arXiv subjects

Wanquan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Wanquan Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

PICANet: Physics-Informed Cascaded Asymmetric Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is an important research direction in image processing. However, existing methods are limited by severe background noise propagation and target degradation in high-level semantic features. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a plug-and-play physics-informed cascaded asymmetric network, named PICANet. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical prior decoupling module to explicitly extract low-level and high-level physical information, thereby characterizing target features at different levels rather than relying solely on convolutional extraction. Furthermore, a dual-prior interactive fusion module is developed to dynamically refine target representations while suppressing complex background clutter. Unlike previous work, a multi-level cross-feature attention module with the cascaded asymmetric mechanism is introduced to achieve precise alignment between high-level semantics and low-level spatial details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PICANet outperforms state-of-the-art ISTD methods, showing satisfactory detection accuracy even against complex backgrounds. Our code is available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/PICANet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

OptGraph: Large Language Models Enhanced Evolutionary Optimization Via Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for automated evolutionary optimization, but existing methods remain limited in pattern reuse, error-aware refinement, and retrieval robustness across diverse tasks. To address these limitations, we propose OptGraph, the first optimization agentic workflow that introduces graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG). Specifically, OptGraph first constructs reusable experience as a typed graph, capturing the relationships among modeling patterns, problem formalization, implementation details, and error corrections. In the inference stage, OptGraph leverages graph neighborhood information to enrich retrieved knowledge, providing structured context to improve modeling, verification, and iterative refinement. Moreover, OptGraph supports adaptive knowledge updates, enabling the distillation of execution traces and verification feedback into reusable graph knowledge without ndertaking LLM parameter tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed OptGraph achieves an average exact accuracy 8.9% higher than the state-of-the-art prompt-based automated optimization frameworks. Our code has been made available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/OptGraph.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Registration-Grounded Spectral Fusion for Unregistered WLI/NBI Endoscopic Lesion Segmentation

White-light imaging (WLI) and narrow-band imaging (NBI) provide complementary views of endoscopic lesions, but their paired observations are often spatially misaligned due to viewpoint changes, tissue deformation, and sequential handheld acquisition. This makes direct WLI/NBI fusion prone to mixing non-corresponding regions and may even degrade segmentation around lesion boundaries. To address this problem, we propose a reliability-aware complex-domain fusion framework for paired-but-unregistered WLI/NBI lesion segmentation. The framework first establishes topology-regularized feature correspondence and further estimates where the cross-modal correspondence is reliable. Guided by this reliability, the model selectively fuses WLI and NBI features in a learnable complex representation. In this representation, WLI-derived cues mainly provide appearance-related magnitude responses, while NBI-derived cues provide structure-sensitive phase responses. Unlike conventional real-valued or symmetric multimodal fusion, the proposed method explicitly models the different roles of WLI and NBI and suppresses unreliable cross-modal interaction in locally mismatched regions. Experiments on paired WLI/NBI endoscopic datasets show that the proposed reliability-aware registration grounding and complex-domain fusion consistently improve lesion segmentation performance. Role-reversal and module ablation studies further validate the necessity of both the modality-role design and reliability-guided cross-modal interaction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Vehicle Routing Problem Meets Large Language Models: An Overview and Perspectives

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a central optimization problem in artificial intelligence, logistics automation, transportation scheduling, and industrial decision-making. VRP and its variants are NP-hard, and practical routing tasks often combine time windows, vehicle capacities, pickup-and-delivery relations, dynamic requests, and other operational constraints, making both modeling and solving difficult. Large language models (LLMs) provide a flexible interface for routing optimization by processing natural-language requirements, generating code, reasoning over constraints, and interacting with external tools. This survey reviews LLM-driven research on VRP, covering the basic definition, main variants, major solver families, and LLM concepts needed for this topic. Existing studies are organized into three roles: modelers translate natural-language requirements into constraints and modeling code; designers generate heuristics, operators, or route plans; and coordinators organize tool calls, multi-agent collaboration, and connections with neural solvers. The survey also reviews standard benchmarks, real or near-real operational datasets, LLM-oriented evaluation frameworks, and two comparative experiments. The goal is to clarify current progress in LLM-assisted routing optimization and provide a structured reference for intelligent decision-making, advanced manufacturing, and industrial automation.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Large Language Models for Operations Research: A Comprehensive Survey

Operations Research (OR) serves as a core decision-support methodology for complex systems, with significant applications across mathematics, management science, and computer science. Traditional approaches heavily rely on expert knowledge and often struggle to efficiently solve large-scale and multi-constraint problems. The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years has offered a novel research paradigm to address these challenges. This paper presents a systematic survey of Large Language Models for Operations Research (LLM4OR). We begin by introducing the definition of OR problems and the fundamental principles of LLMs. We then focus on analyzing the roles of LLMs in OR, specifically covering such as model formulation, algorithm design, and solution verification. In addition, we discuss practical applications in representative scenarios and summarize benchmark datasets in this field. Finally, we outline the key challenges and provide perspectives on future research directions. A collection of related literature is available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/LLM4OR.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Compressed Proximal Federated Learning for Non-Convex Composite Optimization on Heterogeneous Data

Federated Composite Optimization (FCO) has emerged as a promising framework for training models with structural constraints (e.g., sparsity) in distributed edge networks. However, simultaneously achieving communication efficiency and convergence robustness remains a significant challenge, particularly when dealing with non-smooth regularizers, statistical heterogeneity, and the restrictions of biased compression. To address these issues, we propose FedCEF (Federated Composite Error Feedback), a novel algorithm tailored for non-convex FCO. FedCEF introduces a decoupled proximal update scheme that separates the proximal operator from communication, enabling clients to handle non-smooth terms locally while transmitting compressed information. To mitigate the noise from aggressive quantization and the bias from non-IID data, FedCEF integrates a rigorous error feedback mechanism with control variates. Furthermore, we design a communication-efficient pre-proximal downlink strategy that allows clients to exactly reconstruct global control variables without explicit transmission. We theoretically establish that FedCEF achieves sublinear convergence to a bounded residual error under general non-convexity, which is controllable via the step size and batch size. Extensive experiments on real datasets validate FedCEF maintains competitive model accuracy even under extreme compression ratios (e.g., 1%), significantly reducing the total communication volume compared to uncompressed baselines.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

WildGHand: Learning Anti-Perturbation Gaussian Hand Avatars from Monocular In-the-Wild Videos

Despite recent progress in 3D hand reconstruction from monocular videos, most existing methods rely on data captured in well-controlled environments and therefore degrade in real-world settings with severe perturbations, such as hand-object interactions, extreme poses, illumination changes, and motion blur. To tackle these issues, we introduce WildGHand, an optimization-based framework that enables self-adaptive 3D Gaussian splatting on in-the-wild videos and produces high-fidelity hand avatars. WildGHand incorporates two key components: (i) a dynamic perturbation disentanglement module that explicitly represents perturbations as time-varying biases on 3D Gaussian attributes during optimization, and (ii) a perturbation-aware optimization strategy that generates per-frame anisotropic weighted masks to guide optimization. Together, these components allow the framework to identify and suppress perturbations across both spatial and temporal dimensions. We further curate a dataset of monocular hand videos captured under diverse perturbations to benchmark in-the-wild hand avatar reconstruction. Extensive experiments on this dataset and two public datasets demonstrate that WildGHand achieves state-of-the-art performance and substantially improves over its base model across multiple metrics (e.g., up to a $15.8\%$ relative gain in PSNR and a $23.1\%$ relative reduction in LPIPS). Our implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/XuanHuang0/WildGHand.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Personalized Federated PCA with Manifold Optimization for IoT Anomaly Detection

Internet of things (IoT) networks face increasing security threats due to their distributed nature and resource constraints. Although federated learning (FL) has gained prominence as a privacy-preserving framework for distributed IoT environments, current federated principal component analysis (PCA) methods lack the integration of personalization and robustness, which are critical for effective anomaly detection. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient personalized federated PCA (FedEP) method for anomaly detection in IoT networks. The proposed model achieves personalization through introducing local representations with the $\ell_1$-norm for element-wise sparsity, while maintaining robustness via enforcing local models with the $\ell_{2,1}$-norm for row-wise sparsity. To solve this non-convex problem, we develop a manifold optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with rigorous theoretical convergence guarantees. Experimental results confirm that the proposed FedEP outperforms the state-of-the-art FedPG, achieving excellent F1-scores and accuracy in various IoT security scenarios. Our code will be available at \href{https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/FedEP}{https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/FedEP}.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SOFTooth: Semantics-Enhanced Order-Aware Fusion for Tooth Instance Segmentation

Three-dimensional (3D) tooth instance segmentation remains challenging due to crowded arches, ambiguous tooth-gingiva boundaries, missing teeth, and rare yet clinically important third molars. Native 3D methods relying on geometric cues often suffer from boundary leakage, center drift, and inconsistent tooth identities, especially for minority classes and complex anatomies. Meanwhile, 2D foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) provide strong boundary-aware semantics, but directly applying them in 3D is impractical in clinical workflows. To address these issues, we propose SOFTooth, a semantics-enhanced, order-aware 2D-3D fusion framework that leverages frozen 2D semantics without explicit 2D mask supervision. First, a point-wise residual gating module injects occlusal-view SAM embeddings into 3D point features to refine tooth-gingiva and inter-tooth boundaries. Second, a center-guided mask refinement regularizes consistency between instance masks and geometric centroids, reducing center drift. Furthermore, an order-aware Hungarian matching strategy integrates anatomical tooth order and center distance into similarity-based assignment, ensuring coherent labeling even under missing or crowded dentitions. On 3DTeethSeg'22, SOFTooth achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy and mean IoU, with clear gains on cases involving third molars, demonstrating that rich 2D semantics can be effectively transferred to 3D tooth instance segmentation without 2D fine-tuning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Broad stochastic configuration residual learning system for norm-convergent universal approximation

Universal approximation serves as the foundation of neural network learning algorithms. However, some networks establish their universal approximation property by demonstrating that the iterative errors converge in probability measure rather than the more rigorous norm convergence, which makes the universal approximation property of randomized learning networks highly sensitive to random parameter selection, Broad residual learning system (BRLS), as a member of randomized learning models, also encounters this issue. We theoretically demonstrate the limitation of its universal approximation property, that is, the iterative errors do not satisfy norm convergence if the selection of random parameters is inappropriate and the convergence rate meets certain conditions. To address this issue, we propose the broad stochastic configuration residual learning system (BSCRLS) algorithm, which features a novel supervisory mechanism adaptively constraining the range settings of random parameters on the basis of BRLS framework, Furthermore, we prove the universal approximation theorem of BSCRLS based on the more stringent norm convergence. Three versions of incremental BSCRLS algorithms are presented to satisfy the application requirements of various network updates. Solar panels dust detection experiments are performed on publicly available dataset and compared with 13 deep and broad learning algorithms. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness and superiority of BSCRLS algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Diffusion-Guided Mask-Consistent Paired Mixing for Endoscopic Image Segmentation

Augmentation for dense prediction typically relies on either sample mixing or generative synthesis. Mixing improves robustness but misaligned masks yield soft label ambiguity. Diffusion synthesis increases apparent diversity but, when trained as common samples, overlooks the structural benefit of mask conditioning and introduces synthetic-real domain shift. We propose a paired, diffusion-guided paradigm that fuses the strengths of both. For each real image, a synthetic counterpart is generated under the same mask and the pair is used as a controllable input for Mask-Consistent Paired Mixing (MCPMix), which mixes only image appearance while supervision always uses the original hard mask. This produces a continuous family of intermediate samples that smoothly bridges synthetic and real appearances under shared geometry, enlarging diversity without compromising pixel-level semantics. To keep learning aligned with real data, Real-Anchored Learnable Annealing (RLA) adaptively adjusts the mixing strength and the loss weight of mixed samples over training, gradually re-anchoring optimization to real data and mitigating distributional bias. Across Kvasir-SEG, PICCOLO, CVC-ClinicDB, a private NPC-LES cohort, and ISIC 2017, the approach achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance and consistent gains over baselines. The results show that combining label-preserving mixing with diffusion-driven diversity, together with adaptive re-anchoring, yields robust and generalizable endoscopic segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Data-Adaptive Transformed Bilateral Tensor Low-Rank Representation for Clustering

Tensor low-rank representation (TLRR) has demonstrated significant success in image clustering. However, most existing methods rely on fixed transformations and suffer from poor robustness to noise. In this paper, we propose a novel transformed bilateral tensor low-rank representation model called TBTLRR, which introduces a data-adaptive tensor nuclear norm by learning arbitrary unitary transforms, allowing for more effective capture of global correlations. In addition, by leveraging the bilateral structure of latent tensor data, TBTLRR is able to exploit local correlations between image samples and features. Furthermore, TBTLRR integrates the $\ell_{1/2}$-norm and Frobenius norm regularization terms for better dealing with complex noise in real-world scenarios. To solve the proposed nonconvex model, we develop an efficient optimization algorithm inspired by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and provide theoretical convergence. Extensive experiments validate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in clustering. The code will be available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/TBTLRR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Lightweight Deep Unfolding Networks with Enhanced Robustness for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is one of the key techniques in image processing. Although deep unfolding networks (DUNs) have demonstrated promising performance in ISTD due to their model interpretability and data adaptability, existing methods still face significant challenges in parameter lightweightness and noise robustness. In this regard, we propose a highly lightweight framework based on robust principal component analysis (RPCA) called L-RPCANet. Technically, a hierarchical bottleneck structure is constructed to reduce and increase the channel dimension in the single-channel input infrared image to achieve channel-wise feature refinement, with bottleneck layers designed in each module to extract features. This reduces the number of channels in feature extraction and improves the lightweightness of network parameters. Furthermore, a noise reduction module is embedded to enhance the robustness against complex noise. In addition, squeeze-and-excitation networks (SENets) are leveraged as a channel attention mechanism to focus on the varying importance of different features across channels, thereby achieving excellent performance while maintaining both lightweightness and robustness. Extensive experiments on the ISTD datasets validate the superiority of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods covering RPCANet, DRPCANet, and RPCANet++. The code will be available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/L-RPCANet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Transformer-Guided Content-Adaptive Graph Learning for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) targets to decompose each mixed pixel in remote sensing images into a set of endmembers and their corresponding abundances. Despite significant progress in this field using deep learning, most methods fail to simultaneously characterize global dependencies and local consistency, making it difficult to preserve both long-range interactions and boundary details. This letter proposes a novel transformer-guided content-adaptive graph unmixing framework (T-CAGU), which overcomes these challenges by employing a transformer to capture global dependencies and introducing a content-adaptive graph neural network to enhance local relationships. Unlike previous work, T-CAGU integrates multiple propagation orders to dynamically learn the graph structure, ensuring robustness against noise. Furthermore, T-CAGU leverages a graph residual mechanism to preserve global information and stabilize training. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/T-CAGU.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

STAR-Net: An Interpretable Model-Aided Network for Remote Sensing Image Denoising

Remote sensing image (RSI) denoising is an important topic in the field of remote sensing. Despite the impressive denoising performance of RSI denoising methods, most current deep learning-based approaches function as black boxes and lack integration with physical information models, leading to limited interpretability. Additionally, many methods may struggle with insufficient attention to non-local self-similarity in RSI and require tedious tuning of regularization parameters to achieve optimal performance, particularly in conventional iterative optimization approaches. In this paper, we first propose a novel RSI denoising method named sparse tensor-aided representation network (STAR-Net), which leverages a low-rank prior to effectively capture the non-local self-similarity within RSI. Furthermore, we extend STAR-Net to a sparse variant called STAR-Net-S to deal with the interference caused by non-Gaussian noise in original RSI for the purpose of improving robustness. Different from conventional iterative optimization, we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-guided deep unrolling network, in which all regularization parameters can be automatically learned, thus inheriting the advantages of both model-based and deep learning-based approaches and successfully addressing the above-mentioned shortcomings. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that STAR-Net and STAR-Net-S outperform state-of-the-art RSI denoising methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Robust Sparse Phase Retrieval: Statistical Guarantee, Optimality Theory and Convergent Algorithm

Phase retrieval (PR) is a popular research topic in signal processing and machine learning. However, its performance degrades significantly when the measurements are corrupted by noise or outliers. To address this limitation, we propose a novel robust sparse PR method that covers both real- and complex-valued cases. The core is to leverage the Huber function to measure the loss and adopt the $\ell_{1/2}$-norm regularization to realize feature selection, thereby improving the robustness of PR. In theory, we establish statistical guarantees for such robustness and derive necessary optimality conditions for global minimizers. Particularly, for the complex-valued case, we provide a fixed point inclusion property inspired by Wirtinger derivatives. Furthermore, we develop an efficient optimization algorithm by integrating the gradient descent method into a majorization-minimization (MM) framework. It is rigorously proved that the whole generated sequence is convergent and also has a linear convergence rate under mild conditions, which has not been investigated before. Numerical examples under different types of noise validate the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed method.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Bi-Level Unsupervised Feature Selection

Unsupervised feature selection (UFS) is an important task in data engineering. However, most UFS methods construct models from a single perspective and often fail to simultaneously evaluate feature importance and preserve their inherent data structure, thus limiting their performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel bi-level unsupervised feature selection (BLUFS) method, including a clustering level and a feature level. Specifically, at the clustering level, spectral clustering is used to generate pseudo-labels for representing the data structure, while a continuous linear regression model is developed to learn the projection matrix. At the feature level, the $\ell_{2,0}$-norm constraint is imposed on the projection matrix for more effectively selecting features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine a bi-level framework with the $\ell_{2,0}$-norm. To solve the proposed bi-level model, we design an efficient proximal alternating minimization (PAM) algorithm, whose subproblems either have explicit solutions or can be computed by fast solvers. Furthermore, we establish the convergence result and computational complexity. Finally, extensive experiments on two synthetic datasets and eight real datasets demonstrate the superiority of BLUFS in clustering and classification tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Sparse Tensor CCA via Manifold Optimization for Multi-View Learning

Tensor canonical correlation analysis (TCCA) has garnered significant attention due to its effectiveness in capturing high-order correlations in multi-view learning. However, existing TCCA methods often underemphasize the characterization of individual structures and lack algorithmic convergence guarantees. In order to deal with these challenges, we propose a novel sparse TCCA model called STCCA-L, which integrates sparse regularization of canonical matrices and Laplacian regularization of multi-order graphs into the TCCA framework, thereby effectively exploiting the geometric structure of individual views. To solve this non-convex model, we develop an efficient alternating manifold proximal gradient algorithm based on manifold optimization, which avoids computationally expensive full tensor decomposition and leverages a semi-smooth Newton method for resolving the subproblem. Furthermore, we rigorously prove the convergence of the algorithm and analyze its complexity. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior classification performance of the proposed method. Notably, on the 3Sources dataset, it achieves improvements of at least 4.50\% in accuracy and 6.77\% in F1 score over competitors. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhudafa/STCCA-L.

math.OC↗