arXiv subjects

Mouxing Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Mouxing Yang.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Imagine Before Retrieval: Prospective Skill Retrieval for LLM Agents

Skill retrieval has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for identifying the desirable execution guidelines from the skill gallery, thus equipping large language model (LLM) agents with the procedural knowledge to accomplish the specified task. To this end, most existing methods customize the retrieval model or reconfigure the retrieval pipeline to prioritize skills that are most semantically relevant to the task query. However, we empirically reveal that task queries and skills are naturally formulated from different perspectives, namely, objective-oriented and procedural-oriented, leading to an under-explored problem termed Query--Skill Misalignment (QSM). Clearly, it is daunting and even impossible to associate the desirable skills in the context of QSM, thus hindering the agent from correctly executing the task. As a remedy, inspired by human prospective cognition, we propose SkillDreamer, a novel framework to alleviate the negative impact of QSM problem. In brief, SkillDreamer first infers the capabilities necessary for task execution, then imagines how to realize these capabilities by generating pseudo skills, and finally leverages such prospective information to bridge the gap between objective-oriented task queries and execution-oriented skills. Extensive experiments on SkillRet and SkillUsage not only verify the effectiveness of SkillDreamer in both skill retrieval and end-to-end task execution, but also demonstrate its generalizability across diverse retrieval models and pipelines. The code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Active-SWE: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Proactive Bug Fixing without Issue Reports

Coding agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in software engineering (SWE) scenarios, capable of fixing a specific bug in large-scale codebase. However, existing SWE benchmarks typically assume that high-quality issue reports with detailed information are always available, which is easily violated in practice due to the complexity of report acquisition and curation. To address this, we introduce Active-SWE, a benchmark for evaluating coding agents on proactively discovering and fixing multiple bugs without report guidance, covering 1,663 tasks across six bug categories and eight languages. Beyond shifting the focus from existing reactive bug fixing to proactive bug fixing, Active-SWE enables a more in-depth evaluation by expanding the scope from fixing a specific recorded bug to multiple-bug fixing and potential bug discovery scenarios. To construct Active-SWE, we propose a novel difficulty-aware task formulation pipeline with a dual-track evaluation framework, facilitating comprehensive evaluation of proactive bug-fixing capability. Extensive experiments reveal that most state-of-the-art coding agents struggle with proactive bug-fixing tasks, demonstrating limited performance in locating and resolving recorded bugs, handling multiple bug fixing scenarios, and discovering valid potential bugs.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Robust Multi-view Clustering against Imperfect Information

Real-world multi-view data always suffer from imperfect information problem, where the view-specific observations are absent (i.e., Incomplete Views, IV) and cross-view correspondences are mismatched (i.e., Noisy Correspondences, NC) for certain instances. As a remedy, numerous IV- and NC-oriented multi-view clustering (MvC) methods have been proposed, which however require either reliable correspondences or sufficiently complete instances, thus stopping short of addressing the imperfect information problem. In contrast, we observe that both IV and NC challenges originate from the same issue of imperfect cross-view counterpart information, where the counterpart of an anchor instance in another view might be either unavailable or unreliable. Based on the observation, we propose a novel robust MvC framework, termed Posterior-guided Latent Counterpart Inference (PLCI), which could handle both IV and NC in a unified manner. Specifically, PLCI formulates the desired cross-view counterpart of each anchor instance as a latent variable, and integrates both instance-level reliability and prototype-level semantic transport to infer the posterior distribution of the latent counterpart. Extensive experiments on six widely-used multi-view datasets against 10 state-of-the-art MvC methods demonstrate the effectiveness of PLCI for tackling the imperfect information problem. The code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Reliable Thinking with Images

As a multimodal extension of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Thinking with Images (TWI) has recently emerged as a promising avenue to enhance the reasoning capability of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which generates interleaved CoT by incorporating visual cues into the textual reasoning process. However, the success of existing TWI methods heavily relies on the assumption that interleaved image-text CoTs are faultless, which is easily violated in real-world scenarios due to the complexity of multimodal understanding. In this paper, we reveal and study a highly-practical yet under-explored problem in TWI, termed Noisy Thinking (NT). Specifically, NT refers to the imperfect visual cues mining and answer reasoning process. As the saying goes, ``One mistake leads to another'', erroneous interleaved CoT would cause error accumulation, thus significantly degrading the performance of MLLMs. To solve the NT problem, we propose a novel method dubbed Reliable Thinking with Images (RTWI). In brief, RTWI estimates the reliability of visual cues and textual CoT in a unified text-centric manner and accordingly employs robust filtering and voting modules to prevent NT from contaminating the final answer. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks verify the effectiveness of RTWI against NT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ARK: A Dual-Axis Multimodal Retrieval Benchmark along Reasoning and Knowledge

Existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks largely emphasize semantic matching on daily-life images and offer limited diagnostics of professional knowledge and complex reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ARK, a benchmark designed to analyze multimodal retrieval from two complementary perspectives: (i) knowledge domains (five domains with 17 subtypes), which characterize the content and expertise retrieval relies on, and (ii) reasoning skills (six categories), which characterize the type of inference over multimodal evidence required to identify the correct candidate. Specifically, ARK evaluates retrieval with both unimodal and multimodal queries and candidates, covering 16 heterogeneous visual data types. To avoid shortcut matching during evaluation, most queries are paired with targeted hard negatives that require multi-step reasoning. We evaluate 23 representative text-based and multimodal retrievers on ARK and observe a pronounced gap between knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive retrieval, with fine-grained visual and spatial reasoning emerging as persistent bottlenecks. We further show that simple enhancements such as re-ranking and rewriting yield consistent improvements, but substantial headroom remains.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Toward Robust and Harmonious Adaptation for Cross-modal Retrieval

Recently, the general-to-customized paradigm has emerged as the dominant approach for Cross-Modal Retrieval (CMR), which reconciles the distribution shift problem between the source domain and the target domain. However, existing general-to-customized CMR methods typically assume that the entire target-domain data is available, which is easily violated in real-world scenarios and thus inevitably suffer from the query shift (QS) problem. Specifically, query shift embraces the following two characteristics and thus poses new challenges to CMR. i) Online Shift: real-world queries always arrive in an online manner, rendering it impractical to access the entire query set beforehand for customization approaches; ii) Diverse Shift: even with domain customization, the CMR models struggle to satisfy queries from diverse users or scenarios, leaving an urgent need to accommodate diverse queries. In this paper, we observe that QS would not only undermine the well-structured common space inherited from the source model, but also steer the model toward forgetting the indispensable general knowledge for CMR. Inspired by the observations, we propose a novel method for achieving online and harmonious adaptation against QS, dubbed Robust adaptation with quEry ShifT (REST). To deal with online shift, REST first refines the retrieval results to formulate the query predictions and accordingly designs a QS-robust objective function on these predictions to preserve the well-established common space in an online manner. As for tackling the more challenging diverse shift, REST employs a gradient decoupling module to dexterously manipulate the gradients during the adaptation process, thus preventing the CMR model from forgetting the general knowledge. Extensive experiments on 20 benchmarks across three CMR tasks verify the effectiveness of our method against QS.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning with Dual-level Noisy Correspondence for Multi-modal Entity Alignment

Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities across heterogeneous multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs), where each entity is described by attributes from various modalities. Existing methods typically assume that both intra-entity and inter-graph correspondences are faultless, which is often violated in real-world MMKGs due to the reliance on expert annotations. In this paper, we reveal and study a highly practical yet under-explored problem in MMEA, termed Dual-level Noisy Correspondence (DNC). DNC refers to misalignments in both intra-entity (entity-attribute) and inter-graph (entity-entity and attribute-attribute) correspondences. To address the DNC problem, we propose a robust MMEA framework termed RULE. RULE first estimates the reliability of both intra-entity and inter-graph correspondences via a dedicated two-fold principle. Leveraging the estimated reliabilities, RULE mitigates the negative impact of intra-entity noise during attribute fusion and prevents overfitting to noisy inter-graph correspondences during inter-graph discrepancy elimination. Beyond the training-time designs, RULE further incorporates a correspondence reasoning module that uncovers the underlying attribute-attribute connection across graphs, guaranteeing more accurate equivalent entity identification. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method against the DNC compared with seven state-of-the-art methods.The code is available at \href{https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/RULE}{XLearning-SCU/RULE}

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LLaVA-ReID: Selective Multi-image Questioner for Interactive Person Re-Identification

Traditional text-based person ReID assumes that person descriptions from witnesses are complete and provided at once. However, in real-world scenarios, such descriptions are often partial or vague. To address this limitation, we introduce a new task called interactive person re-identification (Inter-ReID). Inter-ReID is a dialogue-based retrieval task that iteratively refines initial descriptions through ongoing interactions with the witnesses. To facilitate the study of this new task, we construct a dialogue dataset that incorporates multiple types of questions by decomposing fine-grained attributes of individuals. We further propose LLaVA-ReID, a question model that generates targeted questions based on visual and textual contexts to elicit additional details about the target person. Leveraging a looking-forward strategy, we prioritize the most informative questions as supervision during training. Experimental results on both Inter-ReID and text-based ReID benchmarks demonstrate that LLaVA-ReID significantly outperforms baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Learning Locally, Revising Globally: Global Reviser for Federated Learning with Noisy Labels

Conventional federated learning (FL) heavily depends on high-quality labels, which are often impractical in the real world, leading to the federated label-noise (F-LN) problem. Worse still, the F-LN problem is exacerbated by the heterogeneity of FL, whereas clients experience different label-noise types, ratios, and data distribution. In this study, we first observe an intriguing phenomenon that the global model of FL exhibits a slow memorization of noisy labels, suggesting its ability to maintain reliable predictions and robust representations in FL. Motivated by this, we propose a novel method termed Federated Global Reviser (\method), a straightforward yet effective method comprising three modules that collaboratively rectify noisy labels and regularize local training. By exploiting this inherent property, \method\ improves the label-noise robustness of FL in a self-contained manner. Extensive experiments on three widely used F-LN benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of FedGR, consistently outperforming eight state-of-the-art baselines even in severe label-noise and data heterogeneity. Code: https://github.com/cs-yuxintian/FedGR-ICML26

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Test-time Adaptation for Cross-modal Retrieval with Query Shift

The success of most existing cross-modal retrieval methods heavily relies on the assumption that the given queries follow the same distribution of the source domain. However, such an assumption is easily violated in real-world scenarios due to the complexity and diversity of queries, thus leading to the query shift problem. Specifically, query shift refers to the online query stream originating from the domain that follows a different distribution with the source one. In this paper, we observe that query shift would not only diminish the uniformity (namely, within-modality scatter) of the query modality but also amplify the gap between query and gallery modalities. Based on the observations, we propose a novel method dubbed Test-time adaptation for Cross-modal Retrieval (TCR). In brief, TCR employs a novel module to refine the query predictions (namely, retrieval results of the query) and a joint objective to prevent query shift from disturbing the common space, thus achieving online adaptation for the cross-modal retrieval models with query shift. Expensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TCR against query shift. The code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

An Empirical Study of Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning on Vision-Language Pre-train Model

Recent studies applied Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning techniques (PEFTs) to efficiently narrow the performance gap between pre-training and downstream. There are two important factors for various PEFTs, namely, the accessible data size and fine-tunable parameter size. A natural expectation for PEFTs is that the performance of various PEFTs is positively related to the data size and fine-tunable parameter size. However, according to the evaluation of five PEFTs on two downstream vision-language (VL) tasks, we find that such an intuition holds only if the downstream data and task are not consistent with pre-training. For downstream fine-tuning consistent with pre-training, data size no longer affects the performance, while the influence of fine-tunable parameter size is not monotonous. We believe such an observation could guide the choice of training strategy for various PEFTs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Decoupled Contrastive Multi-View Clustering with High-Order Random Walks

In recent, some robust contrastive multi-view clustering (MvC) methods have been proposed, which construct data pairs from neighborhoods to alleviate the false negative issue, i.e., some intra-cluster samples are wrongly treated as negative pairs. Although promising performance has been achieved by these methods, the false negative issue is still far from addressed and the false positive issue emerges because all in- and out-of-neighborhood samples are simply treated as positive and negative, respectively. To address the issues, we propose a novel robust method, dubbed decoupled contrastive multi-view clustering with high-order random walks (DIVIDE). In brief, DIVIDE leverages random walks to progressively identify data pairs in a global instead of local manner. As a result, DIVIDE could identify in-neighborhood negatives and out-of-neighborhood positives. Moreover, DIVIDE embraces a novel MvC architecture to perform inter- and intra-view contrastive learning in different embedding spaces, thus boosting clustering performance and embracing the robustness against missing views. To verify the efficacy of DIVIDE, we carry out extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets comparing with nine state-of-the-art MvC methods in both complete and incomplete MvC settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Semantic Invariant Multi-view Clustering with Fully Incomplete Information

Robust multi-view learning with incomplete information has received significant attention due to issues such as incomplete correspondences and incomplete instances that commonly affect real-world multi-view applications. Existing approaches heavily rely on paired samples to realign or impute defective ones, but such preconditions cannot always be satisfied in practice due to the complexity of data collection and transmission. To address this problem, we present a novel framework called SeMantic Invariance LEarning (SMILE) for multi-view clustering with incomplete information that does not require any paired samples. To be specific, we discover the existence of invariant semantic distribution across different views, which enables SMILE to alleviate the cross-view discrepancy to learn consensus semantics without requiring any paired samples. The resulting consensus semantics remain unaffected by cross-view distribution shifts, making them useful for realigning/imputing defective instances and forming clusters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SMILE through extensive comparison experiments with 13 state-of-the-art baselines on five benchmarks. Our approach improves the clustering accuracy of NoisyMNIST from 19.3\%/23.2\% to 82.7\%/69.0\% when the correspondences/instances are fully incomplete. The code could be accessed from https://pengxi.me.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Prototype-based Imputation

In this paper, we study how to achieve two characteristics highly-expected by incomplete multi-view clustering (IMvC). Namely, i) instance commonality refers to that within-cluster instances should share a common pattern, and ii) view versatility refers to that cross-view samples should own view-specific patterns. To this end, we design a novel dual-stream model which employs a dual attention layer and a dual contrastive learning loss to learn view-specific prototypes and model the sample-prototype relationship. When the view is missed, our model performs data recovery using the prototypes in the missing view and the sample-prototype relationship inherited from the observed view. Thanks to our dual-stream model, both cluster- and view-specific information could be captured, and thus the instance commonality and view versatility could be preserved to facilitate IMvC. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method on six challenging benchmarks compared with 11 approaches. The code will be released.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Graph Matching with Bi-level Noisy Correspondence

In this paper, we study a novel and widely existing problem in graph matching (GM), namely, Bi-level Noisy Correspondence (BNC), which refers to node-level noisy correspondence (NNC) and edge-level noisy correspondence (ENC). In brief, on the one hand, due to the poor recognizability and viewpoint differences between images, it is inevitable to inaccurately annotate some keypoints with offset and confusion, leading to the mismatch between two associated nodes, i.e., NNC. On the other hand, the noisy node-to-node correspondence will further contaminate the edge-to-edge correspondence, thus leading to ENC. For the BNC challenge, we propose a novel method termed Contrastive Matching with Momentum Distillation. Specifically, the proposed method is with a robust quadratic contrastive loss which enjoys the following merits: i) better exploring the node-to-node and edge-to-edge correlations through a GM customized quadratic contrastive learning paradigm; ii) adaptively penalizing the noisy assignments based on the confidence estimated by the momentum teacher. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the robustness of our model compared with 12 competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2023-ICCV-COMMON.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Twin Contrastive Learning for Online Clustering

This paper proposes to perform online clustering by conducting twin contrastive learning (TCL) at the instance and cluster level. Specifically, we find that when the data is projected into a feature space with a dimensionality of the target cluster number, the rows and columns of its feature matrix correspond to the instance and cluster representation, respectively. Based on the observation, for a given dataset, the proposed TCL first constructs positive and negative pairs through data augmentations. Thereafter, in the row and column space of the feature matrix, instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted by pulling together positive pairs while pushing apart the negatives. To alleviate the influence of intrinsic false-negative pairs and rectify cluster assignments, we adopt a confidence-based criterion to select pseudo-labels for boosting both the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. As a result, the clustering performance is further improved. Besides the elegant idea of twin contrastive learning, another advantage of TCL is that it could independently predict the cluster assignment for each instance, thus effortlessly fitting online scenarios. Extensive experiments on six widely-used image and text benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of TCL. The code will be released on GitHub.

cs.LG↗