arXiv subjects

Tong Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Tong Zhang.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

CAPTAIN: Semantic Feature Injection for Memorization Mitigation in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Diffusion models can unintentionally reproduce training examples, raising privacy and copyright concerns as these systems are increasingly deployed at scale. Existing inference-time mitigation methods typically manipulate classifier-free guidance (CFG) or perturb prompt embeddings; however, they often struggle to reduce memorization without compromising alignment with the conditioning prompt. We introduce CAPTAIN, a training-free framework that mitigates memorization by directly modifying latent features during denoising. CAPTAIN first applies frequency-based noise initialization to reduce the tendency to replicate memorized patterns early in the denoising process. It then identifies the optimal denoising timesteps for feature injection and localizes memorized regions. Finally, CAPTAIN injects semantically aligned features from non-memorized reference images into localized latent regions, suppressing memorization while preserving prompt fidelity and visual quality. Our experiments show that CAPTAIN achieves substantial reductions in memorization compared to CFG-based baselines while maintaining strong alignment with the intended prompt.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Metric-Fair Prompting: Treating Similar Samples Similarly

We introduce \emph{Metric-Fair Prompting}, a fairness-aware prompting framework that guides large language models (LLMs) to make decisions under metric-fairness constraints. In the application of multiple-choice medical question answering, each {(question, option)} pair is treated as a binary instance with label $+1$ (correct) or $-1$ (incorrect). To promote {individual fairness}~--~treating similar instances similarly~--~we compute question similarity using NLP embeddings and solve items in \emph{joint pairs of similar questions} rather than in isolation. The prompt enforces a global decision protocol: extract decisive clinical features, map each $(\text{question}, \text{option})$ to a score $f(x)$ that acts as confidence, and impose a Lipschitz-style constraint so that similar inputs receive similar scores and, hence, consistent outputs. Evaluated on the {MedQA (US)} benchmark, Metric-Fair Prompting is shown to improve performance over standard single-item prompting, demonstrating that fairness-guided, confidence-oriented reasoning can enhance LLM accuracy on high-stakes clinical multiple-choice questions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Online-BLS: An Accurate and Efficient Online Broad Learning System for Data Stream Classification

The state-of-the-art online learning models generally conduct a single online gradient descent when a new sample arrives and thus suffer from suboptimal model weights. To this end, we introduce an online broad learning system framework with closed-form solutions for each online update. Different from employing existing incremental broad learning algorithms for online learning tasks, which tend to incur degraded accuracy and expensive online update overhead, we design an effective weight estimation algorithm and an efficient online updating strategy to remedy the above two deficiencies, respectively. Specifically, an effective weight estimation algorithm is first developed by replacing notorious matrix inverse operations with Cholesky decomposition and forward-backward substitution to improve model accuracy. Second, we devise an efficient online updating strategy that dramatically reduces online update time. Theoretical analysis exhibits the splendid error bound and low time complexity of our model. The most popular test-then-training evaluation experiments on various real-world datasets prove its superiority and efficiency. Furthermore, our framework is naturally extended to data stream scenarios with concept drift and exceeds state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Reinforce-Ada: An Adaptive Sampling Framework under Non-linear RL Objectives

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model reasoning is frequently hindered by signal loss, a phenomenon where standard uniform sampling with small group sizes fails to uncover informative learning signals for difficult prompts. We demonstrate that this collapse is a statistical artifact of undersampling rather than an inherent model limitation. To address this systematically, we introduce a theoretical framework based on optimizing a non-linear RL objective (e.g., log-likelihood). We show that this objective naturally induces a weighted gradient estimator that prioritizes difficult prompts, which can be robustly realized through adaptive sampling. Guided by this framework, we propose Reinforce-Ada, a family of algorithms that dynamically allocates inference budgets based on prompt difficulty, effectively scaling up RL compute to where it is needed most. Unlike passive filtering methods that discard low-signal prompts, Reinforce-Ada actively invests compute to recover them. We introduce two efficient realizations: an estimation-based approach and a model-free sequential sampling approach. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that Reinforce-Ada significantly outperforms uniform baselines like GRPO, recovering lost signals and accelerating convergence by up to $2\times$ while maintaining the same total inference budget. Code is available at https://github.com/RLHFlow/Reinforce-Ada.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Reliable Multimodal Learning Via Multi-Level Adaptive DeConfusion

Multimodal learning enhances the performance of various machine learning tasks by leveraging complementary information across different modalities. However, existing methods often learn multimodal representations that retain substantial inter-class confusion, making it difficult to achieve high-confidence predictions, particularly in real-world scenarios with low-quality or noisy data. To address this challenge, we propose Multi-Level Adaptive DeConfusion (MLAD), which eliminates inter-class confusion in multimodal data at both global and sample levels, significantly enhancing the classification reliability of multimodal models. Specifically, MLAD first learns class-wise latent distributions with global-level confusion removed via dynamic-exit modality encoders that adapt to the varying discrimination difficulty of each class and a cross-class residual reconstruction mechanism. Subsequently, MLAD further removes sample-specific confusion through sample-adaptive cross-modality rectification guided by confusion-free modality priors. These priors are constructed from low-confusion modality features, identified by evaluating feature confusion using the learned class-wise latent distributions and selecting those with low confusion via a Gaussian mixture model. Experiments demonstrate that MLAD outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks and exhibits superior reliability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Teaching According to Students' Aptitude: Personalized Mathematics Tutoring via Persona-, Memory-, and Forgetting-Aware LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into intelligent tutoring systems to provide human-like and adaptive instruction. However, most existing approaches fail to capture how students' knowledge evolves dynamically across their proficiencies, conceptual gaps, and forgetting patterns. This challenge is particularly acute in mathematics tutoring, where effective instruction requires fine-grained scaffolding precisely calibrated to each student's mastery level and cognitive retention. To address this issue, we propose TASA (Teaching According to Students' Aptitude), a student-aware tutoring framework that integrates persona, memory, and forgetting dynamics for personalized mathematics learning. Specifically, TASA maintains a structured student persona capturing proficiency profiles and an event memory recording prior learning interactions. By incorporating a continuous forgetting curve with knowledge tracing, TASA dynamically updates each student's mastery state and generates contextually appropriate, difficulty-calibrated questions and explanations. Empirical results demonstrate that TASA achieves superior learning outcomes and more adaptive tutoring behavior compared to representative baselines, underscoring the importance of modeling temporal forgetting and learner profiles in LLM-based tutoring systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Free Lunch to Meet the Gap: Intermediate Domain Reconstruction for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) endeavors to transfer generalized knowledge from the source domain to target domains using only a minimal amount of training data, which faces a triplet of learning challenges in the meantime, i.e., semantic disjoint, large domain discrepancy, and data scarcity. Different from predominant CDFSL works focused on generalized representations, we make novel attempts to construct Intermediate Domain Proxies (IDP) with source feature embeddings as the codebook and reconstruct the target domain feature with this learned codebook. We then conduct an empirical study to explore the intrinsic attributes from perspectives of visual styles and semantic contents in intermediate domain proxies. Reaping benefits from these attributes of intermediate domains, we develop a fast domain alignment method to use these proxies as learning guidance for target domain feature transformation. With the collaborative learning of intermediate domain reconstruction and target feature transformation, our proposed model is able to surpass the state-of-the-art models by a margin on 8 cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MIMIC-\RNum{4}-Ext-22MCTS: A 22 Millions-Event Temporal Clinical Time-Series Dataset with Relative Timestamp for Risk Prediction

A crucial component for clinical risk prediction is developing a reliable prediction model is collecting high-quality time series clinical events. In this work, we release such a dataset that consists of 22,588,586 Clinical Time Series events, which we term MIMIC-\RNum{4}-Ext-22MCTS. Our source data are discharge summaries selected from the well-known yet unstructured MIMIC-IV-Note \cite{Johnson2023-pg}. The general-purpose MIMIC-IV-Note pose specific challenges for our work: it turns out that the discharge summaries are too lengthy for typical natural language models to process, and the clinical events of interest often are not accompanied with explicit timestamps. Therefore, we propose a new framework that works as follows: 1) we break each discharge summary into manageably small text chunks; 2) we apply contextual BM25 and contextual semantic search to retrieve chunks that have a high potential of containing clinical events; and 3) we carefully design prompts to teach the recently released Llama-3.1-8B \cite{touvron2023llama} model to identify or infer temporal information of the chunks. The obtained dataset is informative and transparent that standard models fine-tuned on the dataset achieves significant improvements in healthcare applications. In particular, the BERT model fine-tuned based on our dataset achieves 10\% improvement in accuracy on medical question answering task, and 3\% improvement in clinical trial matching task compared with the classic BERT. The dataset is available at https://physionet.org/content/mimic-iv-ext-22mcts/1.0.0. The codebase is released at https://github.com/JingWang-RU/MIMIC-IV-Ext-22MCTS-Temporal-Clinical-Time-Series-Dataset.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Adapt-Pruner: Adaptive Structural Pruning for Efficient Small Language Model Training

Small language models (SLMs) have attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry due to their broad range of applications in edge devices. To obtain SLMs with strong performance, conventional approaches either pre-train the models from scratch, which incurs substantial computational costs, or compress/prune existing large language models (LLMs), which results in performance drops and falls short in comparison to pre-training. In this paper, we investigate the family of acceleration methods that involve both structured pruning and model training. We found 1) layer-wise adaptive pruning (Adapt-Pruner) is extremely effective in LLMs and yields significant improvements over existing pruning techniques, 2) adaptive pruning equipped with further training leads to models comparable to those pre-training from scratch, 3) incremental pruning brings non-trivial performance gain by interleaving pruning with training and only removing a small portion of neurons ($\sim$5%) at a time. Experimental results on LLaMA-3.1-8B demonstrate that Adapt-Pruner outperforms conventional pruning methods, such as LLM-Pruner, FLAP, and SliceGPT, by an average of 1%-7% in accuracy on commonsense benchmarks. Additionally, Adapt-Pruner restores the performance of MobileLLM-125M to 600M on the MMLU benchmark with 200$\times$ fewer tokens via pruning from its larger counterparts, and discovers a new 1B model that surpasses LLaMA-3.2-1B in multiple benchmarks. The official code is released at https://github.com/research4pan/AdaptPruner.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

OpenGenAlign: A Preference Dataset and Benchmark for Trustworthy Reward Modeling in Open-Ended, Long-Context Generation

Reward Modeling is critical in evaluating and improving the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs). While numerous recent works have shown its feasibility in improving safety, helpfulness, reasoning, and instruction-following ability, its capability and generalization to open-ended long-context generation is still rarely explored. In this paper, we introduce OpenGenAlign, a framework and a high-quality dataset designed to develop reward models to evaluate and improve hallucination-free, comprehensive, reliable, and efficient open-ended long-context generation. We define four key metrics to assess generation quality and develop an automated pipeline to evaluate the outputs of multiple LLMs across long-context QA, Data-to-Text, and Summarization scenarios using o3, ending up with 33K high-quality preference data with a human agreement rate of 81\%. Experimental results first demonstrate that existing reward models perform suboptimally on the held-out benchmark. And Our trained reward model achieves superior performance in the benchmark and effectively improves the generation quality of the policy models using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Additionally, OpenGenAlign could be used for effective guided generation in existing datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the OpenGenAlign could be integrated with reward data from other domains to achieve better performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

EarthGPT-X: A Spatial MLLM for Multi-level Multi-Source Remote Sensing Imagery Understanding with Visual Prompting

Recent advances in natural-domain multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated effective spatial reasoning through visual and textual prompting. However, their direct transfer to remote sensing (RS) is hindered by heterogeneous sensing physics, diverse modalities, and unique spatial scales. Existing RS MLLMs are mainly limited to optical imagery and plain language interaction, preventing flexible and scalable real-world applications. In this article, EarthGPT-X is proposed, the first flexible spatial MLLM that unifies multi-source RS imagery comprehension and accomplishes both coarse-grained and fine-grained visual tasks under diverse visual prompts in a single framework. Distinct from prior models, EarthGPT-X introduces: 1) a dual-prompt mechanism combining text instructions with various visual prompts (i.e., point, box, and free-form) to mimic the versatility of referring in human life; 2) a comprehensive multi-source multi-level prompting dataset, the model advances beyond holistic image understanding to support hierarchical spatial reasoning, including scene-level understanding and fine-grained object attributes and relational analysis; 3) a cross-domain one-stage fusion training strategy, enabling efficient and consistent alignment across modalities and tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthGPT-X substantially outperforms prior nature and RS MLLMs, establishing the first framework capable of multi-source, multi-task, and multi-level interpretation using visual prompting in RS scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AIM: Adaptive Intra-Network Modulation for Balanced Multimodal Learning

Multimodal learning has significantly enhanced machine learning performance but still faces numerous challenges and limitations. Imbalanced multimodal learning is one of the problems extensively studied in recent works and is typically mitigated by modulating the learning of each modality. However, we find that these methods typically hinder the dominant modality's learning to promote weaker modalities, which affects overall multimodal performance. We analyze the cause of this issue and highlight a commonly overlooked problem: optimization bias within networks. To address this, we propose Adaptive Intra-Network Modulation (AIM) to improve balanced modality learning. AIM accounts for differences in optimization state across parameters and depths within the network during modulation, achieving balanced multimodal learning without hindering either dominant or weak modalities for the first time. Specifically, AIM decouples the dominant modality's under-optimized parameters into Auxiliary Blocks and encourages reliance on these performance-degraded blocks for joint training with weaker modalities. This approach effectively prevents suppression of weaker modalities while enabling targeted optimization of under-optimized parameters to improve the dominant modality. Additionally, AIM assesses modality imbalance level across network depths and adaptively adjusts modulation strength at each depth. Experimental results demonstrate that AIM outperforms state-of-the-art imbalanced modality learning methods across multiple benchmarks and exhibits strong generalizability across different backbones, fusion strategies, and optimizers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Contextual Relevance and Adaptive Sampling for LLM-Based Document Reranking

Reranking algorithms have made progress in improving document retrieval quality by efficiently aggregating relevance judgments generated by large language models (LLMs). However, identifying relevant documents for queries that require in-depth reasoning remains a major challenge. Reasoning-intensive queries often exhibit multifaceted information needs and nuanced interpretations, rendering document relevance inherently context dependent. To address this, we propose contextual relevance, which we define as the probability that a document is relevant to a given query, marginalized over the distribution of different reranking contexts it may appear in (i.e., the set of candidate documents it is ranked alongside and the order in which the documents are presented to a reranking model). While prior works have studied methods to mitigate the positional bias LLMs exhibit by accounting for the ordering of documents, we empirically find that the compositions of these batches also plays an important role in reranking performance. To efficiently estimate contextual relevance, we propose TS-SetRank, a sampling-based, uncertainty-aware reranking algorithm. Empirically, TS-SetRank improves nDCG@10 over retrieval and reranking baselines by 15-25% on BRIGHT and 6-21% on BEIR, highlighting the importance of modeling relevance as context-dependent.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Moduli spaces of threefolds on the Noether line

In this paper, we study the moduli spaces of canonical threefolds with any prescribed geometric genus $p_g \ge 5$ which have the smallest possible canonical volume. This minimal volume is equal to the smallest half-integer that is larger than or equal to $\frac43 p_g -\frac{10}3$, and the threefolds in question are said to lie on the (refined) Noether line. For every such moduli space, we establish an explicit stratification, compute the dimension of all strata, and estimate the number of its irreducible components. Thus it yields a complete classification of threefolds on the (refined) Noether line. A new and unexpected phenomenon is that the number of irreducible components of the moduli space grows linearly with $p_g$, while the moduli space of canonical surfaces on the Noether line with any prescribed geometric genus has at most two irreducible components. The key idea in the proof is to relate these canonical threefolds $X$ to simple fibrations in $(1, 2)$-surfaces. In turn, this depends on the observation that a general member in $|K_X|$ is a canonical surface on the Noether line.

math.AG↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging Hierarchical Image-Text Misalignment for Universal Fake Image Detection

With the rapid development of generative models, detecting generated fake images to prevent their malicious use has become a critical issue recently. Existing methods frame this challenge as a naive binary image classification task. However, such methods focus only on visual clues, yielding trained detectors susceptible to overfitting specific image patterns and incapable of generalizing to unseen models. In this paper, we address this issue from a multi-modal perspective and find that fake images cannot be properly aligned with corresponding captions compared to real images. Upon this observation, we propose a simple yet effective detector termed ITEM by leveraging the image-text misalignment in a joint visual-language space as discriminative clues. Specifically, we first measure the misalignment of the images and captions in pre-trained CLIP's space, and then tune a MLP head to perform the usual detection task. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical misalignment scheme that first focuses on the whole image and then each semantic object described in the caption, which can explore both global and fine-grained local semantic misalignment as clues. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method against other state-of-the-art competitors with impressive generalization and robustness on various recent generative models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Frequency Forgery Clues for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image synthesis, but the generated high-quality images raise concerns about potential malicious use. Existing detectors often struggle to capture discriminative clues across different models and settings, limiting their generalization to unseen diffusion models and robustness to various perturbations. To address this issue, we observe that diffusion-generated images exhibit progressively larger differences from natural real images across low- to high-frequency bands. Based on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective representation by enhancing the Frequency Forgery Clue (F^2C) across all frequency bands. Specifically, we introduce a frequency-selective function which serves as a weighted filter to the Fourier spectrum, suppressing less discriminative bands while enhancing more informative ones. This approach, grounded in a comprehensive analysis of frequency-based differences between natural real and diffusion-generated images, enables general detection of images from unseen diffusion models and provides robust resilience to various perturbations. Extensive experiments on various diffusion-generated image datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art detectors with superior generalization and robustness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Test-time Scaling of LLMs: A Survey from A Subproblem Structure Perspective

With this paper, we survey techniques for improving the predictive accuracy of pretrained large language models by allocating additional compute at inference time. In categorizing test-time scaling methods, we place special emphasis on how a problem is decomposed into subproblems and on the topological organization of these subproblems whether sequential, parallel, or tree-structured. This perspective allows us to unify diverse approaches such as Chain-of-Thought, Branch-Solve-Merge, and Tree-of-Thought under a common lens. We further synthesize existing analyses of these techniques, highlighting their respective strengths and weaknesses, and conclude by outlining promising directions for future research

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Lean4Physics: Comprehensive Reasoning Framework for College-level Physics in Lean4

We present **Lean4PHYS**, a comprehensive reasoning framework for college-level physics problems in Lean4. **Lean4PHYS** includes *LeanPhysBench*, a college-level benchmark for formal physics reasoning in Lean4, which contains 200 hand-crafted and peer-reviewed statements derived from university textbooks and physics competition problems. To establish a solid foundation for formal reasoning in physics, we also introduce *PhysLib*, a community-driven repository containing fundamental unit systems and theorems essential for formal physics reasoning. Based on the benchmark and Lean4 repository we composed in **Lean4PHYS**, we report baseline results using major expert Math Lean4 provers and state-of-the-art closed-source models, with the best performance of DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B achieving only 16% and Claude-Sonnet-4 achieving 35%. We also conduct a detailed analysis showing that our *PhysLib* can achieve an average improvement of 11.75% in model performance. This demonstrates the challenging nature of our *LeanPhysBench* and the effectiveness of *PhysLib*. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a physics benchmark in Lean4.

cs.AI↗