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Ning Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Ning Yang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Noise-Driven Exploration and Transient Freezing Select Flat Minima in Stochastic Gradient Descent

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium mechanism that governs solution selection during training. Numerical experiments reveal a transient exploratory phase in which SGD trajectories repeatedly escape sharp valleys and migrate toward flatter regions of the loss landscape before becoming confined to a final basin. Using a tractable physical model, we show that SGD noise reshapes the loss landscape into an effective potential that preferentially stabilizes flat solutions. We further uncover a transient freezing mechanism: as training progresses, the flattening landscape suppresses transitions between competing valleys. Stronger SGD noise delays this freezing transition, prolonging the exploratory phase and thereby increasing the probability of convergence to flatter minima. Together, these results provide a unified physical framework connecting learning dynamics, loss-landscape geometry, and generalization, and suggest guiding principles for the design of more effective optimization algorithms.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

WAM-Nav: Asymmetric Latent World-Action Modeling for Unified Visual Navigation

Visual navigation requires generating smooth and collision-free trajectories under complex geometric and physical constraints. Existing reactive policies that directly map observations to actions lack anticipatory reasoning, limiting their ability to proactively avoid obstacles. While visual imagination offers predictive foresight, conventional modular approaches separate scene prediction from policy learning, often leading to error accumulation and inefficient inference. To address these limitations, we propose WAM-Nav, a Latent World-Action Model for embodied visual navigation that jointly learns action generation and latent visual foresight, enabling more robust and foresighted navigation decisions without compromising inference efficiency. Specifically, WAM-Nav utilizes a shared Diffusion Transformer for asymmetric joint diffusion to concurrently generate long-horizon actions and short-horizon visual foresight, reducing the inference latency and visual error accumulation inherent in multi-step autoregressive rollouts. To further encourage smooth and consistent trajectory generation, we introduce a dual-stream contextual conditioning mechanism that integrates episode-level ego-motion history with sequential visual observations. Combined with a unified goal alignment module that preserves balanced representations across goal types, WAM-Nav naturally supports Image-Goal, Point-Goal, and No-Goal exploration within a single policy. Extensive experiments on the challenging ClutterScenes and InternScenes benchmarks demonstrate strong generalization of WAM-Nav, particularly on Image-Goal and Point-Goal navigation, where it improves success rates by 15.7% and 3.3%, respectively. Real-world deployment further validates effective zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, achieving an average 85% task success rate across diverse indoor and outdoor environments.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

On the Superlinear Relationship between SGD Noise Covariance and Loss Landscape Curvature

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) introduces anisotropic noise that is correlated with the local curvature of the loss landscape, thereby biasing optimization toward flat minima. Prior work often assumes an equivalence between the Fisher Information Matrix and the Hessian for negative log-likelihood losses, leading to the claim that the SGD noise covariance $\mathbf{C}$ is proportional to the Hessian $\mathbf{H}$. We show that this assumption holds only under restrictive conditions that are typically violated in deep neural networks. Using the recently discovered Activity--Weight Duality, we find a more general relationship agnostic to the specific loss formulation, showing that $\mathbf{C} \propto \mathbb{E}_p[\mathbf{h}_p^2]$, where $\mathbf{h}_p$ denotes the per-sample Hessian with $\mathbf{H} = \mathbb{E}_p[\mathbf{h}_p]$. As a consequence, $\mathbf{C}$ and $\mathbf{H}$ commute approximately rather than coincide exactly. We further find that, within the analyzed fully connected layers, their diagonal elements follow per-layer empirical power laws $C_{ii} \propto H_{ii}^γ$, with layer-dependent fitted exponents bounded by $1 \leq γ\leq 2$. Experiments across datasets, architectures, and loss functions support the resulting layerwise bounds, providing a unified characterization of the noise-curvature relationship in deep learning.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

SKIP: Sparse Keyframe Interpolation Paradigm for Efficient Embodied World Models

Embodied world models have emerged as a promising paradigm in robotics by predicting how robot actions affect the surrounding scene. However, the rollout inference remains computationally expensive in pixel space, as long-horizon manipulation videos typically have to be generated frame by frame. This cost cannot be easily reduced by indiscriminately dropping frames, since downstream policies rely on complete preservation of sparse task-relevant events such as approach, contact, grasp, and release. To address this challenge, we propose Sparse Keyframe Interpolation Paradigm (SKIP), an event-preserving sparse-to-dense framework that avoids dense frame-by-frame generation. SKIP first identifies task-relevant keyframes by leveraging robot-aware multimodal features. It then synthesizes only these keyframes with a sparse video diffusion model. A learned gap predictor and an action-conditioned interpolator subsequently reconstruct the missing intervals according to the robot actions. On LIBERO, SKIP generates dense rollouts $4.16\times$ faster than a dense baseline while improving visual fidelity and reducing aggregate FVD by $89.0\%$. Importantly, SKIP-generated videos are effective policy-training data. Even when they fully replace real demonstrations, $π_{0.5}$ success drops only $1.3$ pp in LIBERO simulation and $6.7$ pp on the real robot, whereas fully dense frame-by-frame generation collapses by $48$ to $58$ pp.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

SF-AMS: Strategic Forgetting for Structured Memory in LLM Agent

Managing long-context dependencies remains a primary bottleneck in LLM agents, as redundant and irrelevant information can degrade multi-step reasoning. Strategic Forgetting for Agent Memory Systems (SF-AMS) is proposed as a framework for maintaining compact high-utility memory by modeling the long-term importance of memory units. SF-AMS replaces static retrieval and heuristic decay with a utility-driven survival mechanism that updates memory importance from usage redundancy and temporal signals, inducing a hierarchical memory structure that prioritizes stable entity-consistent information while filtering noise. On top of this, Composite Importance Scoring integrates semantic and entity level signals to improve retrieval robustness. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show consistent gains over strong state of the art baselines including LightMem MemO and A-Mem. The largest improvement appears in multi-hop reasoning under Qwen2.5-7B where SF-AMS achieves plus 9.65 F1 over the strongest baseline followed by temporal reasoning under GPT-4o-mini plus 6.91 F1 and open-domain tasks plus 6.53 F1 demonstrating strong cross backbone generalization. These results show that modeling memory importance as a dynamic utility signal is critical for reliable long-context reasoning.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Cascade-KDE: Robust Time-Series Restoration under Out-of-Distribution Impulse Corruptions

Real-world time-series data in industrial sensing, healthcare, and energy systems is often corrupted by a mixture of Gaussian noise and occasional large-magnitude impulse outliers. For tasks that depend on local shape, such as ECG morphology analysis and battery degradation monitoring, the main requirement is not only low reconstruction error but also preservation of derivative peaks and task-critical features. We propose Cascade-KDE, a training-free restoration framework for corrupted time series. The method first estimates a two-dimensional temporal-amplitude density, then applies a Density-Truncated Robust Expectation to limit the influence of distant abnormal points, and finally refines the sequence through an exponential cascade with adaptive stopping. This design aims to improve robustness under out-of-distribution impulse corruptions while keeping the restored trajectory close to the original local structure. Across several benchmark datasets, the proposed method shows consistent gains over classical filters and representative learning-based baselines on curve fidelity, derivative preservation, downstream classification, and runtime efficiency. These results suggest that bounded density-based restoration is a practical option for feature-preserving preprocessing in noisy time-series pipelines.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Computable lower bound of the parameterized entanglement monotone

Although numerous measures of entanglement have been proposed so far, the calculation of a given faithful entanglement measure is a hard work since it is always involved in some optimization process. It is, therefore, important to estimate the lower bound of a given entanglement measure for an arbitrary quantum state. This results in a subject of intensive mathematical research. In particular, along this line, the lower bounds of concurrence or other measures that are induced from concurrence have been explored a lot. Here, we investigate the lower bounds of two kinds of entanglement monotones, i.e., $q$-concurrence ($q>1$) and $α$-concurrence ($0<α<1$), or termed the parameterized entanglement monotone together. We obtain, in the light of the informationally complete ($N$, $M$)-positive operator-valued measure [($N$, $M$)-POVM], the lower bounds for the case of $\frac12<α<1$, $1<q<2$ for two-qudit states, and the case of $2\leqslant q<3$ for two-qubit states. We list several examples which show that the lower bounds based on ($N$, $M$)-POVM outperform that of GSIC-POVM and SIC-POVM, and all these measurement based bounds are better then the ones induced by positive partial transpose (PPT) and realignment criteria in literature. In addition, we obtain an analytical formula of the parameterized entanglement monotone with $\frac12<α<1$ and $1<q<2$ for the isotropic state.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

EgoKit: Towards Unified Low-Cost Egocentric Data Collection with Heterogeneous Devices

Egocentric video is increasingly used as a data source for robot learning, activity understanding, and embodied AI research, but collecting it at scale remains fragmented in practice: each candidate host device, such as an Android phone, iPhone, iPad, smart glasses, or extended reality (XR) headset, exposes a different SDK, a different policy on raw camera access, and different limitations on external USB cameras and on-device tracking. Synchronized ego-view and wrist-view capture is therefore typically obtained by either committing to a single proprietary platform or building one-off rigs that do not transfer across devices. To address this gap, we present EgoKit, a toolkit that exposes the same egocentric recording workflow across six heterogeneous host devices. Across all supported devices, EgoKit presents the same recording interaction and produces locally stored video with a uniform log format; on XR headsets, it additionally logs head pose and OpenXR-standard 26-joint hand tracking aligned to the video streams. The companion accessories, including two wrist cameras with mounts, a head strap, and a USB-C hub, add wrist-view capture to any supported host without custom hardware fabrication. EgoKit is available at \url{https://egokit.chuange.org/}.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Vision-LLMs for Spatiotemporal Traffic Forecasting

Accurate spatiotemporal traffic forecasting is a critical prerequisite for proactive resource management in dense urban mobile networks. While large language models have shown promise in time series analysis, they inherently struggle to model the complex spatial dependencies of grid-based traffic data. Effectively extending large language models to this domain is challenging, as representing the vast amount of information from dense geographical grids can be inefficient and overwhelm the model's context. To address these challenges, we propose ST-Vision-LLM, a novel framework that reframes spatiotemporal forecasting as a vision-language fusion problem. Our approach leverages a Vision-LLM visual encoder to process historical global traffic matrices as image sequences, providing the model with a comprehensive global view to inform cell-level predictions. To overcome the inefficiency of large language models in handling numerical data, we introduce an efficient encoding scheme that represents floating-point values as single tokens via a specialized vocabulary, coupled with a two-stage numerical alignment fine-tuning process. The model is first trained with supervised fine-tuning and then further optimized for predictive accuracy using group relative policy optimization, a memory-efficient reinforcement learning method. Evaluations on real-world mobile traffic datasets demonstrate that ST-Vision-LLM outperforms existing methods by 15.6% in long-term prediction accuracy and exceeds the best baseline by around 30% on average in cross-domain few-shot scenarios. Our extensive experiments validate the model's strong generalization capabilities across various data-scarce environments.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Band Together: Untargeted Adversarial Training with Multimodal Coordination against Evasion-based Promotion Attacks

Multimodal recommender systems exploit visual and textual signals to alleviate data sparsity, but this also makes them more vulnerable to evasion-based promotion attacks. Existing defenses are largely limited to single-modal settings and mainly focus on poisoning-based threats, leaving evasion-based threats underexplored. In this work, we first identify a cross-modal gradient mismatch under the multi-user promotion setting, where visual and textual perturbations are optimized in inconsistent directions due to the dominance of distinct user groups. This phenomenon dilutes the attack effectiveness and leads robust training to underestimate worst-case risks. To address this issue, we propose Untargeted Adversarial Training with Multimodal Coordination (UAT-MC). UAT-MC tackles the challenge of unknown targeted items in evasion-based attacks (as opposed to poisoning-based attacks) by treating all items as potential targets, and introduces a gradient alignment mechanism to explicitly correct this mismatch. This design ensures synchronized perturbations across modalities, thereby maximizing adversarial strength for robust training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAT-MC significantly improves robustness against promotion attacks while maintaining acceptable recommendation performance under the defense-accuracy trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/gmXian/UAT-MC.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training for Long-Tailed Robustness via Geometric Alignment

Adversarial training is effective on balanced datasets, but its robustness degrades under longtailed class distributions, where tail classes suffer high robust error and unstable decision boundaries. We propose Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training (MCAT), a unified framework that enforces the semantic validity of adversarial examples by penalizing deviations from class-conditional manifolds in feature space, while promoting balanced geometric separation across classes via an ETF-inspired regularization. We provide theoretical results that link geometric separation to lower bounds on adversarially robust margins, and show that manifold-constrained adversarial risk upperbounds robust risk on high-density semantic regions. Extensive experiments on standard longtailed benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in overall, balanced, and tail-class adversarial robustness.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Cooperative Edge Caching with Large Language Model in Wireless Networks

Cooperative edge caching in overlapping zones couples Base Station (BS) decisions, making content replacement sensitive to spatial topology and temporal reuse. Conventional heuristics suffer from myopia, while Deep Reinforcement Learning relies on brittle numerical representations and needs prohibitive retraining under topological or traffic dynamics. This paper studies a centralized, cooperative multi-BS cache-replacement controller driven by a Large Language Model (LLM) within a deterministic text-to-action loop. At each time slot, the global cache state is rendered into a prompt encapsulating each BS's inventory, deduplicated requests, and multi-scale frequency summaries. The LLM generates one decision line per BS. A strict parser and feasibility checker then either accept the joint action or fall back to an all-BS NoOp action. We align the LLM via two-stage training: Supervised Fine-Tuning on look-ahead expert trajectories to acquire action syntax and robust initialization, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization. This employs an 'opportunity-aware' reward, using multi-step cooperative hit rate gains relative to a NoOp baseline as the primary signal, plus penalties for invalid outputs. We focus on reactive replacement of equal-sized files, max one replacement per BS per slot, and insertions restricted to current requests. Evaluating on identical request traces and association graphs, our orchestrator approaches a single-step exhaustive-search reference (0.610 vs. 0.617 in a 5-BS scenario), surpasses classical baselines (+4.1% over least-frequently used), and exhibits robust zero-shot transfer across cache capacity, library size, popularity skewness, and user density. Code is available at https://github.com/gracefulning/CoopLLM-Cache.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Chain-of-Thought Compression Should Not Be Blind: V-Skip for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Path Anchoring

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning significantly enhances the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), its autoregressive nature incurs prohibitive latency constraints. Current efforts to mitigate this via token compression often fail by blindly applying text-centric metrics to multimodal contexts. We identify a critical failure mode termed Visual Amnesia, where linguistically redundant tokens are erroneously pruned, leading to hallucinations. To address this, we introduce V-Skip that reformulates token pruning as a Visual-Anchored Information Bottleneck (VA-IB) optimization problem. V-Skip employs a dual-path gating mechanism that weighs token importance through both linguistic surprisal and cross-modal attention flow, effectively rescuing visually salient anchors. Extensive experiments on Qwen2-VL and Llama-3.2 families demonstrate that V-Skip achieves a $2.9\times$ speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Specifically, it preserves fine-grained visual details, outperforming other baselines over 30\% on the DocVQA.

cs.MM↗
arXiv2026

Not All Queries Need Deep Thought: CoFiCot for Adaptive Coarse-to-fine Stateful Refinement

Scaling test-time computation enhances LLM reasoning ability but faces a uniform computation paradox. Allocating identical resources leads to over-correction on simple tasks and insufficient refinement on complex ones. To address this, we propose CoFiCot, a coarse-to-fine adaptive framework that dynamically tailors inference strategies to problem difficulty. Specifically, we implement a multi-metric classifier that triages queries by synthesizing semantic entropy, consensus reliability, and predicted reasoning depth . This enables a differentiated refinement stage that applies efficient aggregation for simple queries while routing complex ones to a context-aware correction loop . We formalize correction as a stateful sequential propagation process , where each repair is strictly conditioned on the verified history of prior rectifications. By integrating Process Reward Models (PRMs) within this state-dependent trajectory, CoFiCot effectively bridges the gap between granular error localization and global logical coherence, preventing the context fragmentation typical of stateless refinement methods.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Token-Importance Guided Direct Preference Optimization

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for safe and effective AI interactions. While popular methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have simplified alignment, they remain sensitive to data noise and overlook the differential importance of individual tokens. Existing token-level approaches often rely on probability prediction or simplistic weighting schemes to obtain token importance, which still cannot fully address these issues. To solve this problem, we propose the Token-Importance Guided Direct Preference Optimization (TI-DPO), a framework that achieves fine-grained semantic control through two synergistic innovations. First, we propose a novel hybrid weighting mechanism that combines gradient attribution with a Gaussian prior, ensuring both the accuracy and robustness of token importance scores. Second, we employ a triplet loss to provide structured guidance for the optimization, explicitly guiding model outputs to approach preferred responses and diverge from non-preferred ones. Experimental results show that TI-DPO achieves higher accuracy and stronger generative diversity, providing more stable and computationally efficient solutions compared with DPO and other RLHF methods.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

PointCoT: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Explicit 3D Geometric Reasoning

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate proficiency in 2D scenes, extending their perceptual intelligence to 3D point cloud understanding remains a significant challenge. Current approaches focus primarily on aligning 3D features with pre-trained models. However, they typically treat geometric reasoning as an implicit mapping process. These methods bypass intermediate logical steps and consequently suffer from geometric hallucinations. They confidently generate plausible responses that fail to ground in precise structural details. To bridge this gap, we present PointCoT, a novel framework that empowers MLLMs with explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for 3D data. We advocate for a \textit{Look, Think, then Answer} paradigm. In this approach, the model is supervised to generate geometry-grounded rationales before predicting final answers. To facilitate this, we construct Point-Reason-Instruct, a large-scale benchmark comprising $\sim$86k instruction-tuning samples with hierarchical CoT annotations. By leveraging a dual-stream multi-modal architecture, our method synergizes semantic appearance with geometric truth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointCoT achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex reasoning tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Inverse orbital Hall effect induced terahertz emission enabled by a ferromagnet with quenched orbital moment in Fe/Pt/W trilayers

The inverse orbital Hall effect (IOHE) has recently attracted considerable attention as an emerging mechanism for terahertz (THz) emission based on ultrafast angular-momentum-to-charge conversion. Most experimental studies have focused on materials with strong spin-orbit coupling or pronounced orbital character, where sizable orbital Hall responses are expected. Elemental ferromagnets such as Fe are generally regarded as quenched orbital sources and are not expected to exhibit orbital-dominated THz emission. Here, we report a pronounced enhancement of THz emission in Fe/Pt/W trilayer heterostructures, despite the absence of detectable orbital contributions in the corresponding Fe/Pt and Fe/W bilayers. Thickness-dependent measurements reveal long-distance signal persistence, systematic delay accumulation, and pronounced pulse broadening with increasing W thickness. These features are inconsistent with diffusive spin transport and indicate that orbital angular momentum transport in the W layer, converted into charge current via the IOHE, becomes a dominant channel for THz emission in the trilayer configuration. Our results demonstrate that strong IOHE can emerge in heterostructures incorporating a quenched orbital ferromagnet, providing an effective route to enhance spintronic THz emitters through orbital Hall physics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

CrossCheck-Bench: Diagnosing Compositional Failures in Multimodal Conflict Resolution

Multimodal Large Language Models are primarily trained and evaluated on aligned image-text pairs, which leaves their ability to detect and resolve real-world inconsistencies largely unexplored. In open-domain applications visual and textual cues often conflict, requiring models to perform structured reasoning beyond surface-level alignment. We introduce CrossCheck-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating contradiction detection in multimodal inputs. The benchmark adopts a hierarchical task framework covering three levels of reasoning complexity and defines seven atomic capabilities essential for resolving cross-modal inconsistencies. CrossCheck-Bench includes 15k question-answer pairs sourced from real-world artifacts with synthetically injected contradictions. The dataset is constructed through a multi-stage annotation pipeline involving more than 450 expert hours to ensure semantic validity and calibrated difficulty across perception, integration, and reasoning. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art vision-language models and observe a consistent performance drop as tasks shift from perceptual matching to logical contradiction detection. Most models perform well on isolated entity recognition but fail when multiple clues must be synthesized for conflict reasoning. Capability-level analysis further reveals uneven skill acquisition, especially in tasks requiring multi-step inference or rule-based validation. Additional probing shows that conventional prompting strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Set-of-Mark yield only marginal gains. By contrast, methods that interleave symbolic reasoning with grounded visual processing achieve more stable improvements. These results highlight a persistent bottleneck in multimodal reasoning and suggest new directions for building models capable of robust cross-modal verification.

cs.CL↗