arXiv subjects

Rong Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Rong Xiao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RoSAMDepth: Robust Self-supervised Depth Estimation Leveraging Segment Anything Model

Robust depth estimation aims to maintain high-quality depths across diverse conditions. However, most existing methods estimate depth without taking into account the object-level information. As a result, the predicted depth may easily deviate within objects and become blurred under adverse conditions. To overcome this weakness, we propose RoSAMDepth, a novel framework that can assist robust self-supervised depth estimation in leveraging rich and diverse object-level priors from the Segment Anything Model (SAM). We focus on incorporating object-level information across three key aspects: a segment-guided representation contrasting method that injects object-level awareness into the feature representation space; an adaptive regional outlier masking strategy combined with a regional Gaussian likelihood loss that enforces regional depth smoothness; and an object-level reliability estimation strategy that mitigates the influence of unreliable supervision. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and diverse weather conditions demonstrate that our method produces sharper, more accurate depth predictions, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/xagao/RoSAMDepth.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SPARE: Sparsity Allocation via Routing Entropy for Efficient MoEs

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale model capacity efficiently, yet their substantial memory footprint poses a major barrier to deployment. Expert pruning reduces this footprint, but most methods focus on which experts to remove and prune every layer equally. We propose SPARE (Sparsity Allocation via Routing Entropy), a training-free, selector-agnostic method that decides how many experts to remove from each layer using routing entropy, the entropy of tokens' normalized Top-K gate weights on calibration data. When a token's gate weight is spread evenly, removing one active expert discards little of it, so SPARE prunes layers with more diffuse routing more aggressively. A perturbation bound under random pruning formalizes this intuition, and controlled interventions with a fixed selector link concentrated routing to larger output changes. With the same selector and budget, SPARE improves average accuracy over uniform allocation on Mixtral, Qwen3, and DeepSeek models, especially at high pruning ratios. At 50% expert pruning, it raises the eight-task average of Qwen3-30B-A3B from 57.2% to 63.8%, and the math, code, and science average of DeepSeek-R1 from 80.1 to 82.8.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

ManiUnit: A Manipulation Skill Dataset and Benchmark for Long-Horizon Tasks

Long-horizon mobile manipulation requires a robot to navigate multi-room environments and execute a sequence of manipulation skills under a single natural language instruction. Learning and evaluating these skills present three challenges: similar observations under a fixed task instruction may make skill selection ambiguous; even when a preceding skill succeeds, the robot state inherited by the next skill may deviate from its demonstrated starting states and affect execution; and task-level metrics hinder skill-specific diagnosis, while early failures leave later skills untested. We therefore introduce ManiUnit, a manipulation skill dataset and benchmark built from 50 BEHAVIOR-1K activities. Its dataset contains 137,899 segments across 21 skill types and 417 subtasks, and its benchmark contains 1,260 test instances. Correspondingly, ManiUnit pairs each segment with an explicit subtask instruction; measures sensitivity to perturbations of the robot's starting base position or joint configuration; and restores intermediate simulator states and defines local success conditions so that each skill can be evaluated without executing preceding stages. Evaluations of representative vision-language-action (VLA) policies show that similar aggregate scores can hide substantial per-skill differences. The tested starting-state perturbations also degrade execution: on the full benchmark, joint perturbations reduce success rates by approximately 56% relative to those from demonstrated starting states. On two long-horizon activities, a skill policy trained on ManiUnit segments achieves 78.7% local manipulation success, compared with 49.3% for a task policy trained on complete demonstrations. The trained skills further support complete-task execution on these activities, as coordinating the task and skill policies through a planner raises full-task success from 4.0% to 18.0%.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

P4Q: Co-designing Token Pruning and Quantization for Vision-Language Model Acceleration

Vision language models have achieved strong performance across a wide range of multimodal applications, yet their substantial computational and memory costs hinder efficient deployment. Visual token pruning and post-training quantization reduce inference overhead along two complementary dimensions, namely sequence length and numerical precision. Existing workflows typically optimize these techniques independently or apply them sequentially. Their distinct optimization objectives leave critical interactions unaddressed and constrain the achievable compression performance. We revisit these designs and present P4Q, a practical co-design framework that jointly optimizes visual token pruning and low-bit quantization for efficient VLM inference. First, P4Q introduces a quantization-aware visual token selection strategy before the LLM. It applies fake quantization to copies of the features produced by the projector and selects visual tokens using statistics computed from these fake-quantized features, thereby conditioning the selector's feature-based decisions on simulated low-bit perturbations. Second, P4Q introduces a pruning-aware quantization calibration strategy. It uses the same selection strategy as pruning to calibrate the quantized model on the retained-token distribution, thereby aligning the calibration process with the pruned execution path used during deployment. By coupling these two components, P4Q achieves substantial inference speedups while maintaining comparable task performance, resulting in a better efficiency-accuracy trade-off than independently optimized pipelines. For instance, on LLaVA-NeXT, P4Q achieves an average end-to-end inference speedup of 2.8x across eight distinct test sets, while retaining higher accuracy than prior compression and quantization methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SubRot: Signed Gradient Subspace Calibration for VLM Rotation Quantization

Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of vision-language models (VLMs), but preserving multimodal capabilities at low bit widths remains challenging. Existing methods rely on modality- or token-level gradient statistics, which are susceptible to cross-sample variations in visual-to-textual token ratios and the positions of visual information, limiting statistical stability. Moreover, overly coarse aggregation through absolute values and averaging discards gradient signs and channel-wise differences, limiting the separation of modality-specific sensitivities. In contrast, the channel space provides a shared coordinate system across samples, making it a more natural basis for capturing stable task-sensitive structures. We therefore propose SubRot, a signed gradient subspace calibration method for VLM rotation quantization. Through eigendecomposition of the empirical Fisher matrix of activation gradients, SubRot identifies a sensitive channel subspace with three properties: cross-sample stability, clear sensitivity separation, and consistent signed effects on the autoregressive loss along certain directions. Guided by a local Taylor expansion, SubRot combines signed first-order guidance along sign-stable directions with second-order constraints along the remaining sensitive directions, while retaining MSE for overall reconstruction quality. This objective steers quantization errors toward loss-decreasing directions while controlling their magnitude. Experiments on five VLMs across five benchmarks show consistent average-score improvements over FlatQuant under W4A6 and W4A4, reaching 1.4 percentage points on LLaVA-NeXT-7B. Under W4A4, average accuracy degradation from FP16 remains within 1.4 percentage points across all evaluated models, while LLaVA-v1.5-13B exceeds its FP16 average score by 0.4 percentage points.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Chern Insulators on a Twisted Klein Bottle

Recently, momentum-space nonsymmorphic symmetries have attracted considerable attention. However, their realizations typically rely on fine-tuning hopping phases to satisfy the required projective symmetry algebras. Here, we show that such symmetry algebras arise naturally on bipartite lattices through the interplay of crystalline and sublattice symmetries. Unlike previously studied cases, these symmetry operators can anticommute with the Hamiltonian and are therefore referred to as momentum-space nonsymmorphic chiral symmetries. Although the free actions of these symmetries reduce the Brillouin torus to more elementary manifolds, the resulting manifolds are twisted in the Atiyah--Segal formalism. In particular, chiral glide reflection (screw rotation) gives rise to a twisted Klein bottle (dicosm) in two (three) dimensions, and this twisting dramatically alters the topological classification. Unlike the untwisted Klein bottle, whose nonorientability forces the Chern number to vanish, the twisted Klein bottle can host nonzero Chern numbers, corresponding to even Chern numbers on the torus. At open boundaries, the corresponding topological invariant manifests itself through chiral edge states exhibiting a glide-reflection structure in energy--momentum space. Our results establish momentum-space nonsymmorphic chiral symmetry as a new organizing principle for discovering and engineering topological phases beyond conventional crystalline classifications.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2026

EAGER: Enrich-and-Align Generative Query Recommendation from Clicked Items in E-commerce Search

E-commerce platforms increasingly display clickable query suggestions alongside items in the user feed, enabling users to refine or expand their intent without manually reformulating queries. Existing approaches either mine suggestions from historical logs -- limited to past behavior and blind to long-tail, personalized intents -- or rely on off-the-shelf LLMs whose lack of platform-specific knowledge yields fluent but generic queries disconnected from real click behavior. We propose EAGER (Enrich-and-AliGn gEnerative Query Recommendation), a two-stage framework for generating query suggestions from clicked items. In the enrichment stage, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) follows a four-stage curriculum that scales information richness (from item-only to user-conditioned) and reasoning depth (from direct to chain-of-thought). Each stage incorporates rationale augmentation, diversity regularization, and self-distillation. In the alignment stage, we post-train via GRPO with a hybrid reward of multiple rule-based business signals and a preference-aware click reward. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B test demonstrate the effectiveness of EAGER, which has been deployed in production at a major e-commerce platform.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

SAM-D2Q: Aligning Multimodal Doc2Query with Search Demand and Conversion for E-commerce

E-commerce search often suffers from vocabulary mismatch between user queries and merchant-authored product titles, since short titles cannot fully cover diverse user expressions or visual product attributes. Although Doc2Query alleviates this issue by generating pseudo-queries for document expansion, traditional methods are text-only and not optimized for e-commerce business objectives. As a result, they may produce semantically plausible but commercially ineffective expansions and miss key attributes present in product images. To this end, we propose E-commerce Search-Aligned Multimodal Doc2Query (SAM-D2Q), a business-aligned multimodal document expansion framework for e-commerce search under Boolean retrieval constraints. SAM-D2Q consists of three stages: (1) task-adapted multimodal supervised fine-tuning to enhance vision-language understanding of product titles, images, and user queries; (2) multimodal data augmentation to improve perception of key visual attributes and expansion coverage; and (3) reinforcement-learning-based preference alignment toward search business objectives, encouraging the model to generate pseudo-queries that better match user intent and commercial value. Offline experiments show that SAM-D2Q substantially improves retrieval performance over traditional Doc2Query methods. Deployed in the AliExpress production search system, SAM-D2Q improves online business metrics, increasing GMV by +3.38% and Pay Count by +2.27%.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

ScaleVid: Geometry-Aware Video Object Scaling with Mesh-Free Inference

Geometry-aware video object scaling aims to anisotropically resize the object along object-centric axes while preserving geometric plausibility, temporal coherence, and background consistency. Existing text-guided methods mainly operate in the 2D image plane, while depth-guided approaches provide coarse control and mesh-based methods require costly 3D reconstruction. We present a progressive two-stage training framework that decouples geometry-aware foreground transformation from background preservation and realistic video composition, without mesh-pixel alignment and explicit 3D reconstruction at inference. In both stages, geometrically perturbed pseudo-sources are constructed from real videos, while the original complete videos are retained as reconstruction targets. The first stage uses planar transformations to learn robust foreground-background composition, whereas the second introduces object-centric 3D deformation guidance for geometry-aware scaling. This pseudo-source reconstruction formulation enables real-video synthesis without paired real-world scaling targets. We construct complementary paired-geometry and real-background benchmarks and further evaluate on in-the-wild videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior geometric consistency, foreground fidelity, and background preservation, together with faster and more practical inference than methods requiring explicit 3D reconstruction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TRIO: Token Reduction via Inference-Objective Guidance for Efficient Vision-Language Models

Recently, reducing redundant visual tokens in vision-language models (VLMs) to accelerate VLM inference has emerged as a hot topic. However, most existing methods rely on heuristics constructed based on inter-visual-token similarity or cross-modal visual-text similarity, which gives rise to certain limitations in compression performance and practical deployment. In contrast, we propose TRIO from the perspective of inference objectives, which transforms visual token compression into preserving output result invariance and selects tokens primarily by their importance to this goal. Specifically, vision tokens are reordered with the guidance of token-level gradient saliency generated by our designed layer-local proxy loss, a coarse constraint from the current layer to the final result. Then the most valuable vision tokens are selected following the non-maximum suppression (NMS) principle.The proposed TRIO is training-free and compatible with FlashAttention, friendly to practical application and deployment. It can be deployed independently as an encoder-free method, or combined with encoder compression approaches like VisionZip for use as an encoder-involved method. On LLaVA-Next-7B, TRIO retains just 11.1\% of visual tokens but maintains 97.2\% of the original performance, with a 2.75$\times$ prefill speedup, 2.14$\times$ inference speedup, 6.22$\times$ lower FLOPs, and 6.05$\times$ reduced KV Cache overhead.Our code is available at https://github.com/ocy1/TRIO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

EvFlow-GS: Event Enhanced Motion Deblurring with Optical Flow for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Achieving sharp 3D reconstruction from motion-blurred images alone becomes challenging, motivating recent methods to incorporate event cameras, benefiting from microsecond temporal resolution. However, they suffer from residual artifacts and blurry texture details due to misleading supervision from inaccurate event double integral priors and noisy, blurry events. In this study, we propose EvFlow-GS, a unified framework that leverages event streams and optical flow to optimize an end-to-end learnable double integral (LDI), camera poses, and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) jointly on-the-fly. Specifically, we first extract edge information from the events using optical flow and then formulate a novel event-based loss applied separately to different modules. Additionally, we exploit a novel event-residual prior to strengthen the supervision of intensity changes between images rendered from 3DGS. Finally, we integrate the outputs of both 3DGS and LDI into a joint loss, enabling their optimization to mutually facilitate each other. Experiments demonstrate the leading performance of our EvFlow-GS.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Bridging Coarse and Fine Recognition: A Hybrid Approach for Open-Ended Multi-Granularity Object Recognition in Interactive Educational Games

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled open-ended object recognition, yet they struggle with fine-grained tasks. In contrast, CLIP-style models excel at fine-grained recognition but lack broad coverage of general object categories. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{HyMOR}, a \textbf{Hy}brid \textbf{M}ulti-granularity open-ended \textbf{O}bject \textbf{R}ecognition framework that integrates an MLLM with a CLIP model. In HyMOR, the MLLM performs open-ended and coarse-grained object recognition, while the CLIP model specializes in fine-grained identification of domain-specific objects such as animals and plants. This hybrid design enables accurate object understanding across multiple semantic granularities, serving as a robust perceptual foundation for downstream multi-modal content generation and interactive gameplay. To support evaluation in content-rich and educational scenarios, we introduce TBO (TextBook Objects), a dataset containing 20,942 images annotated with 8,816 object categories extracted from textbooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyMOR narrows the fine-grained recognition gap with CLIP to 0.2\% while improving general object recognition by 2.5\% over a baseline MLLM, measured by average Sentence-BERT (SBert) similarity. Overall, HyMOR achieves a 23.2\% improvement in average SBert across all evaluated datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in enabling accurate perception for multi-modal game content generation and interactive learning applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Modal Representation Learning via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction for Generalized Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to identify both known and unknown categories, with only partial labels given for the known categories, posing a challenging open-set recognition problem. State-of-the-art approaches for GCD task are usually built on multi-modality representation learning, which is heavily dependent upon inter-modality alignment. However, few of them cast a proper intra-modality alignment to generate a desired underlying structure of representation distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective multi-modal representation learning framework for GCD via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction, called SSR$^2$-GCD, to learn cross-modality representations with desired structural properties based on emphasizing to properly align intra-modality relationships. Moreover, to boost knowledge transfer, we integrate prompt candidates by leveraging the inter-modal alignment offered by Vision Language Models. We conduct extensive experiments on generic and fine-grained benchmark datasets demonstrating superior performance of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Ctrl&Shift: High-Quality Geometry-Aware Object Manipulation in Visual Generation

Object-level manipulation, relocating or reorienting objects in images or videos while preserving scene realism, is central to film post-production, AR, and creative editing. Yet existing methods struggle to jointly achieve three core goals: background preservation, geometric consistency under viewpoint shifts, and user-controllable transformations. Geometry-based approaches offer precise control but require explicit 3D reconstruction and generalize poorly; diffusion-based methods generalize better but lack fine-grained geometric control. We present Ctrl&Shift, an end-to-end diffusion framework to achieve geometry-consistent object manipulation without explicit 3D representations. Our key insight is to decompose manipulation into two stages, object removal and reference-guided inpainting under explicit camera pose control, and encode both within a unified diffusion process. To enable precise, disentangled control, we design a multi-task, multi-stage training strategy that separates background, identity, and pose signals across tasks. To improve generalization, we introduce a scalable real-world dataset construction pipeline that generates paired image and video samples with estimated relative camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ctrl&Shift achieves state-of-the-art results in fidelity, viewpoint consistency, and controllability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify fine-grained geometric control and real-world generalization for object manipulation, without relying on any explicit 3D modeling.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Open-Text Aerial Detection: A Unified Framework For Aerial Visual Grounding And Detection

Open-Vocabulary Aerial Detection (OVAD) and Remote Sensing Visual Grounding (RSVG) have emerged as two key paradigms for aerial scene understanding. However, each paradigm suffers from inherent limitations when operating in isolation: OVAD is restricted to coarse category-level semantics, while RSVG is structurally limited to single-target localization. These limitations prevent existing methods from simultaneously supporting rich semantic understanding and multi-target detection. To address this, we propose OTA-Det, the first unified framework that bridges both paradigms into a cohesive architecture. Specifically, we introduce a task reformulation strategy that unifies task objectives and supervision mechanisms, enabling joint training across datasets from both paradigms with dense supervision signals. Furthermore, we propose a dense semantic alignment strategy that establishes explicit correspondence at multiple granularities, from holistic expressions to individual attributes, enabling fine-grained semantic understanding. To ensure real-time efficiency, OTA-Det builds upon the RT-DETR architecture, extending it from closed-set detection to open-text detection by introducing several high efficient modules, achieving state-of-the-art performance on six benchmarks spanning both OVAD and RSVG tasks while maintaining real-time inference at 34 FPS.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Practical and Efficient Quantization Calibration for Vision-Language Models

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a primary approach for deploying large language models without fine-tuning, and the quantized performance is often strongly affected by the calibration in PTQ. By contrast, in vision-language models (VLMs), substantial differences between visual and text tokens in their activation distributions and sensitivities to quantization error pose significant challenges for effective calibration during PTQ. In this work, we rethink what PTQ calibration should align with in VLMs and propose the Token-level Importance-aware Layer-wise Quantization framework (TLQ). Guided by gradient information, we design a token-level importance integration mechanism for quantization error, and use it to construct a token-level calibration set, enabling a more fine-grained calibration strategy. Furthermore, TLQ introduces a multi-GPU, quantization-exposed layer-wise calibration scheme. This scheme keeps the layer-wise calibration procedure consistent with the true quantized inference path and distributes the complex layer-wise calibration workload across multiple RTX3090 GPUs, thereby reducing reliance on the large memory of A100 GPUs. TLQ is evaluated across two models, three model scales, and two quantization settings, consistently achieving performance improvements across all settings, indicating its strong quantization stability. The code will be released publicly.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Delving into Muon and Beyond: Deep Analysis and Extensions

The Muon optimizer has recently attracted considerable attention for its strong empirical performance and use of orthogonalized updates on matrix-shaped parameters, yet its underlying mechanisms and relationship to adaptive optimizers such as Adam remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we aim to address these questions through a unified spectral perspective. Specifically, we view Muon as the p = 0 endpoint of a family of spectral transformations of the form U \boldsymbolΣ^{p} V' , and consider additional variants with p = 1/2 , p = 1/4 , and p = 1 . These transformations are applied to both first-moment updates, as in momentum SGD, and to root-mean-square (RMS) normalized gradient updates as in Adam. To enable efficient computation, we develop a coupled Newton iteration that avoids explicit singular value decomposition. Across controlled experiments, we find that RMS-normalized updates yield more stable optimization than first-moment updates. Moreover, while spectral compression provides strong stabilization benefits under first-moment updates, the Muon update (p = 0) does not consistently outperform Adam. These results suggest that Muon is best understood as an effective form of spectral normalization, but not a universally superior optimization method. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/Ocram7/BeyondMuon.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SimpleGPT: Improving GPT via A Simple Normalization Strategy

In this work, we revisit Transformer optimization through the lens of second-order geometry and establish a direct connection between architectural design, activation scale, the Hessian matrix, and the maximum tolerable learning rate. We introduce a simple normalization strategy, termed SimpleNorm, which stabilizes intermediate activation scales by construction. Then, by analyzing the Hessian of the loss with respect to network activations, we theoretically show that SimpleNorm significantly reduces the spectral norm of the Hessian, thereby permitting larger stable learning rates. We validate our theoretical findings through extensive experiments on large GPT models at parameter scales 1B, 1.4B, 7B and 8B. Empirically, SimpleGPT, our SimpleNorm-based network, tolerates learning rates 3$\times$-10$\times$ larger than standard convention, consistently demonstrates strong optimization stability, and achieves substantially better performance than well-established baselines. Specifically, when training 7B-scale models for 60K steps, SimpleGPT achieves a training loss that is 0.08 lower than that of LLaMA2 with QKNorm, reducing the loss from 2.290 to 2.208. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/Ocram7/SimpleGPT.

cs.LG↗