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Qirui Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Qirui Hu.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Differentially private inference framework for Riemannian manifold data

We propose a novel and systematic differentially private (DP) inference framework for non-Euclidean data. First, we design two types of DP mechanisms for the Fréchet mean and variance for i.i.d. Riemannian manifold-valued data, tailored to different geometric structures and accompanied by analytic privacy budgets calibrated to the geometry of the underlying manifold. Second, we establish the consistency and central limit theorems (CLTs) of the proposed DP estimators, enabling a suite of statistical inference procedures under privacy constraints. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive implementation guidelines and feasible procedures, including consistent DP estimators of the asymptotic variance in the CLTs. Extensive numerical experiments support the proposed methodologies. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real-world medical image and sociological datasets supported on two representative manifolds.

stat.ME↗

Unified theory of testing relevant hypotheses in functional time series

In this paper, we develop a {\em unified} framework for testing relevant hypotheses in functional time series. The proposed approach accommodates one-sample, two-sample, and change point problems for contaminated observations under arbitrary sampling schemes. Combining B-spline estimation with self-normalization, we construct nuisance-parameter-free tests that bypass auxiliary estimation of long-run covariance functions and measurement-error variance functions. We establish asymptotic validity by exploiting a sequential Gaussian approximation for dependent random vectors of moderately high dimension, which leads to a pivotal limiting distribution. We also provide sufficient conditions for the non-degeneracy of the self-normalizer and establish consistent decision rules. A key theoretical finding is that the proposed tests detect \(n^{-1/2}\)-local alternatives under arbitrary sampling frequencies. This uncovers a sparse-to-dense phase transition distinct from those typically observed in functional data analysis: while the sampling frequency affects the asymptotic variance, the detection rate remains \(n^{-1/2}\), even in sparsely sampled regimes. We further study multiple change point alternatives and extend the theory to settings where consistent change point estimates are available. We also discuss the choice of self-normalizers, including the recently developed range-adjusted self-normalizer. Extensive simulations support the theoretical results, and applications to the AU.SHF implied volatility and traffic volume datasets demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed methods.

stat.ME↗

Asymptotic Anytime-Valid Inference for U-statistics

We study asymptotic anytime-valid confidence sequences for degree-two U-statistics under continuous monitoring. In the nondegenerate case, Hoeffding's projection reduces the problem to a time-uniform central limit theory for the partial sums of the first-order projection, while the canonical remainder is shown to be negligible under mild moment assumptions. A leave-one-out jackknife estimator then yields a fully data-driven procedure, leading to confidence sequences with asymptotic coverage guarantee for the parameter of interest. In the degenerate case, we show that the U-statistic is approximated by a centered quadratic Gaussian-chaos rather than by a simple Gaussian, which poses significant challenges for sequential inference. To address this issue, we novelly develop the Spectrally Allocated Gaussian-chaos Excursion (SAGE) boundary, and then provide plug-in implementations based on truncated spectrum estimation with consistency guarantees. The resulting widths can attain the expected time-uniform optimal rates: $\sqrt{\log\log n/n}$ in the nondegenerate regime and $\log\log n/n$ in the degenerate regime. Several widely used U-statistics are discussed within the proposed framework, and numerical experiments further support the validity of the derived theory.

math.ST↗

Geometric Renyi Differential Privacy: Ricci Curvature Characterized by Heat Diffusion Mechanisms

In this paper, we develop a novel privacy mechanism for Riemannian manifold-valued data. Our key contribution lies in uncovering unexpected connections among geometric analysis, heat diffusion models, and differential privacy (DP). We characterize the Renyi divergence via dimension-free Harnack inequalities on Riemannian manifolds and establish Renyi differential privacy guarantees governed by Ricci curvature. For manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature, we propose a mechanism based on heat diffusion. In contrast, for general manifolds we introduce a Langevin-process-based approach that yields intrinsic mechanisms supporting normalization-free sampling and continuous privacy-utility trade-offs. We derive detailed utility analyses for both mechanisms. As a statistical application, we develop privacy-preserving estimation of the generalized Frechet mean, including nontrivial sensitivity analysis and phase transition characterizations. Numerical experiments further demonstrate the advantages of the proposed DP mechanisms over existing approaches.

stat.ML↗

ARM: Advantage Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Long-horizon robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) because sparse rewards provide limited guidance for credit assignment. Practical policy improvement thus relies on richer intermediate supervision, such as dense progress rewards, which are costly to obtain and ill-suited to non-monotonic behaviors such as backtracking and recovery. To address this, we propose Advantage Reward Modeling (ARM), a framework that shifts from hard-to-quantify absolute progress to estimating relative advantage. We introduce a cost-effective tri-state labeling strategy -- Progressive, Regressive, and Stagnant -- that reduces human cognitive overhead while ensuring high cross-annotator consistency. By training on these intuitive signals, ARM enables automated progress annotation for both complete demonstrations and fragmented DAgger-style data. Integrating ARM into an offline RL pipeline allows for adaptive action-reward reweighting, effectively filtering suboptimal samples. Our approach achieves a 99.4% success rate on a challenging long-horizon towel-folding task, demonstrating improved stability and data efficiency over current VLA baselines with near-zero human intervention during policy training.

cs.RO↗

Strong Gaussian approximation for U-statistics in high dimensions and beyond

We establish a strong Gaussian approximation for high-dimensional non-degenerate U-statistics with diverging dimension. Under mild assumptions, we construct, on a sufficiently rich probability space, a Gaussian process that uniformly approximates the entire sequential U-statistic process. The approximation error is explicitly characterized and vanishes under polynomial growth of the dimension. The key technical contribution is a sharp martingale maximal inequality for completely degenerate U-statistics, combined with a high-dimensional strong approximation for independent sums. This coupling yields functional Gaussian limits without relying on $\mathcal{L}^\infty$-type bounds or bootstrap arguments. The theory is illustrated through three representative examples of U-statistics: the spatial Kendall's tau matrix, the multivariate Gini's mean difference, and the characteristic dispersion parameter. As applications, we derive Brownian bridge approximations for U-statistic-based change-point statistics and develop a self-normalized relevant testing procedure whose limiting distribution is fully pivotal. The framework naturally accommodates bounded kernels and therefore remains valid under heavy-tailed distributions. Overall, our results provide a unified probability-theoretic foundation for high-dimensional inference based on U-statistics.

math.ST↗

Individualized Causal Effects under Network Interference with Combinatorial Treatments

Modern causal decision-making increasingly demands individualized treatment-effect estimation in networks where interventions are high-dimensional, combinatorial vectors. While network interference, effect heterogeneity, and multi-dimensional treatments have been studied separately, their intersection yields an exponentially large intervention space that makes standard identification tools and low-dimensional exposure mappings untenable. We bridge this gap with a unified framework that constructs a \emph{global potential-outcome emulator} for unit-level inference. Our method combines (1) rooted network configurations to leverage local smoothness, (2) doubly robust orthogonalization to mitigate confounding from network position and covariates, and (3) sparse spectral learning to efficiently estimate response surfaces over the $2^p$-dimensional treatment space. We also decompose networked effects into own-treatment, structural, and interaction components, and provide finite-sample error bounds and asymptotic consistency guarantees. Overall, we show that individualized causal inference remains feasible in high-dimensional networked settings without collapsing the intervention space.

stat.ME↗

LightCity: An Urban Dataset for Outdoor Inverse Rendering and Reconstruction under Multi-illumination Conditions

Inverse rendering in urban scenes is pivotal for applications like autonomous driving and digital twins. Yet, it faces significant challenges due to complex illumination conditions, including multi-illumination and indirect light and shadow effects. However, the effects of these challenges on intrinsic decomposition and 3D reconstruction have not been explored due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we present LightCity, a novel high-quality synthetic urban dataset featuring diverse illumination conditions with realistic indirect light and shadow effects. LightCity encompasses over 300 sky maps with highly controllable illumination, varying scales with street-level and aerial perspectives over 50K images, and rich properties such as depth, normal, material components, light and indirect light, etc. Besides, we leverage LightCity to benchmark three fundamental tasks in the urban environments and conduct a comprehensive analysis of these benchmarks, laying a robust foundation for advancing related research.

cs.CV↗

Federated Learning of Quantile Inference under Local Differential Privacy

In this paper, we investigate federated learning for quantile inference under local differential privacy (LDP). We propose an estimator based on local stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose local gradients are perturbed via a randomized mechanism with global parameters, making the procedure tolerant of communication and storage constraints without compromising statistical efficiency. Although the quantile loss and its corresponding gradient do not satisfy standard smoothness conditions typically assumed in existing literature, we establish asymptotic normality for our estimator as well as a functional central limit theorem. The proposed method accommodates data heterogeneity and allows each server to operate with an individual privacy budget. Furthermore, we construct confidence intervals for the target value through a self-normalization approach, thereby circumventing the need to estimate additional nuisance parameters. Extensive numerical experiments and real data application validate the theoretical guarantees of the proposed methodology.

stat.ME↗

Panoramic Direct LiDAR-assisted Visual Odometry

Enhancing visual odometry by exploiting sparse depth measurements from LiDAR is a promising solution for improving tracking accuracy of an odometry. Most existing works utilize a monocular pinhole camera, yet could suffer from poor robustness due to less available information from limited field-of-view (FOV). This paper proposes a panoramic direct LiDAR-assisted visual odometry, which fully associates the 360-degree FOV LiDAR points with the 360-degree FOV panoramic image datas. 360-degree FOV panoramic images can provide more available information, which can compensate inaccurate pose estimation caused by insufficient texture or motion blur from a single view. In addition to constraints between a specific view at different times, constraints can also be built between different views at the same moment. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the benefit of large FOV of our panoramic direct LiDAR-assisted visual odometry to state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.RO↗

OmniD: Generalizable Robot Manipulation Policy via Image-Based BEV Representation

The visuomotor policy can easily overfit to its training datasets, such as fixed camera positions and backgrounds. This overfitting makes the policy perform well in the in-distribution scenarios but underperform in the out-of-distribution generalization. Additionally, the existing methods also have difficulty fusing multi-view information to generate an effective 3D representation. To tackle these issues, we propose Omni-Vision Diffusion Policy (OmniD), a multi-view fusion framework that synthesizes image observations into a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) representation. We introduce a deformable attention-based Omni-Feature Generator (OFG) to selectively abstract task-relevant features while suppressing view-specific noise and background distractions. OmniD achieves 11\%, 17\%, and 84\% average improvement over the best baseline model for in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and few-shot experiments, respectively. Training code and simulation benchmark are available: https://github.com/1mather/omnid.git

cs.RO↗

From sparse to dense functional time series: phase transitions of detecting structural breaks and beyond

We develop a novel methodology for detecting abrupt break points in mean functions of functional time series, adaptable to arbitrary sampling schemes. By employing B-spline smoothing, we introduce $\mathcal L_{\infty}$ and $\mathcal L_2$ test statistics statistics based on a smoothed cumulative summation (CUMSUM) process, and derive the corresponding asymptotic distributions under the null and local alternative hypothesis, as well as the phase transition boundary from sparse to dense. We further establish the convergence rate of the proposed break point estimators and conduct statistical inference on the jump magnitude based on the estimated break point, also applicable across sparsely, semi-densely, and densely, observed random functions. Extensive numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed procedures. To illustrate the practical relevance, we apply the developed methods to analyze electricity price data and temperature data.

stat.ME↗

NIS-SLAM: Neural Implicit Semantic RGB-D SLAM for 3D Consistent Scene Understanding

In recent years, the paradigm of neural implicit representations has gained substantial attention in the field of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, a notable gap exists in the existing approaches when it comes to scene understanding. In this paper, we introduce NIS-SLAM, an efficient neural implicit semantic RGB-D SLAM system, that leverages a pre-trained 2D segmentation network to learn consistent semantic representations. Specifically, for high-fidelity surface reconstruction and spatial consistent scene understanding, we combine high-frequency multi-resolution tetrahedron-based features and low-frequency positional encoding as the implicit scene representations. Besides, to address the inconsistency of 2D segmentation results from multiple views, we propose a fusion strategy that integrates the semantic probabilities from previous non-keyframes into keyframes to achieve consistent semantic learning. Furthermore, we implement a confidence-based pixel sampling and progressive optimization weight function for robust camera tracking. Extensive experimental results on various datasets show the better or more competitive performance of our system when compared to other existing neural dense implicit RGB-D SLAM approaches. Finally, we also show that our approach can be used in augmented reality applications. Project page: \href{https://zju3dv.github.io/nis_slam}{https://zju3dv.github.io/nis\_slam}.

cs.CV↗

From Sparse to Dense Functional Data: Phase Transitions from a Simultaneous Inference Perspective

We aim to develop simultaneous inference tools for the mean function of functional data from sparse to dense. First, we derive a unified Gaussian approximation to construct simultaneous confidence bands of mean functions based on the B-spline estimator. Then, we investigate the conditions of phase transitions by decomposing the asymptotic variance of the approximated Gaussian process. As an extension, we also consider the orthogonal series estimator and show the corresponding conditions of phase transitions. Extensive simulation results strongly corroborate the theoretical results, and also illustrate the variation of the asymptotic distribution via the asymptotic variance decomposition we obtain. The developed method is further applied to body fat data and traffic data.

stat.ME↗

Online Local Differential Private Quantile Inference via Self-normalization

Based on binary inquiries, we developed an algorithm to estimate population quantiles under Local Differential Privacy (LDP). By self-normalizing, our algorithm provides asymptotically normal estimation with valid inference, resulting in tight confidence intervals without the need for nuisance parameters to be estimated. Our proposed method can be conducted fully online, leading to high computational efficiency and minimal storage requirements with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ space. We also proved an optimality result by an elegant application of one central limit theorem of Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP) when targeting the frequently encountered median estimation problem. With mathematical proof and extensive numerical testing, we demonstrate the validity of our algorithm both theoretically and experimentally.

stat.ME↗