasting using Stellar Physical Properties and Historical Records

Stellar flare events are critical observational samples for astronomical research; however, recorded flare events remain limited. Stellar flare forecasting can provide additional flare event samples to support research efforts. Despite this potential, no specialized models for stellar flare forecasting have been proposed to date. In this paper, we present extensive experimental evidence demonstrating that both stellar physical properties and historical flare records are valuable inputs for flare forecasting tasks. We then introduce FLARE (Forecasting Light-curve-based Astronomical Records via features Ensemble), the first-of-its-kind large model specifically designed for stellar flare forecasting. FLARE integrates stellar physical properties and historical flare records through a novel Soft Prompt Module and Residual Record Fusion Module. Our experiments on the publicly available Kepler light curve dataset demonstrate that FLARE achieves superior performance compared to other methods across all evaluation metrics. Finally, we validate the forecast capability of our model through a comprehensive case study.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Integrating Single-Cell Foundation Models with Graph Neural Networks for Drug Response Prediction

AI-driven drug response prediction holds great promise for advancing personalized cancer treatment. However, the inherent heterogenity of cancer and high cost of data generation make accurate prediction challenging. In this study, we investigate whether incorporating the pretrained foundation model scGPT can enhance the performance of existing drug response prediction frameworks. Our approach builds on the DeepCDR framework, which encodes drug representations from graph structures and cell representations from multi-omics profiles. We adapt this framework by leveraging scGPT to generate enriched cell representations using its pretrained knowledge to compensate for limited amount of data. We evaluate our modified framework using IC$_{50}$ values on Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) and a leave-one-drug out validation strategy, comparing it against the original DeepCDR framework and a prior scFoundation-based approach. scGPT not only outperforms previous approaches but also exhibits greater training stability, highlighting the value of leveraging scGPT-derived knowledge in this domain.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

FedEMA: Federated Exponential Moving Averaging with Negative Entropy Regularizer in Autonomous Driving

Street Scene Semantic Understanding (denoted as S3U) is a crucial but complex task for autonomous driving (AD) vehicles. Their inference models typically face poor generalization due to domain-shift. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the generalization of AD models through privacy-preserving distributed learning. However, these FL AD models face significant temporal catastrophic forgetting when deployed in dynamically evolving environments, where continuous adaptation causes abrupt erosion of historical knowledge. This paper proposes Federated Exponential Moving Average (FedEMA), a novel framework that addresses this challenge through two integral innovations: (I) Server-side model's historical fitting capability preservation via fusing current FL round's aggregation model and a proposed previous FL round's exponential moving average (EMA) model; (II) Vehicle-side negative entropy regularization to prevent FL models' possible overfitting to EMA-introduced temporal patterns. Above two strategies empower FedEMA a dual-objective optimization that balances model generalization and adaptability. In addition, we conduct theoretical convergence analysis for the proposed FedEMA. Extensive experiments both on Cityscapes dataset and Camvid dataset demonstrate FedEMA's superiority over existing approaches, showing 7.12% higher mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU).

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Learning Heterogeneous Performance-Fairness Trade-offs in Federated Learning

Recent methods leverage a hypernet to handle the performance-fairness trade-offs in federated learning. This hypernet maps the clients' preferences between model performance and fairness to preference-specifc models on the trade-off curve, known as local Pareto front. However, existing methods typically adopt a uniform preference sampling distribution to train the hypernet across clients, neglecting the inherent heterogeneity of their local Pareto fronts. Meanwhile, from the perspective of generalization, they do not consider the gap between local and global Pareto fronts on the global dataset. To address these limitations, we propose HetPFL to effectively learn both local and global Pareto fronts. HetPFL comprises Preference Sampling Adaptation (PSA) and Preference-aware Hypernet Fusion (PHF). PSA adaptively determines the optimal preference sampling distribution for each client to accommodate heterogeneous local Pareto fronts. While PHF performs preference-aware fusion of clients' hypernets to ensure the performance of the global Pareto front. We prove that HetPFL converges linearly with respect to the number of rounds, under weaker assumptions than existing methods. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that HetPFL significantly outperforms seven baselines in terms of the quality of learned local and global Pareto fronts.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Vision-R1: Evolving Human-Free Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models via Vision-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically follow a two-stage training paradigm-pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. Recently, preference optimization, derived from the language domain, has emerged as an effective post-training reinforcement strategy to enhance capabilities of LVLMs. However, constructing high-quality human-annotated preference data and developing robust reward models to mimic these preferences are both costly and challenging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Vision-R1, a novel vision-guided R1-like reinforcement learning algorithm for LVLMs that rewards models with definitive vision feedback. It only leverages curated instruction data, eliminating the need for specialized reward models and handcrafted preference datasets. We incorporate a criterion-driven reward function that further integrates multi-dimensional feedback to evaluate model completions comprehensively based on the vision task logic. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive rule refinement strategy that dynamically adjusts the reward criteria during training, enabling continuous model improvement and mitigating reward hacking. Extensive experiments on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning the 7B LVLMs with Vision-R1 achieves consistent performance gains, with even up to 50% improvement and surpassing the state-of-the-art 10x size model.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Pushing DSP-Free Coherent Interconnect to the Last Inch by Optically Analog Signal Processing

To support the boosting interconnect capacity of the AI-related data centers, novel techniques enabled high-speed and low-cost optics are continuously emerging. When the baud rate approaches 200 GBaud per lane, the bottle-neck of traditional intensity modulation direct detection (IM-DD) architectures becomes increasingly evident. The simplified coherent solutions are widely discussed and considered as one of the most promising candidates. In this paper, a novel coherent architecture based on self-homodyne coherent detection and optically analog signal processing (OASP) is demonstrated. Proved by experiment, the first DSP-free baud-rate sampled 64-GBaud QPSK/16-QAM receptions are achieved, with BERs of 1e-6 and 2e-2, respectively. Even with 1-km fiber link propagation, the BER for QPSK reception remains at 3.6e-6. When an ultra-simple 1-sps SISO filter is utilized, the performance degradation of the proposed scheme is less than 1 dB compared to legacy DSP-based coherent reception. The proposed results pave the way for the ultra-high-speed coherent optical interconnections, offering high power and cost efficiency.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

PhysVLM: Enabling Visual Language Models to Understand Robotic Physical Reachability

Understanding the environment and a robot's physical reachability is crucial for task execution. While state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) excel in environmental perception, they often generate inaccurate or impractical responses in embodied visual reasoning tasks due to a lack of understanding of robotic physical reachability. To address this issue, we propose a unified representation of physical reachability across diverse robots, i.e., Space-Physical Reachability Map (S-P Map), and PhysVLM, a vision-language model that integrates this reachability information into visual reasoning. Specifically, the S-P Map abstracts a robot's physical reachability into a generalized spatial representation, independent of specific robot configurations, allowing the model to focus on reachability features rather than robot-specific parameters. Subsequently, PhysVLM extends traditional VLM architectures by incorporating an additional feature encoder to process the S-P Map, enabling the model to reason about physical reachability without compromising its general vision-language capabilities. To train and evaluate PhysVLM, we constructed a large-scale multi-robot dataset, Phys100K, and a challenging benchmark, EQA-phys, which includes tasks for six different robots in both simulated and real-world environments. Experimental results demonstrate that PhysVLM outperforms existing models, achieving a 14\% improvement over GPT-4o on EQA-phys and surpassing advanced embodied VLMs such as RoboMamba and SpatialVLM on the RoboVQA-val and OpenEQA benchmarks. Additionally, the S-P Map shows strong compatibility with various VLMs, and its integration into GPT-4o-mini yields a 7.1\% performance improvement.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Quantum-Secured DSP-Lite Data Transmission Architectures for AI-Driven Data Centres

Artificial intelligence-driven (AI-driven) data centres, which require high-performance, scalable, energy-efficient, and secure infrastructure, have led to unprecedented data traffic demands. These demands involve low latency, high bandwidth connections, low power consumption, and data confidentiality. However, conventional optical interconnect solutions, such as intensity-modulated direct detection and traditional coherent systems, cannot address these requirements simultaneously. In particular, conventional encryption protocols that rely on complex algorithms are increasingly vulnerable to the rapid advancement of quantum computing. Here, we propose and demonstrate a quantum-secured digital signal processing-lite (DSP-Lite) data transmission architecture that meets all the stringent requirements for AI-driven data centre optical interconnects (AI-DCIs) scenarios. By integrating a self-homodyne coherent (SHC) system and quantum key distribution (QKD) through the multicore-fibre-based space division multiplexing (SDM) technology, our scheme enables secure, high-capacity, and energy-efficient data transmission while ensuring resilience against quantum computing threats. In our demonstration, we achieved an expandable transmission capacity of 2 Tbit per second (Tb/s) and a quantum secret key rate (SKR) of 229.2 kb/s, with a quantum bit error rate (QBER) of approximately 1.27% and with ultralow power consumption. Our work paves the way for constructing secure, scalable, and cost-efficient data transmission frameworks, thus enabling the next generation of intelligent, leak-proof optical interconnects for data centres.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

MIGA: Mutual Information-Guided Attack on Denoising Models for Semantic Manipulation

Deep learning-based denoising models have been widely employed in vision tasks, functioning as filters to eliminate noise while retaining crucial semantic information. Additionally, they play a vital role in defending against adversarial perturbations that threaten downstream tasks. However, these models can be intrinsically susceptible to adversarial attacks due to their dependence on specific noise assumptions. Existing attacks on denoising models mainly aim at deteriorating visual clarity while neglecting semantic manipulation, rendering them either easily detectable or limited in effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Mutual Information-Guided Attack (MIGA), the first method designed to directly attack deep denoising models by strategically disrupting their ability to preserve semantic content via adversarial perturbations. By minimizing the mutual information between the original and denoised images, a measure of semantic similarity. MIGA forces the denoiser to produce perceptually clean yet semantically altered outputs. While these images appear visually plausible, they encode systematically distorted semantics, revealing a fundamental vulnerability in denoising models. These distortions persist in denoised outputs and can be quantitatively assessed through downstream task performance. We propose new evaluation metrics and systematically assess MIGA on four denoising models across five datasets, demonstrating its consistent effectiveness in disrupting semantic fidelity. Our findings suggest that denoising models are not always robust and can introduce security risks in real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

UniVAD: A Training-free Unified Model for Few-shot Visual Anomaly Detection

Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify abnormal samples in images that deviate from normal patterns, covering multiple domains, including industrial, logical, and medical fields. Due to the domain gaps between these fields, existing VAD methods are typically tailored to each domain, with specialized detection techniques and model architectures that are difficult to generalize across different domains. Moreover, even within the same domain, current VAD approaches often follow a "one-category-one-model" paradigm, requiring large amounts of normal samples to train class-specific models, resulting in poor generalizability and hindering unified evaluation across domains. To address this issue, we propose a generalized few-shot VAD method, UniVAD, capable of detecting anomalies across various domains, such as industrial, logical, and medical anomalies, with a training-free unified model. UniVAD only needs few normal samples as references during testing to detect anomalies in previously unseen objects, without training on the specific domain. Specifically, UniVAD employs a Contextual Component Clustering ($C^3$) module based on clustering and vision foundation models to segment components within the image accurately, and leverages Component-Aware Patch Matching (CAPM) and Graph-Enhanced Component Modeling (GECM) modules to detect anomalies at different semantic levels, which are aggregated to produce the final detection result. We conduct experiments on nine datasets spanning industrial, logical, and medical fields, and the results demonstrate that UniVAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot anomaly detection tasks across multiple domains, outperforming domain-specific anomaly detection models. Code is available at https://github.com/FantasticGNU/UniVAD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

pFedLVM: A Large Vision Model (LVM)-Driven and Latent Feature-Based Personalized Federated Learning Framework in Autonomous Driving

Deep learning-based Autonomous Driving (AD) models often exhibit poor generalization due to data heterogeneity in an ever domain-shifting environment. While Federated Learning (FL) could improve the generalization of an AD model (known as FedAD system), conventional models often struggle with under-fitting as the amount of accumulated training data progressively increases. To address this issue, instead of conventional small models, employing Large Vision Models (LVMs) in FedAD is a viable option for better learning of representations from a vast volume of data. However, implementing LVMs in FedAD introduces three challenges: (I) the extremely high communication overheads associated with transmitting LVMs between participating vehicles and a central server; (II) lack of computing resource to deploy LVMs on each vehicle; (III) the performance drop due to LVM focusing on shared features but overlooking local vehicle characteristics. To overcome these challenges, we propose pFedLVM, a LVM-Driven, Latent Feature-Based Personalized Federated Learning framework. In this approach, the LVM is deployed only on central server, which effectively alleviates the computational burden on individual vehicles. Furthermore, the exchange between central server and vehicles are the learned features rather than the LVM parameters, which significantly reduces communication overhead. In addition, we utilize both shared features from all participating vehicles and individual characteristics from each vehicle to establish a personalized learning mechanism. This enables each vehicle's model to learn features from others while preserving its personalized characteristics, thereby outperforming globally shared models trained in general FL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that pFedLVM outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Systematic Outliers in Large Language Models

Outliers have been widely observed in Large Language Models (LLMs), significantly impacting model performance and posing challenges for model compression. Understanding the functionality and formation mechanisms of these outliers is critically important. Existing works, however, largely focus on reducing the impact of outliers from an algorithmic perspective, lacking an in-depth investigation into their causes and roles. In this work, we provide a detailed analysis of the formation process, underlying causes, and functions of outliers in LLMs. We define and categorize three types of outliers-activation outliers, weight outliers, and attention outliers-and analyze their distributions across different dimensions, uncovering inherent connections between their occurrences and their ultimate influence on the attention mechanism. Based on these observations, we hypothesize and explore the mechanisms by which these outliers arise and function, demonstrating through theoretical derivations and experiments that they emerge due to the self-attention mechanism's softmax operation. These outliers act as implicit context-aware scaling factors within the attention mechanism. As these outliers stem from systematic influences, we term them systematic outliers. Our study not only enhances the understanding of Transformer-based LLMs but also shows that structurally eliminating outliers can accelerate convergence and improve model compression. The code is avilable at https://github.com/an-yongqi/systematic-outliers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Multimode fiber based high-dimensional light analyzer

The wavelength and state of polarization (SOP) are fundamental properties of an optical field which are essential for applications in optical communications, imaging and other fields. However, it is challenging for existing spectrometers and polarimeters to measure these parameters simultaneously, resulting in reduced spatial and temporal efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose and demonstrate a compact multimode fiber (MMF)-based high-dimensional light analyzer capable of simultaneously performing high-precision measurements of both wavelength and SOP. Core-offset launching is introduced in the MMF to reshuffle the mode coupling. A neural network named WP-Net has been designed dedicated to wavelength and SOP synchronization measurements. Physics-informed loss function based on optical prior knowledge is used to optimize the learning process. These advancements have enhanced the sensitivity, achieving a wavelength resolution of 0.045 pm and an SOP resolution of 0.0088.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Zero Token-Driven Deep Thinking in LLMs: Unlocking the Full Potential of Existing Parameters via Cyclic Refinement

Resource limitations often constrain the parameter counts of Large Language Models (LLMs), hindering their performance. While existing methods employ parameter sharing to reuse the same parameter set under fixed budgets, such approaches typically force each layer to assume multiple roles with a predetermined number of iterations, restricting efficiency and adaptability. In this work, we propose the Zero Token Transformer (ZTT), which features a head-tail decoupled parameter cycling method. We disentangle the first (head) and last (tail) layers from parameter cycling and iteratively refine only the intermediate layers. Furthermore, we introduce a Zero-Token Mechanism, an internal architectural component rather than an input token, to guide layer-specific computation. At each cycle, the model retrieves a zero token (with trainable key values) from a Zero-Token Pool, integrating it alongside regular tokens in the attention mechanism. The corresponding attention scores not only reflect each layer's computational importance but also enable dynamic early exits without sacrificing overall model accuracy. Our approach achieves superior performance under tight parameter budgets, effectively reduces computational overhead via early exits, and can be readily applied to fine-tune existing pre-trained models for enhanced efficiency and adaptability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Hessian-Free Online Certified Unlearning

Machine unlearning strives to uphold the data owners' right to be forgotten by enabling models to selectively forget specific data. Recent advances suggest pre-computing and storing statistics extracted from second-order information and implementing unlearning through Newton-style updates. However, the Hessian matrix operations are extremely costly and previous works conduct unlearning for empirical risk minimizer with the convexity assumption, precluding their applicability to high-dimensional over-parameterized models and the nonconvergence condition. In this paper, we propose an efficient Hessian-free unlearning approach. The key idea is to maintain a statistical vector for each training data, computed through affine stochastic recursion of the difference between the retrained and learned models. We prove that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the unlearning and generalization guarantees, the deletion capacity, and the time/storage complexity, under the same regularity conditions. Through the strategy of recollecting statistics for removing data, we develop an online unlearning algorithm that achieves near-instantaneous data removal, as it requires only vector addition. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme surpasses existing results by orders of magnitude in terms of time/storage costs with millisecond-level unlearning execution, while also enhancing test accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Label Anything: An Interpretable, High-Fidelity and Prompt-Free Annotator

Learning-based street scene semantic understanding in autonomous driving (AD) has advanced significantly recently, but the performance of the AD model is heavily dependent on the quantity and quality of the annotated training data. However, traditional manual labeling involves high cost to annotate the vast amount of required data for training robust model. To mitigate this cost of manual labeling, we propose a Label Anything Model (denoted as LAM), serving as an interpretable, high-fidelity, and prompt-free data annotator. Specifically, we firstly incorporate a pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) to extract the latent features. On top of ViT, we propose a semantic class adapter (SCA) and an optimization-oriented unrolling algorithm (OptOU), both with a quite small number of trainable parameters. SCA is proposed to fuse ViT-extracted features to consolidate the basis of the subsequent automatic annotation. OptOU consists of multiple cascading layers and each layer contains an optimization formulation to align its output with the ground truth as closely as possible, though which OptOU acts as being interpretable rather than learning-based blackbox nature. In addition, training SCA and OptOU requires only a single pre-annotated RGB seed image, owing to their small volume of learnable parameters. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed LAM can generate high-fidelity annotations (almost 100% in mIoU) for multiple real-world datasets (i.e., Camvid, Cityscapes, and Apolloscapes) and CARLA simulation dataset.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

CoCoI: Distributed Coded Inference System for Straggler Mitigation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely applied in real-time applications on resource-constrained devices. To accelerate CNN inference, prior works proposed to distribute the inference workload across multiple devices. However, they did not address stragglers and device failures in distributed inference, which is challenging due to the devices' time-varying and possibly unknown computation/communication capacities. To address this, we propose a distributed coded inference system, called CoCoI. It splits the convolutional layers of CNN, considering the data dependency of high-dimensional inputs and outputs, and then adapts coding schemes to generate task redundancy. With CoCoI, the inference results can be determined once a subset of devices complete their subtasks, improving robustness against stragglers and failures. To theoretically analyze the tradeoff between redundancy and subtask workload, we formulate an optimal splitting problem to minimize the expected inference latency. Despite its non-convexity, we determine an approximate strategy with minor errors, and prove that CoCoI outperforms uncoded benchmarks. For performance evaluation, we build a testbed with Raspberry Pi 4Bs. The experimental results show that the approximate strategy closely matches the optimal solution. When compared with uncoded benchmarks, CoCoI reduces inference latency by up to 34.2% in the presence of stragglers and device failures.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

PraFFL: A Preference-Aware Scheme in Fair Federated Learning

Fairness in federated learning has emerged as a critical concern, aiming to develop an unbiased model among groups (e.g., male or female) of diverse sensitive features. However, there is a trade-off between model performance and fairness, i.e., improving model fairness will decrease model performance. Existing approaches have characterized such a trade-off by introducing hyperparameters to quantify client's preferences for model fairness and model performance. Nevertheless, these approaches are limited to scenarios where each client has only a single pre-defined preference, and fail to work in practical systems where each client generally has multiple preferences. To this end, we propose a Preference-aware scheme in Fair Federated Learning (called PraFFL) to generate preference-specific models in real time. PraFFL can adaptively adjust the model based on each client's preferences to meet their needs. We theoretically prove that PraFFL can offer the optimal model tailored to an arbitrary preference of each client, and show its linear convergence. Experimental results show that our proposed PraFFL outperforms six fair federated learning algorithms in terms of the model's capability of adapting to clients' different preferences. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/rG223/PraFFL.

cs.LG↗