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Pengxiang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Pengxiang Li.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Adaptive Chain-of-Focus Reasoning via Dynamic Visual Search and Zooming for Efficient VLMs

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a variety of computer vision tasks. However, the multimodal reasoning capability has not been fully explored in existing models. In this paper, we propose a Chain-of-Focus (CoF) method that allows VLMs to perform adaptive focusing and zooming in on key image regions based on obtained visual cues and the given questions, achieving efficient multimodal reasoning. To enable this CoF capability, we present a two-stage training pipeline, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we construct the MM-CoF dataset, comprising 3K samples derived from a visual agent designed to adaptively identify key regions to solve visual tasks with different image resolutions and questions. We use MM-CoF to fine-tune the Qwen2.5-VL model for cold start. In the RL stage, we leverage the outcome accuracies and formats as rewards to update the Qwen2.5-VL model, enabling further refining the search and reasoning strategy of models without human priors. Our model achieves significant improvements on multiple benchmarks. On the V* benchmark that requires strong visual reasoning capability, our model outperforms existing VLMs by 5% among 8 image resolutions ranging from 224 to 4K, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed CoF method and facilitating the more efficient deployment of VLMs in practical applications.

cs.CV↗

From Objects to Anywhere: A Holistic Benchmark for Multi-level Visual Grounding in 3D Scenes

3D visual grounding has made notable progress in localizing objects within complex 3D scenes. However, grounding referring expressions beyond objects in 3D scenes remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Anywhere3D-Bench, a holistic 3D visual grounding benchmark consisting of 2,886 referring expression-3D bounding box pairs spanning four different grounding levels: human-activity areas, unoccupied space beyond objects, individual objects in the scene, and fine-grained object parts. We assess a range of state-of-the-art 3D visual grounding methods alongside large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) on Anywhere3D-Bench. Experimental results reveal that space-level and part-level visual grounding pose the greatest challenges: space-level tasks require a more comprehensive spatial reasoning ability, for example, modeling distances and spatial relations within 3D space, while part-level tasks demand fine-grained perception of object composition. Even the best-performing models, Google Gemini-2.5-Pro and OpenAI o3, achieve just around 30% accuracy on space-level tasks and around 40% on part-level tasks, significantly lower than its performance on area-level and object-level tasks. These findings underscore a critical gap in current models' capacity to understand and reason about 3D scenes beyond object-level semantics.

cs.CV↗

Double-Checker: Enhancing Reasoning of Slow-Thinking LLMs via Self-Critical Fine-Tuning

While slow-thinking large language models (LLMs) exhibit reflection-like reasoning, commonly referred to as the "aha moment:, their ability to generate informative critiques and refine prior solutions remains limited. In this paper, we introduce Double-Checker, a principled framework designed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of slow-thinking LLMs by fostering explicit self-critique and iterative refinement of their previous solutions. By fine-tuning on our curated 1,730 self-critical instances, Double-Checker empowers long-CoT LLMs to iteratively critique and refine their outputs during inference until they evaluate their solutions as correct under self-generated critiques. We validate the efficacy of Double-Checker across a comprehensive suite of reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that iterative self-critique significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of long-CoT LLMs. Notably, our Double-Checker increases the pass@1 performance on challenging AIME benchmarks from 4.4% to 18.2% compared to the original long-CoT LLMs. These results highlight a promising direction for developing more trustworthy and effective LLMs capable of structured self-critique. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/XinXU-USTC/DoubleChecker

cs.CL↗

Efficient Multi-turn RL for GUI Agents via Decoupled Training and Adaptive Data Curation

Vision-language model (VLM) based GUI agents show promise for automating complex desktop and mobile tasks, but face significant challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL): (1) slow multi-turn interactions with GUI environments for policy rollout, and (2) insufficient high-quality agent-environment interactions for policy learning. To address these challenges, we propose DART, a Decoupled Agentic RL Training framework for GUI agents, which coordinates heterogeneous modules in a highly decoupled manner. DART separates the training system into four asynchronous modules: environment cluster, rollout service, data manager, and trainer. This design enables non-blocking communication, asynchronous training, rollout-wise trajectory sampling, and per-worker model synchronization, significantly improving the system efficiency: 1.6*GPU utilization for rollout, 1.9* training throughput, and 5.5* environment utilization. To facilitate effective learning from abundant samples, we introduce an adaptive data curation scheme: (1) pre-collecting successful trajectories for challenging tasks to supplement sparse success in online sampling; (2) dynamically adjusting rollout numbers and trajectory lengths based on task difficulty; (3) training selectively on high-entropy steps to prioritize critical decisions; (4) stabilizing learning via truncated importance sampling for policy mismatch between policy rollout and updating. On the OSWorld benchmark, DART-GUI-7B achieves a 42.13% task success rate, a 14.61% absolute gain over the base model, and 7.34% higher than open-source SOTA. We will fully open-source our training framework, data, and model checkpoints via computer-use-agents.github.io/dart-gui, which we believe is a timely contribution to the open-source community of agentic RL training.

cs.LG↗

Learning Personalized Driving Styles via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Generating human-like and adaptive trajectories is essential for autonomous driving in dynamic environments. While generative models have shown promise in synthesizing feasible trajectories, they often fail to capture the nuanced variability of personalized driving styles due to dataset biases and distributional shifts. To address this, we introduce TrajHF, a human feedback-driven finetuning framework for generative trajectory models, designed to align motion planning with diverse driving styles. TrajHF incorporates multi-conditional denoiser and reinforcement learning with human feedback to refine multi-modal trajectory generation beyond conventional imitation learning. This enables better alignment with human driving preferences while maintaining safety and feasibility constraints. TrajHF achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art on NavSim benchmark. TrajHF sets a new paradigm for personalized and adaptable trajectory generation in autonomous driving.

cs.RO↗

DreamMix: Decoupling Object Attributes for Enhanced Editability in Customized Image Inpainting

Subject-driven image inpainting has recently gained prominence in image editing with the rapid advancement of diffusion models. Beyond image guidance, recent studies have explored incorporating text guidance to achieve identity-preserved yet locally editable object inpainting. However, these methods still suffer from identity overfitting, where original attributes remain entangled with target textual instructions. To overcome this limitation, we propose DreamMix, a diffusion-based framework adept at inserting target objects into user-specified regions while concurrently enabling arbitrary text-driven attribute modifications. DreamMix introduces three key components: (i) an Attribute Decoupling Mechanism (ADM) that synthesizes diverse attribute-augmented image-text pairs to mitigate overfitting; (ii) a Textual Attribute Substitution (TAS) module that isolates target attributes via orthogonal decomposition, and (iii) a Disentangled Inpainting Framework (DIF) that seperates local generation from global harmonization. Extensive experiments across multiple inpainting backbones demonstrate that DreamMix achieves a superior balance between identity preservation and attribute editability across diverse applications, including object insertion, attribute editing, and small object inpainting.

cs.CV↗

Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving

End-to-End (E2E) solutions have emerged as a mainstream approach for autonomous driving systems, with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models representing a new paradigm that leverages pre-trained multimodal knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret and interact with complex real-world environments. However, these methods remain constrained by the limitations of imitation learning, which struggles to inherently encode physical rules during training. Existing approaches often rely on complex rule-based post-refinement, employ reinforcement learning that remains largely limited to simulation, or utilize diffusion guidance that requires computationally expensive gradient calculations. To address these challenges, we introduce ReflectDrive, a novel learning-based framework that integrates a reflection mechanism for safe trajectory generation via discrete diffusion. We first discretize the two-dimensional driving space to construct an action codebook, enabling the use of pre-trained Diffusion Language Models for planning tasks through fine-tuning. Central to our approach is a safety-aware reflection mechanism that performs iterative self-correction without gradient computation. Our method begins with goal-conditioned trajectory generation to model multi-modal driving behaviors. Based on this, we apply local search methods to identify unsafe tokens and determine feasible solutions, which then serve as safe anchors for inpainting-based regeneration. Evaluated on the NAVSIM benchmark, ReflectDrive demonstrates significant advantages in safety-critical trajectory generation, offering a scalable and reliable solution for autonomous driving systems.

cs.RO↗

TransDiffuser: Diverse Trajectory Generation with Decorrelated Multi-modal Representation for End-to-end Autonomous Driving

In recent years, diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable potential across diverse domains, from vision generation to language modeling. Transferring its generative capabilities to modern end-to-end autonomous driving systems has also emerged as a promising direction. However, existing diffusion-based trajectory generative models often exhibit mode collapse where different random noises converge to similar trajectories after the denoising process.Therefore, state-of-the-art models often rely on anchored trajectories from pre-defined trajectory vocabulary or scene priors in the training set to mitigate collapse and enrich the diversity of generated trajectories, but such inductive bias are not available in real-world deployment, which can be challenged when generalizing to unseen scenarios. In this work, we investigate the possibility of effectively tackling the mode collapse challenge without the assumption of pre-defined trajectory vocabulary or pre-computed scene priors. Specifically, we propose TransDiffuser, an encoder-decoder based generative trajectory planning model, where the encoded scene information and motion states serve as the multi-modal conditional input of the denoising decoder. Different from existing approaches, we exploit a simple yet effective multi-modal representation decorrelation optimization mechanism during the denoising process to enrich the latent representation space which better guides the downstream generation. Without any predefined trajectory anchors or pre-computed scene priors, TransDiffuser achieves the PDMS of 94.85 on the closed-loop planning-oriented benchmark NAVSIM, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative evaluation further showcases TransDiffuser generates more diverse and plausible trajectories which explore more drivable area.

cs.RO↗

Mix-LN: Unleashing the Power of Deeper Layers by Combining Pre-LN and Post-LN

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet recent findings reveal that their deeper layers often contribute minimally and can be pruned without affecting overall performance. While some view this as an opportunity for model compression, we identify it as a training shortfall rooted in the widespread use of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). We demonstrate that Pre-LN, commonly employed in models like GPT and LLaMA, leads to diminished gradient norms in its deeper layers, reducing their effectiveness. In contrast, Post-Layer Normalization (Post-LN) preserves larger gradient norms in deeper layers but suffers from vanishing gradients in earlier layers. To address this, we introduce Mix-LN, a novel normalization technique that combines the strengths of Pre-LN and Post-LN within the same model. Mix-LN applies Post-LN to the earlier layers and Pre-LN to the deeper layers, ensuring more uniform gradients across layers. This allows all parts of the network--both shallow and deep layers--to contribute effectively to training. Extensive experiments with various model sizes from 70M to 7B demonstrate that Mix-LN consistently outperforms both Pre-LN and Post-LN, promoting more balanced, healthier gradient norms throughout the network, and enhancing the overall quality of LLM pre-training. Furthermore, we demonstrate that models pre-trained with Mix-LN learn better compared to those using Pre-LN or Post-LN during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), highlighting the critical importance of high-quality deep layers. By effectively addressing the inefficiencies of deep layers in current LLMs, Mix-LN unlocks their potential, enhancing model capacity without increasing model size. Our code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/MixLN.

cs.LG↗

GPAS: Accelerating Convergence of LLM Pretraining via Gradient-Preserving Activation Scaling

Modern Large Language Models, such as the LLaMA, Qwen and DeepSeek series, predominantly adopt the Pre-LayerNorm (Pre-LN) Transformer architecture. While being stable during pretraining and scalable to large model sizes, Pre-LN suffers from an exponential growth in activation variance across layers, causing the shortcut to dominate over sub-layer outputs in the residual connection and limiting the learning capacity of deeper layers. To mitigate this issue, we propose Gradient-Preserving Activation Scaling (GPAS), a simple technique that can be used in combination with existing approaches. GPAS works by scaling down the intermediate activations while keeping their gradients unchanged. This leaves information in the activations intact, and avoids the gradient vanishing problem associated with gradient downscaling. Extensive experiments across various model sizes from 71M to 1B show that GPAS achieves consistent performance gains. Beyond enhancing Pre-LN Transformers, GPAS also shows promise in improving alternative architectures such as Sandwich-LN and DeepNorm, demonstrating its versatility and potential for improving training dynamics in a wide range of settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/dandingsky/GPAS.

cs.LG↗

A Set-to-Set Distance Measure in Hyperbolic Space

We propose a hyperbolic set-to-set distance measure for computing dissimilarity between sets in hyperbolic space. While point-to-point distances in hyperbolic space effectively capture hierarchical relationships between data points, many real-world applications require comparing sets of hyperbolic data points, where the local structure and the global structure of the sets carry crucial semantic information. The proposed the \underline{h}yperbolic \underline{s}et-\underline{to}-\underline{s}et \underline{d}istance measure (HS2SD) integrates both global and local structural information: global structure through geodesic distances between Einstein midpoints of hyperbolic sets, and local structure through topological characteristics of the two sets. To efficiently compute topological differences, we prove that using a finite Thue-Morse sequence of degree and adjacency matrices can serve as a robust approximation to capture the topological structure of a set. In this case, by considering the topological differences, HS2SD provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between two hyperbolic sets. Empirical evaluation on entity matching, standard image classification, and few-shot image classification demonstrates that our distance measure outperforms existing methods by effectively modeling the hierarchical and complex relationships inherent in hyperbolic sets.

cs.CV↗

Geometry-aware Distance Measure for Diverse Hierarchical Structures in Hyperbolic Spaces

Learning in hyperbolic spaces has attracted increasing attention due to its superior ability to model hierarchical structures of data. Most existing hyperbolic learning methods use fixed distance measures for all data, assuming a uniform hierarchy across all data points. However, real-world hierarchical structures exhibit significant diversity, making this assumption overly restrictive. In this paper, we propose a geometry-aware distance measure in hyperbolic spaces, which dynamically adapts to varying hierarchical structures. Our approach derives the distance measure by generating tailored projections and curvatures for each pair of data points, effectively mapping them to an appropriate hyperbolic space. We introduce a revised low-rank decomposition scheme and a hard-pair mining mechanism to mitigate the computational cost of pair-wise distance computation without compromising accuracy. We present an upper bound on the low-rank approximation error using Talagrand's concentration inequality, ensuring theoretical robustness. Extensive experiments on standard image classification (MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100), hierarchical classification (5-level CIFAR-100), and few-shot learning tasks (mini-ImageNet, tiered-ImageNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our approach consistently outperforms learning methods that use fixed distance measures, with notable improvements on few-shot learning tasks, where it achieves over 5\% gains on mini-ImageNet. The results reveal that adaptive distance measures better capture diverse hierarchical structures, with visualization showing clearer class boundaries and improved prototype separation in hyperbolic spaces.

cs.CV↗

Outlier-weighed Layerwise Sampling for LLM Fine-tuning

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. However, the substantial size of LLMs presents significant challenges in training or fine-tuning. While parameter-efficient approaches such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) have gained popularity, they often compromise performance compared to full-rank fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose Outlier-weighed Layerwise Sampling (OWS), a new memory-efficient fine-tuning approach, inspired by the layerwise outlier distribution of LLMs. Unlike LoRA, which adds extra adapters to all layers, OWS strategically assigns higher sampling probabilities to layers with more outliers, selectively sampling only a few layers and fine-tuning their pre-trained weights. To further increase the number of fine-tuned layers without a proportional rise in memory costs, we incorporate gradient low-rank projection, further boosting the approach's performance. Our extensive experiments across various architectures, including LLaMa2 and Mistral, demonstrate that OWS consistently outperforms baseline approaches, including full fine-tuning. Specifically, it achieves up to a 1.1% average accuracy gain on the Commonsense Reasoning benchmark, a 3.0% improvement on MMLU, and a notable 10% boost on MT-Bench, while being more memory efficient. OWS allows us to fine-tune 7B LLMs with only 21GB of memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/OWS.

cs.LG↗

Adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance via Dynamic Low-Confidence Masking

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) significantly enhances controllability in generative models by interpolating conditional and unconditional predictions. However, standard CFG often employs a static unconditional input, which can be suboptimal for iterative generation processes where model uncertainty varies dynamically. We introduce Adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance (A-CFG), a novel method that tailors the unconditional input by leveraging the model's instantaneous predictive confidence. At each step of an iterative (masked) diffusion language model, A-CFG identifies tokens in the currently generated sequence for which the model exhibits low confidence. These tokens are temporarily re-masked to create a dynamic, localized unconditional input. This focuses CFG's corrective influence precisely on areas of ambiguity, leading to more effective guidance. We integrate A-CFG into a state-of-the-art masked diffusion language model and demonstrate its efficacy. Experiments on diverse language generation benchmarks show that A-CFG yields substantial improvements over standard CFG, achieving, for instance, a 3.9 point gain on GPQA. Our work highlights the benefit of dynamically adapting guidance mechanisms to model uncertainty in iterative generation.

cs.CL↗

InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have powered Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, showing promise in automating tasks on computing devices. Recent works have begun exploring reasoning in GUI tasks with encouraging results. However, many current approaches rely on manually designed reasoning templates, which may result in reasoning that is not sufficiently robust and adaptive for complex GUI environments. Meanwhile, some existing agents continue to operate as Reactive Actors, relying primarily on implicit reasoning that may lack sufficient depth for GUI tasks demanding planning and error recovery. We argue that advancing these agents requires a shift from reactive acting towards acting based on deliberate reasoning. To facilitate this transformation, we introduce InfiGUI-R1, an MLLM-based GUI agent developed through our Actor2Reasoner framework, a reasoning-centric, two-stage training approach designed to progressively evolve agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners. The first stage, Reasoning Injection, focuses on establishing a basic reasoner. We employ Spatial Reasoning Distillation to transfer cross-modal spatial reasoning capabilities from teacher models to MLLMs through trajectories with explicit reasoning steps, enabling models to integrate GUI visual-spatial information with logical reasoning before action generation. The second stage, Deliberation Enhancement, refines the basic reasoner into a deliberative one using Reinforcement Learning. This stage introduces two approaches: Sub-goal Guidance, which rewards models for generating accurate intermediate sub-goals, and Error Recovery Scenario Construction, which creates failure-and-recovery training scenarios from identified prone-to-error steps. Experimental results show InfiGUI-R1 achieves strong performance in GUI grounding and trajectory tasks. Resources at https://github.com/Reallm-Labs/InfiGUI-R1.

cs.AI↗

Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation in 3D Scenes

Grounding natural language in 3D environments is a critical step toward achieving robust 3D vision-language alignment. Current datasets and models for 3D visual grounding predominantly focus on identifying and localizing objects from static, object-centric descriptions. These approaches do not adequately address the dynamic and sequential nature of task-oriented scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel task: Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation in 3D Scenes, where models must interpret step-by-step instructions for daily activities by either localizing a sequence of target objects in indoor scenes or navigating toward them within a 3D simulator. To facilitate this task, we present SG3D, a large-scale dataset comprising 22,346 tasks with 112,236 steps across 4,895 real-world 3D scenes. The dataset is constructed by combining RGB-D scans from various 3D scene datasets with an automated task generation pipeline, followed by human verification for quality assurance. We benchmark contemporary methods on SG3D, revealing the significant challenges in understanding task-oriented context across multiple steps. Furthermore, we propose SG-LLM, a state-of-the-art approach leveraging a stepwise grounding paradigm to tackle the sequential grounding task. Our findings underscore the need for further research to advance the development of more capable and context-aware embodied agents.

cs.CV↗

InfiR : Crafting Effective Small Language Models and Multimodal Small Language Models in Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, they still face challenges such as high computational demands and privacy concerns. This paper focuses on developing efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) and Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) that retain competitive reasoning abilities. We introduce a novel training pipeline that enhances reasoning capabilities and facilitates deployment on edge devices, achieving state-of-the-art performance while minimizing development costs. \InfR~ aims to advance AI systems by improving reasoning, reducing adoption barriers, and addressing privacy concerns through smaller model sizes. Resources are available at https://github. com/Reallm-Labs/InfiR.

cs.CL↗

Multi-modal Agent Tuning: Building a VLM-Driven Agent for Efficient Tool Usage

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) prompts the development of multi-modal agents, which are used as a controller to call external tools, providing a feasible way to solve practical tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal agent tuning method that automatically generates multi-modal tool-usage data and tunes a vision-language model (VLM) as the controller for powerful tool-usage reasoning. To preserve the data quality, we prompt the GPT-4o mini model to generate queries, files, and trajectories, followed by query-file and trajectory verifiers. Based on the data synthesis pipeline, we collect the MM-Traj dataset that contains 20K tasks with trajectories of tool usage. Then, we develop the T3-Agent via \underline{T}rajectory \underline{T}uning on VLMs for \underline{T}ool usage using MM-Traj. Evaluations on the GTA and GAIA benchmarks show that the T3-Agent consistently achieves improvements on two popular VLMs: MiniCPM-V-8.5B and {Qwen2-VL-7B}, which outperforms untrained VLMs by $20\%$, showing the effectiveness of the proposed data synthesis pipeline, leading to high-quality data for tool-usage capabilities.

cs.AI↗