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Siyuan Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Siyuan Feng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

$\tau_0$-VLA: a Hierarchical Robot Foundation Model with World-Model-Guided Test-Time Computation

Long-horizon robot manipulation requires a robot to both execute individual skills reliably and sequence them coherently over extended tasks. Most hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) models make each such decision with a single forward pass, leaving no mechanism to allocate additional computation to difficult or consequential choices. We introduce $\tau_0$-VLA, a hierarchical robot foundation model that formulates high-level subtask generation as a compute-scalable inference problem through world-model-guided test-time computation. At each inference step, the high-level policy uses execution memory to generate a subtask and, when needed, searches over alternatives before committing to its output. A low-level policy then executes the generated subtask across multiple robot embodiments. The policy is trained on 40,115 hours of heterogeneous real-world data with multimodal co-training. Across in-domain and distribution-shifted settings, allocating additional test-time computation substantially improves next-subtask prediction accuracy, and these gains translate into higher closed-loop success on long-horizon robot manipulation tasks.

cs.RO

Cost-Optimal Foundation Model Deployment Portfolio for Transportation Management

Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), are increasingly used for transportation management center (TMC) tasks such as anomaly detection, incident reporting, and traveler information. Deploying multiple such models across TMC functions raises a portfolio question: which model should serve each function, in which deployment mode, and under what shared hardware budget? We formulate this as the Foundation Model Deployment Portfolio (FMDP) problem, a mixed-integer program minimizing total cost of ownership (TCO) subject to per-function quality, latency, and safety constraints over shared GPU capacity. We prove the problem NP-hard by reduction from the 0-1 knapsack problem and propose a polynomial-time greedy heuristic. In an illustrative case study with five TMC functions and 19 candidate (model, mode) pairs, FMDP identifies a mixed portfolio costing $34/mo (97% below the cheapest feasible all-closed-API baseline) by routing four functions to open-source APIs and the one function whose quality floor no open-source model meets to a closed API. Break-even analysis shows that on-premise GPU investment becomes reasonable only above approximately 309 vision queries/hour or if API prices double.

cs.AI

ProWAFT: A ROMA-LPD Instance for Workload-Aware and Dynamic Fault Tolerance in FPGA-Based CNN Accelerators

SRAM-based FPGAs provide an attractive platform for energy- and latency-constrained CNN inference at the network edge, yet transient faults can lead to silent errors that compromise reliability. Always-on redundancy (e.g., full TMR) improves correctness but incurs substantial performance and energy overhead, while reactive recovery may introduce unacceptable latency on the critical path. We propose \textbf{ProWAFT}, a proactive workload-aware fault-tolerance framework for FPGA-based CNN accelerators that uses partial reconfiguration to selectively apply TMR across reconfigurable partitions. ProWAFT quantifies workload criticality, models fault propagation and reconfiguration overhead, and selects configurations that minimize a composite objective over latency, energy, and reliability risk. Implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU104 platform with six reconfigurable regions and evaluated on a 500-task trace derived from ResNet-18, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-Lite under time-varying SEU injection, ProWAFT achieves lower composite cost than static TMR and reactive reconfiguration while maintaining high task success rate and near-baseline throughput with low online decision overhead.

cs.CL

One Demo is Worth a Thousand Trajectories: Action-View Augmentation for Visuomotor Policies

Visuomotor policies for manipulation have demonstrated remarkable potential in modeling complex robotic behaviors, yet minor alterations in the robot's initial configuration and unseen obstacles easily lead to out-of-distribution observations. Without extensive data collection effort, these result in catastrophic execution failures. In this work, we introduce an effective data augmentation framework that generates visually realistic fisheye image sequences and corresponding physically feasible action trajectories from real-world eye-in-hand demonstrations, captured with a portable parallel gripper with a single fisheye camera. We introduce a novel Gaussian Splatting formulation, adapted to wide FoV fisheye cameras, to reconstruct and edit the 3D scene with unseen objects. We utilize trajectory optimization to generate smooth, collision-free, view-rendering-friendly action trajectories and render visual observations from corresponding novel views. Comprehensive experiments in simulation and the real world show that our augmentation framework improves the success rate for various manipulation tasks in both the same scene and the augmented scene with obstacles requiring collision avoidance.

cs.RO

PlexRL: Cluster-Level Orchestration of Serviceized LLM Execution for RLVR

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently unlocked strong reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), triggering rapid exploration of new algorithms and data. However, RLVR training is notoriously inefficient: long-tailed rollouts, tool-induced stalls, and asymmetric resource requirements between rollout and training introduce substantial idle time that cannot be eliminated by job-local optimizations such as synchronous pipelining, asynchronous rollout, or colocated execution. We argue that this inefficiency is structural. While idle gaps are unavoidable within individual RLVR jobs, they are largely anti-correlated across jobs and therefore exploitable at the cluster level. Leveraging this observation, we present PlexRL, a cluster-level runtime for multiplexing unified LLM services across RLVR jobs. By centrally managing model placement, state transitions, and function-level scheduling under strict affinity constraints, PlexRL time-slices LLM execution across jobs to fill otherwise idle periods without expensive model migration. Our implementation and evaluations demonstrate that PlexRL significantly improves effective cluster capacity and reduces user GPU hour cost by maximum 37.58% while preserving algorithmic flexibility and introducing minimal per-job overhead.

cs.DC

D$^3$-Subsidy: Online and Sequential Driver Subsidy Decision-Making for Large-Scale Ride-Hailing Market

Ride-hailing platforms like DiDi Chuxing operate in highly dynamic environments where balancing driver supply and passenger demand is critical. Although driver-side subsidies serve as a primary lever to align these forces and improve key KPIs like completed rides (\texttt{Rides}) and gross merchandise value (\texttt{GMV}), optimizing them in production requires simultaneously meeting three constraints: (i) responsiveness to stochastic shocks, (ii) strict subsidy-rate caps, and (iii) low-latency execution at city scale. These requirements rule out expensive per-order optimization, calling for a forward-looking, constraint-aware city-level controller for online sequential decision making. To meet these requirements, we introduce D$^3$-Subsidy (Dynamic Driver-side Diffusion-based Subsidy), a hierarchical diffusion-based framework for deployable city-wide subsidy control. To bridge the train-inference gap, D$^3$-Subsidy employs a prefix-conditioned diffusion model that samples plausible future trajectories from immutable historical observations, ensuring the training protocol aligns with the fixed-history nature of online deployment. These generated plans are then decoded by a context-conditioned inverse module into low-dimensional city-level control signals. For scalable execution, we bridge the gap between city-level planning and fine-grained dispatch via a Lagrangian-dual-derived mapping, which embeds subsidy-rate caps directly into order-driver incentives without iterative optimization. Additionally, a multi-city pretraining strategy with parameter-efficient fine-tuning enables robust transfer across heterogeneous cities. Extensive offline evaluations demonstrate that D$^3$-Subsidy improves \texttt{Rides} and \texttt{GMV} while enhancing cap compliance, and a real-world A/B test confirms significant uplift while keeping budget-related violation metrics within operational thresholds.

cs.LG

NeuroRisk: Physics-Informed Neural Optimization for Risk-Aware Traffic Engineering

In production Wide-Area Networks (WANs), correlated failures dominate availability losses, forcing operators to reserve large safety margins that leave substantial capacity underutilized. Achieving high utilization under strict availability targets therefore requires risk-aware Traffic Engineering (TE) over dozens to hundreds of probabilistic failure scenarios-yet solving this problem at operational timescales remains elusive. We demonstrate that existing risk-aware formulations can be unified under an embedded Sort-and-Select structure, exposing a fundamental trade-off between expressiveness and tractability: classical optimizers either restrict scenario selection for efficiency or incur prohibitive decomposition costs. While deep learning appears promising, prior Deep TE methods mainly target maximum link utilization and rely on scaling-based feasibility, which fundamentally breaks under explicit capacity constraints and scenario-dependent risk. We present NeuroRisk, a physics-informed deep unrolled optimizer that exploits the structure of Sort-and-Select. NeuroRisk enforces feasibility via gated edge-local reservations and represents scenario sets through permutation-invariant, gradient-aligned cues. Evaluations on production-style WANs show that NeuroRisk achieves small optimality gaps relative to the solver with orders of magnitude speedup $(10^2- 10^5 \times)$ on risk objectives, while outperforming neural baselines on nominal throughput.

cs.NI

FalconGEMM: Surpassing Hardware Peaks with Lower-Complexity Matrix Multiplication

Peak breaking Matrix Multiplication is a promising technique to improve the performance of DL, especially in LLM training and inference. We present FalconGEMM, a cross-platform framework that automates the deployment, optimization, and selection of Lower-Complexity Matrix Multiplication Algorithms (LCMAs) across diverse hardware. There are three key innovations: (1) a Deployment Module that enables portable execution across various hardware and input configurations through code generation; (2) an Execution Module with Group-Parallel Optimizations that maximizes on-chip data reuse, utilizes parallel resources, and reduces bandwidth overhead; and (3) a Decision Module featuring a lightweight analytical performance model to select the optimal strategy based on matrix shapes and hardware profiles. Extensive evaluation is conducted on LLM workloads across GPU (H20, A100) and CPU (ARM, x86) architectures with multiple data types. FalconGEMM succeeds in delivering peak breaking performance and outperforms GEMM libraries (e.g., cuBLAS, CUTLASS, Intel MKL, etc) by 7.59%-17.85% and LCMA competitors like AlphaTensor by 12.41%-55.61%. Our framework makes the theoretical promise of LCMAs practical for production deployment across the heterogeneous landscape of modern hardware.

cs.DC

Coherence-Minimized Sensing Matrix Design for MRI Reconstruction via Dual-Space Projection Optimization

Compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) heavily relies on the low mutual coherence between the measurement matrix and the sparsity basis. However, under highly accelerated Cartesian undersampling, the severe structural coherence between Fourier measurements and spatial bases, discrete cosine transform (DCT) for example, fundamentally violates this requirement, causing classical sparse recovery algorithms to stagnate. To mitigate this fundamental bottleneck, we propose a synergistic dual-space projection framework, denoted as $\mathbf{PAQ}$. Instead of merely designing heuristic sampling masks, our method directly reshapes the equivalent dictionary. Specifically, we introduce a diagonal-dominant random rotator $\mathbf{Q}$ in the feature space to probabilistically disrupt structural alignment, and an active orthogonalization projector $\mathbf{P}$ in the measurement space to deterministically whiten the residual correlations. We theoretically demonstrate that this dual-space mechanism bounds the mutual coherence with an exponentially decaying tail via sub-exponential distribution properties. Experimental validations on clinical MRI datasets under 20\% Cartesian sampling demonstrate that plugging the $\mathbf{PAQ}$ preconditioners into the standard ISTA solver significantly suppresses aliasing artifacts and yields consistent peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvements.

eess.SP

Learning While Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies

Generalist robot policies increasingly benefit from large-scale pretraining, but offline data alone is insufficient for robust real-world deployment. Deployed robots encounter distribution shifts, long-tail failures, task variations, and human correction opportunities that fixed demonstration datasets cannot fully capture. We present Learning While Deploying (LWD), a fleet-scale offline-to-online reinforcement learning framework for continual post-training of generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies. Starting from a pretrained VLA policy, LWD closes the loop between deployment, shared physical experience, policy improvement, and redeployment by using autonomous rollouts and human interventions collected across a robot fleet. To stabilize learning from heterogeneous, sparse-reward fleet data, LWD combines Distributional Implicit Value Learning (DIVL) for robust value estimation with Q-learning via Adjoint Matching (QAM) for policy extraction in flow-based VLA action generators. We validate LWD on a fleet of 16 dual-arm robots across eight real-world manipulation tasks, including semantic grocery restocking and 3--5 minute long-horizon tasks. A single generalist policy improves as fleet experience accumulates, reaching an average success rate of 95%, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks.

cs.RO

daVinci-LLM:Towards the Science of Pretraining

The foundational pretraining phase determines a model's capability ceiling, as post-training struggles to overcome capability foundations established during pretraining, yet it remains critically under-explored. This stems from a structural paradox: organizations with computational resources operate under commercial pressures that inhibit transparent disclosure, while academic institutions possess research freedom but lack pretraining-scale computational resources. daVinci-LLM occupies this unexplored intersection, combining industrial-scale resources with full research freedom to advance the science of pretraining. We adopt a fully-open paradigm that treats openness as scientific methodology, releasing complete data processing pipelines, full training processes, and systematic exploration results. Recognizing that the field lacks systematic methodology for data processing, we employ the Data Darwinism framework, a principled L0-L9 taxonomy from filtering to synthesis. We train a 3B-parameter model from random initialization across 8T tokens using a two-stage adaptive curriculum that progressively shifts from foundational capabilities to reasoning-intensive enhancement. Through 200+ controlled ablations, we establish that: processing depth systematically enhances capabilities, establishing it as a critical dimension alongside volume scaling; different domains exhibit distinct saturation dynamics, necessitating adaptive strategies from proportion adjustments to format shifts; compositional balance enables targeted intensification while preventing performance collapse; how evaluation protocol choices shape our understanding of pretraining progress. By releasing the complete exploration process, we enable the community to build upon our findings and systematic methodologies to form accumulative scientific knowledge in pretraining.

cs.AI

Multi-Mode Pneumatic Artificial Muscles Driven by Hybrid Positive-Negative Pressure

Artificial muscles embody human aspirations for engineering lifelike robotic movements. This paper introduces an architecture for Inflatable Fluid-Driven Origami-Inspired Artificial Muscles (IN-FOAMs). A typical IN-FOAM consists of an inflatable skeleton enclosed within an outer skin, which can be driven using a combination of positive and negative pressures (e.g., compressed air and vacuum). IN-FOAMs are manufactured using low-cost heat-sealable sheet materials through heat-pressing and heat-sealing processes. Thus, they can be ultra-thin when not actuated, making them flexible, lightweight, and portable. The skeleton patterns are programmable, enabling a variety of motions, including contracting, bending, twisting, and rotating, based on specific skeleton designs. We conducted comprehensive experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies to investigate IN-FOAM's basic mechanical behavior and properties. The results show that IN-FOAM's output force and contraction can be tuned through multiple operation modes with the applied hybrid positive-negative pressure. Additionally, we propose multilayer skeleton structures to enhance the contraction ratio further, and we demonstrate a multi-channel skeleton approach that allows the integration of multiple motion modes into a single IN-FOAM. These findings indicate that IN-FOAMs hold great potential for future applications in flexible wearable devices and compact soft robotic systems.

cs.RO

Data Darwinism Part I: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training

Data quality determines foundation model performance, yet systematic processing frameworks are lacking. We introduce Data Darwinism, a ten-level taxonomy (L0-L9) that conceptualizes data-model co-evolution: advanced models produce superior data for next-generation systems. We validate this on scientific literature by constructing Darwin-Science, a 900B-token corpus (L0-L5). We identify a learnability gap in raw scientific text, which we bridge via L4 (Generative Refinement) and L5 (Cognitive Completion) using frontier LLMs to explicate reasoning and terminology. To ensure rigorous attribution, we pre-trained daVinci-origin-3B/7B models from scratch, excluding scientific content to create contamination-free baselines. After 600B tokens of continued pre-training, Darwin-Science outperforms baselines by +2.12 (3B) and +2.95 (7B) points across 20+ benchmarks, rising to +5.60 and +8.40 points on domain-aligned tasks. Systematic progression to L5 yields a +1.36 total gain, confirming that higher-level processing unlocks latent data value. We release the Darwin-Science corpus and daVinci-origin models to enable principled, co-evolutionary development.

cs.AI

SOP: A Scalable Online Post-Training System for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve strong generalization through large-scale pre-training, but real-world deployment requires expert-level task proficiency in addition to broad generality. Existing post-training approaches for VLA models are typically offline, single-robot, or task-specific, limiting effective on-policy adaptation and scalable learning from real-world interaction. We introduce a Scalable Online Post-training (SOP) system that enables online, distributed, multi-task post-training of generalist VLA models directly in the physical world. SOP tightly couples execution and learning through a closed-loop architecture in which a fleet of robots continuously streams on-policy experience and human intervention signals to a centralized cloud learner, and asynchronously receives updated policies. This design supports prompt on-policy correction, scales experience collection through parallel deployment, and preserves generality during adaptation. SOP is agnostic to the choice of post-training algorithm; we instantiate it with both interactive imitation learning (HG-DAgger) and reinforcement learning (RECAP). Across a range of real-world manipulation tasks including cloth folding, box assembly, and grocery restocking, we show that SOP substantially improves the performance of large pretrained VLA models while maintaining a single shared policy across tasks. Effective post-training can be achieved within hours of real-world interaction, and performance scales near-linearly with the number of robots in the fleet. These results suggest that tightly coupling online learning with fleet-scale deployment is instrumental to enabling efficient, reliable, and scalable post-training of generalist robot policies in the physical world.

cs.RO

Nex-N1: Agentic Models Trained via a Unified Ecosystem for Large-Scale Environment Construction

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive responders to autonomous agents necessitates a fundamental shift in learning paradigms -- from static imitation to incentive-driven decision making. However, this transition is significantly impeded by the lack of scalable infrastructure capable of constructing high-quality interaction signals for effective policy learning. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive method designed to systematically scale the diversity and complexity of interactive environments. Our method realizes this scaling by addressing three orthogonal dimensions: (1) Complexity: NexAU, a flexible agent framework that supports building complex agent hierarchies via simple configurations; (2) Diversity: NexA4A automatically generates diverse agent hierarchies from natural language to cover infinite domains; and (3) Fidelity: NexGAP bridges the simulation-reality gap by integrating dynamic real-world environment for grounded trajectories synthesis. We train Nex-N1 upon the diverse and complex interactive environments established by our infrastructure. Empirical results on benchmarks such as SWE-bench and tau2 demonstrate that Nex-N1 consistently outperforms SOTA open-source models and achieves competitive performance against frontier proprietary models on complex agentic tasks. We open-source the Nex ecosystem and model weights to facilitate further research.

cs.CL

ReSpec: Towards Optimizing Speculative Decoding in Reinforcement Learning Systems

Adapting large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) is often bottlenecked by the generation stage, which can consume over 75\% of the training time. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive generation in serving systems, but its behavior under RL training remains largely unexplored. We identify three critical gaps that hinder the naive integration of SD into RL systems: diminishing speedups at large batch sizes, drafter staleness under continual actor updates, and drafter-induced policy degradation. To address these gaps, we present ReSpec, a system that adapts SD to RL through three complementary mechanisms: dynamically tuning SD configurations, evolving the drafter via knowledge distillation, and weighting updates by rollout rewards. On Qwen models (3B--14B), ReSpec achieves up to 4.5x speedup while preserving reward convergence and training stability, providing a practical solution for efficient RL-based LLM adaptation.

cs.LG

Expert-as-a-Service: Towards Efficient, Scalable, and Robust Large-scale MoE Serving

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models challenge serving infrastructures with dynamic, sparse expert utilization, causing instability on conventional systems designed for dense architectures. We propose EaaS, a novel serving system to enable efficient, scalable, and robust MoE deployment. Our system disaggregates MoE modules into independent, stateless services. This design enables fine-grained resource scaling and provides inherent fault tolerance by decoupling compute units. The architecture is powered by a high-performance, CPU-free peer-to-peer communication library that ensures minimal overhead and high throughput. Experiments confirm EaaS's scalability and efficiency, achieving performance comparable to monolithic systems while providing robust fault tolerance and strong scalability. EaaS incurs less than a 2% throughput reduction under simulated hardware failures that would otherwise halt monolithic architectures. It further saves up to 37.5% of computing resources through dynamic fine-grained adaptation to serving traffic, demonstrating strong resilience for large-scale MoE deployment in production.

cs.DC

DistFlow: A Fully Distributed RL Framework for Scalable and Efficient LLM Post-Training

Effectively scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for enhancing the reasoning and alignment of Large Language Models. The massive data and complex execution flows inherent in these tasks require a distributed architecture capable of efficient scaling. However, to simplify programming and dependency management, mainstream frameworks often rely on a centralized architecture where a single node dispatches both control and data. This inherent coupling creates significant communication bottlenecks, severely limiting system scalability and efficiency. We present DISTFLOW, a novel, fully distributed RL framework that adopts a multi-controller paradigm. By decoupling data transmission from control dispatch, DISTFLOW establishes a parallelism-aware, decentralized Data Coordinator that leverages local caching, load balancing, and asynchronous double buffer to minimize communication overhead and mitigate straggler effects. For control logic, it introduces a task scheduler built upon Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that facilitates fine-grained, independent execution. Experimental results demonstrate that DISTFLOW achieves near-linear scalability up to 512 GPUs and delivers up to a 2.63x throughput improvement over state-of-the-art (SOTA) frameworks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/sii-research/siiRL.

cs.DC