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Weifeng Lin

Publications and source records attributed to Weifeng Lin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Rethinking VLM Representation for VLA Initialization

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models widely adopt pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as policy backbones, yet it remains unclear what kind of pretrained VLM representation is useful as a VLA initialization. In this paper, we study VLA initialization as a controlled representation-design problem along three axes: capability-level embodied VQA supervision, parameter-update strategy, and robot-data pretraining. Our experiments show that the original pretrained VLM representation is a key source of action performance. However, embodied VQA adaptation does not yield uniform gains: its benefit depends on downstream bottlenecks, and gains from different capability domains are not simply additive. For update strategy, LoRA provides a more reliable initialization than Full Finetune, indicating that overly reshaping the pretrained representation can weaken VLA initialization. Robot-data pretraining further improves VLA initialization, with the strongest variant obtained by staged LoRA-based training. Together, these findings suggest that effective VLM-to-VLA adaptation should inject action-relevant embodied and robot-trajectory signals while preserving the pretrained VLM representation that remains useful for action learning.

cs.CV

MemGUI-Bench: Benchmarking Memory of Mobile GUI Agents in Dynamic Environments

Reliable mobile GUI agents must retain and reuse information across actions, applications, and repeated interactions. However, current benchmarks systematically underrepresent these memory demands: only 5.2-11.8 percent of their tasks are memory-related, and none evaluates cross-session learning. We introduce MemGUI-Bench, a comprehensive memory-centric benchmark that assesses both short-term information retention and long-term experience accumulation through pass@k protocols and staged LLM-as-judge evaluation. Our contributions include: (1) a systematic taxonomy of short- and long-term memory based on 11 agents across 5 architectures; (2) a snapshot-based suite of 128 tasks across 26 applications, organized into 64 mirror pairs, where 89.8 percent require cross-temporal and cross-spatial retention; (3) MemGUI-Eval, an automated 3-stage Progressive Scrutiny pipeline with 7 hierarchical metrics spanning memory fidelity, learning effectiveness, and execution efficiency; and (4) an assessment of 11 state-of-the-art agents guided by 6 research questions. Our experiments reveal substantial memory deficits across all evaluated systems, including 4-10x capability gaps on memory-intensive tasks. They further show that short-term memory is indispensable, while explicit long-term memory improves cross-session learning by 21.9 percentage points, with cross-application transfer and computational cost remaining major bottlenecks. We additionally identify 5 distinct failure modes and synthesize 5 actionable design implications for future memory-enhanced agents. All resources, including code, benchmark, and evaluation results, will be fully open-sourced and continuously maintained at https://memgui-bench.github.io/.

cs.DC

GLEAM: Learning to Match and Explain in Cross-View Geo-Localization

Cross-View Geo-Localization (CVGL) focuses on identifying correspondences between images captured from distinct perspectives of the same geographical location. However, existing CVGL approaches are typically restricted to a single view or modality, and their direct visual matching strategy lacks interpretability: they only determine whether two images correspond, without explaining the rationale behind the match. In this paper, we present GLEAM-C, a foundational CVGL model that unifies multiple views and modalities by aligning them exclusively with satellite imagery. Our framework improves training efficiency through optimized implementation and achieves accuracy comparable to prior modality-specific CVGL models via a novel two-phase training strategy. To address interpretability, we further propose GLEAM-X, a novel task that combines cross-view correspondence prediction with explainable reasoning enabled by multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We construct a bilingual benchmark using commercial MLLMs to generate training and testing data, and refine the test set through rigorous human revision for systematic evaluation of explainable cross-view reasoning. Together, GLEAM-C and GLEAM-X form a comprehensive CVGL pipeline that integrates multi-modal, multi-view alignment with interpretable correspondence analysis, unifying accurate cross-view matching with explainable reasoning and advancing Geo-Localization by enabling models to better Explain And Match. Code and datasets used in this work will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/GLEAM.

cs.CV

Perceive Anything: Recognize, Explain, Caption, and Segment Anything in Images and Videos

We present Perceive Anything Model (PAM), a conceptually straightforward and efficient framework for comprehensive region-level visual understanding in images and videos. Our approach extends the powerful segmentation model SAM 2 by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling simultaneous object segmentation with the generation of diverse, region-specific semantic outputs, including categories, label definition, functional explanations, and detailed captions. A key component, Semantic Perceiver, is introduced to efficiently transform SAM 2's rich visual features, which inherently carry general vision, localization, and semantic priors into multi-modal tokens for LLM comprehension. To support robust multi-granularity understanding, we also develop a dedicated data refinement and augmentation pipeline, yielding a high-quality dataset of 1.5M image and 0.6M video region-semantic annotations, including novel region-level streaming video caption data. PAM is designed for lightweightness and efficiency, while also demonstrates strong performance across a diverse range of region understanding tasks. It runs 1.2-2.4x faster and consumes less GPU memory than prior approaches, offering a practical solution for real-world applications. We believe that our effective approach will serve as a strong baseline for future research in region-level visual understanding.

cs.CV

MINT-CoT: Enabling Interleaved Visual Tokens in Mathematical Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has widely enhanced mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still remains challenging for extending it to multimodal domains. Existing works either adopt a similar textual reasoning for image input, or seek to interleave visual signals into mathematical CoT. However, they face three key limitations for math problem-solving: reliance on coarse-grained box-shaped image regions, limited perception of vision encoders on math content, and dependence on external capabilities for visual modification. In this paper, we propose MINT-CoT, introducing Mathematical INterleaved Tokens for Chain-of-Thought visual reasoning. MINT-CoT adaptively interleaves relevant visual tokens into textual reasoning steps via an Interleave Token, which dynamically selects visual regions of any shapes within math figures. To empower this capability, we construct the MINT-CoT dataset, containing 54K mathematical problems aligning each reasoning step with visual regions at the token level, accompanied by a rigorous data generation pipeline. We further present a three-stage MINT-CoT training strategy, progressively combining text-only CoT SFT, interleaved CoT SFT, and interleaved CoT RL, which derives our MINT-CoT-7B model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for effective visual interleaved reasoning in mathematical domains, where MINT-CoT-7B outperforms the baseline model by +34.08% on MathVista, +28.78% on GeoQA, and +23.2% on MMStar, respectively. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/xinyan-cxy/MINT-CoT

cs.CV

UI-Genie: A Self-Improving Approach for Iteratively Boosting MLLM-based Mobile GUI Agents

In this paper, we introduce UI-Genie, a self-improving framework addressing two key challenges in GUI agents: verification of trajectory outcome is challenging and high-quality training data are not scalable. These challenges are addressed by a reward model and a self-improving pipeline, respectively. The reward model, UI-Genie-RM, features an image-text interleaved architecture that efficiently pro- cesses historical context and unifies action-level and task-level rewards. To sup- port the training of UI-Genie-RM, we develop deliberately-designed data genera- tion strategies including rule-based verification, controlled trajectory corruption, and hard negative mining. To address the second challenge, a self-improvement pipeline progressively expands solvable complex GUI tasks by enhancing both the agent and reward models through reward-guided exploration and outcome verification in dynamic environments. For training the model, we generate UI- Genie-RM-517k and UI-Genie-Agent-16k, establishing the first reward-specific dataset for GUI agents while demonstrating high-quality synthetic trajectory gen- eration without manual annotation. Experimental results show that UI-Genie achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple GUI agent benchmarks with three generations of data-model self-improvement. We open-source our complete framework implementation and generated datasets to facilitate further research in https://github.com/Euphoria16/UI-Genie.

cs.CL

LLM-Powered GUI Agents in Phone Automation: Surveying Progress and Prospects

With the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs), phone automation has undergone transformative changes. This paper systematically reviews LLM-driven phone GUI agents, highlighting their evolution from script-based automation to intelligent, adaptive systems. We first contextualize key challenges, (i) limited generality, (ii) high maintenance overhead, and (iii) weak intent comprehension, and show how LLMs address these issues through advanced language understanding, multimodal perception, and robust decision-making. We then propose a taxonomy covering fundamental agent frameworks (single-agent, multi-agent, plan-then-act), modeling approaches (prompt engineering, training-based), and essential datasets and benchmarks. Furthermore, we detail task-specific architectures, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning strategies that bridge user intent and GUI operations. Finally, we discuss open challenges such as dataset diversity, on-device deployment efficiency, user-centric adaptation, and security concerns, offering forward-looking insights into this rapidly evolving field. By providing a structured overview and identifying pressing research gaps, this paper serves as a definitive reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to harness LLMs in designing scalable, user-friendly phone GUI agents. The collection of papers reviewed in this survey will be hosted and regularly updated on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/PhoneLLM/Awesome-LLM-Powered-Phone-GUI-Agents

cs.HC

IMAGINE-E: Image Generation Intelligence Evaluation of State-of-the-art Text-to-Image Models

With the rapid development of diffusion models, text-to-image(T2I) models have made significant progress, showcasing impressive abilities in prompt following and image generation. Recently launched models such as FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0, along with others like Dall-E3 and Stable Diffusion 3, have demonstrated exceptional performance across various complex tasks, raising questions about whether T2I models are moving towards general-purpose applicability. Beyond traditional image generation, these models exhibit capabilities across a range of fields, including controllable generation, image editing, video, audio, 3D, and motion generation, as well as computer vision tasks like semantic segmentation and depth estimation. However, current evaluation frameworks are insufficient to comprehensively assess these models' performance across expanding domains. To thoroughly evaluate these models, we developed the IMAGINE-E and tested six prominent models: FLUX.1, Ideogram2.0, Midjourney, Dall-E3, Stable Diffusion 3, and Jimeng. Our evaluation is divided into five key domains: structured output generation, realism, and physical consistency, specific domain generation, challenging scenario generation, and multi-style creation tasks. This comprehensive assessment highlights each model's strengths and limitations, particularly the outstanding performance of FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0 in structured and specific domain tasks, underscoring the expanding applications and potential of T2I models as foundational AI tools. This study provides valuable insights into the current state and future trajectory of T2I models as they evolve towards general-purpose usability. Evaluation scripts will be released at https://github.com/jylei16/Imagine-e.

cs.CV

A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has catalyzed the development of mobile graphic user interface (GUI) AI agents, which is designed to autonomously perform tasks on mobile devices. However, a significant gap persists in mobile GUI agent evaluation, where existing benchmarks predominantly rely on either static frame assessments such as AndroidControl or offline static apps such as AndroidWorld and thus fail to capture agent performance in dynamic, real-world online mobile apps. To address this gap, we present Android Agent Arena (A3), a novel "essential-state" based procedural evaluation system for mobile GUI agents. A3 introduces a benchmark of 100 tasks derived from 20 widely-used, dynamic online apps across 20 categories from the Google Play Store, ensuring evaluation comprehension. A3 also presents a novel "essential-state" based procedural evaluation method that leverages MLLMs as reward models to progressively verify task completion and process achievement. This evaluation approach address the limitations of traditional function based evaluation methods on online dynamic apps. Furthermore, A3 includes a toolkit to streamline Android device interaction, reset online environment and apps and facilitate data collection from both human and agent demonstrations. The complete A3 system, including the benchmark and tools, will be publicly released to provide a robust foundation for future research and development in mobile GUI agents.

cs.AI

PixWizard: Versatile Image-to-Image Visual Assistant with Open-Language Instructions

This paper presents a versatile image-to-image visual assistant, PixWizard, designed for image generation, manipulation, and translation based on free-from language instructions. To this end, we tackle a variety of vision tasks into a unified image-text-to-image generation framework and curate an Omni Pixel-to-Pixel Instruction-Tuning Dataset. By constructing detailed instruction templates in natural language, we comprehensively include a large set of diverse vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, image restoration, image grounding, dense image prediction, image editing, controllable generation, inpainting/outpainting, and more. Furthermore, we adopt Diffusion Transformers (DiT) as our foundation model and extend its capabilities with a flexible any resolution mechanism, enabling the model to dynamically process images based on the aspect ratio of the input, closely aligning with human perceptual processes. The model also incorporates structure-aware and semantic-aware guidance to facilitate effective fusion of information from the input image. Our experiments demonstrate that PixWizard not only shows impressive generative and understanding abilities for images with diverse resolutions but also exhibits promising generalization capabilities with unseen tasks and human instructions. The code and related resources are available at https://github.com/AFeng-x/PixWizard

cs.CV

Lumina-mGPT: Illuminate Flexible Photorealistic Text-to-Image Generation with Multimodal Generative Pretraining

We present Lumina-mGPT, a family of multimodal autoregressive models capable of various vision and language tasks, particularly excelling in generating flexible photorealistic images from text descriptions. By initializing from multimodal Generative PreTraining (mGPT), we demonstrate that decoder-only Autoregressive (AR) model can achieve image generation performance comparable to modern diffusion models with high efficiency through Flexible Progressive Supervised Fine-tuning (FP-SFT). Equipped with our proposed Unambiguous image Representation (UniRep), Lumina-mGPT can flexibly generate high-quality images of varying aspect ratios. Building on the strong image generation capabilities, we further explore Ominiponent Supervised Fine-tuning (Omni-SFT), an initial attempt to elevate Lumina-mGPT into a unified multi-modal generalist. The resulting model demonstrates versatile multimodal capabilities, including visual generation tasks like text-to-image/multiview generation and controllable generation, visual recognition tasks like segmentation and depth estimation, and vision-language tasks like multi-turn visual question answering, showing the rosy potential of the technical direction. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-mGPT.

cs.CV

Bioinspired polymer-incorporating self-lubricating and antifouling hydrogels

Healthy articular cartilage has excellent lubricating properties, with friction coefficients reaching extremely low values at physiological pressures. Such high-performing lubricating layer in joints is attributed to the surface hydration arising from the interplay between multiple hydrophilic biopolymers (such as hyaluronic acid, proteoglycans, and lubricin) and phospholipids in the cartilage matrix. Mimicking such molecular structure, hydrogels, composed of a hydrophilic polymer network, have the potential to replicate the lubricating feature and possibly replace natural cartilages. In this study, we have synthesized a poly(2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine-co-N-isopropylacrylamide) (PMPC-co-PNIPAM, PMN)random copolymer with highly-hydrated lubricious 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine moieties and less hydrated N-isopropylacrylamide moieties. Incorporation of PMN copolymers within various hydrogels significantly reduces the gels sliding surface friction, resulting in low friction coefficients against different counter surfaces, including stainless steel (hard metal surface), polyethylene (hydrophobic surface), and polyHEMA (soft hydrogel surface). Additionally, hydrogels containing PMN are shown to be biocompatible and have excellent antifouling properties, making them an ideal coating for commercially available stents. With these qualities, hydrogels containing PMN stand out as a promising new material with numerous possible applications.

cond-mat.soft

Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want

In this paper, we present the Draw-and-Understand framework, exploring how to integrate visual prompting understanding capabilities into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Visual prompts allow users to interact through multi-modal instructions, enhancing the models' interactivity and fine-grained image comprehension. In this framework, we propose a general architecture adaptable to different pre-trained MLLMs, enabling it to recognize various types of visual prompts (such as points, bounding boxes, and free-form shapes) alongside language understanding. Additionally, we introduce MDVP-Instruct-Data, a multi-domain dataset featuring 1.2 million image-visual prompt-text triplets, including natural images, document images, scene text images, mobile/web screenshots, and remote sensing images. Building on this dataset, we introduce MDVP-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate a model's ability to understand visual prompting instructions. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework can be easily and effectively applied to various MLLMs, such as SPHINX-X and LLaVA. After training with MDVP-Instruct-Data and image-level instruction datasets, our models exhibit impressive multimodal interaction capabilities and pixel-level understanding, while maintaining their image-level visual perception performance.

cs.CV

SPHINX-X: Scaling Data and Parameters for a Family of Multi-modal Large Language Models

We propose SPHINX-X, an extensive Multimodality Large Language Model (MLLM) series developed upon SPHINX. To improve the architecture and training efficiency, we modify the SPHINX framework by removing redundant visual encoders, bypassing fully-padded sub-images with skip tokens, and simplifying multi-stage training into a one-stage all-in-one paradigm. To fully unleash the potential of MLLMs, we assemble a comprehensive multi-domain and multimodal dataset covering publicly available resources in language, vision, and vision-language tasks. We further enrich this collection with our curated OCR intensive and Set-of-Mark datasets, extending the diversity and generality. By training over different base LLMs including TinyLlama1.1B, InternLM2-7B, LLaMA2-13B, and Mixtral8x7B, we obtain a spectrum of MLLMs that vary in parameter size and multilingual capabilities. Comprehensive benchmarking reveals a strong correlation between the multi-modal performance with the data and parameter scales. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory

cs.CV

Liposomic lubricants suppress shear-stress induced inflammatory gene regulation in the joint in vivo

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a widespread, debilitating joint disease associated with articular cartilage degradation. It is driven via mechano-inflammatory catabolic pathways, presumed up-regulated due to increased shear stress on the cartilage-embedded chondrocytes, that lead to tissue degeneration. Here we demonstrate that the up-regulation of the matrix metalloproteinase 3 (Mmp3) and interleukin-1beta (Il1b) genes upon surgical joint destabilization in a model of murine OA is completely suppressed when lipid-based lubricants are injected into the joints. At the same time, Timp1, a compression but not shear-stress sensitive gene, is unaffected by lubricant. Our results provide direct evidence that biolubrication couples to catabolic gene regulation in OA, shed strong light on the nature of the chondrocytes' response to shear stress, and have clear implications for novel OA treatments.

physics.bio-ph

Recent progress in cartilage lubrication

Healthy articular cartilage, covering the ends of bones in major joints such as hips and knees, presents the most efficiently-lubricated surface known in nature, with friction coefficients as low as 0.001 up to physiologically high pressures. Such low friction is indeed essential for its well being. It minimizes wear-and-tear and hence the cartilage degradation associated with osteoarthritis, the most common joint disease, and, by reducing shear stress on the mechanotransductive, cartilage-embedded chondrocytes (the only cell type in the cartilage), it regulates their function to maintain homeostasis. Understanding the origins of such low friction of the articular cartilage, therefore, is of major importance in order to alleviate disease symptoms, and slow or even reverse its breakdown. This progress report considers the relation between frictional behavior and the cellular mechanical environment in the cartilage, then reviews the mechanism of lubrication in the joints, in particular focusing on boundary lubrication. Following recent advances based on hydration lubrication, a proposed synergy between different molecular components of the synovial joints, acting together in enabling the low friction, has been proposed. Additionally, recent development of natural and of bio-inspired lubricants is reviewed.

physics.med-ph

Hierarchical Side-Tuning for Vision Transformers

Fine-tuning pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) has showcased significant promise in enhancing visual recognition tasks. Yet, the demand for individualized and comprehensive fine-tuning processes for each task entails substantial computational and memory costs, posing a considerable challenge. Recent advancements in Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) have shown potential for achieving high performance with fewer parameter updates compared to full fine-tuning. However, their effectiveness is primarily observed in simple tasks like image classification, while they encounter challenges with more complex vision tasks like dense prediction. To address this gap, this study aims to identify an effective tuning method that caters to a wider range of visual tasks. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical Side-Tuning (HST), an innovative PETL method facilitating the transfer of ViT models to diverse downstream tasks. Diverging from existing methods that focus solely on fine-tuning parameters within specific input spaces or modules, HST employs a lightweight Hierarchical Side Network (HSN). This network leverages intermediate activations from the ViT backbone to model multi-scale features, enhancing prediction capabilities. To evaluate HST, we conducted comprehensive experiments across a range of visual tasks, including classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Remarkably, HST achieved state-of-the-art performance in 13 out of the 19 tasks on the VTAB-1K benchmark, with the highest average Top-1 accuracy of 76.1%, while fine-tuning a mere 0.78M parameters. When applied to object detection and semantic segmentation tasks on the COCO and ADE20K testdev benchmarks, HST outperformed existing PETL methods and even surpassed full fine-tuning.

cs.CV

Scale-Aware Modulation Meet Transformer

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, Scale-Aware Modulation Transformer (SMT), that can handle various downstream tasks efficiently by combining the convolutional network and vision Transformer. The proposed Scale-Aware Modulation (SAM) in the SMT includes two primary novel designs. Firstly, we introduce the Multi-Head Mixed Convolution (MHMC) module, which can capture multi-scale features and expand the receptive field. Secondly, we propose the Scale-Aware Aggregation (SAA) module, which is lightweight but effective, enabling information fusion across different heads. By leveraging these two modules, convolutional modulation is further enhanced. Furthermore, in contrast to prior works that utilized modulations throughout all stages to build an attention-free network, we propose an Evolutionary Hybrid Network (EHN), which can effectively simulate the shift from capturing local to global dependencies as the network becomes deeper, resulting in superior performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a wide range of visual tasks. Specifically, SMT with 11.5M / 2.4GFLOPs and 32M / 7.7GFLOPs can achieve 82.2% and 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, respectively. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224^2 resolution, it attains 87.1% and 88.1% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224^2 and 384^2, respectively. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, the SMT base trained with 1x and 3x schedule outperforms the Swin Transformer counterpart by 4.2 and 1.3 mAP on COCO, respectively. For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, the SMT base test at single- and multi-scale surpasses Swin by 2.0 and 1.1 mIoU respectively on the ADE20K.

cs.CV