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Weijie Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Weijie Zhou.

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RxBrain: Embodied Cognition Foundation Model with Joint Language-Visual Reasoning and Imagination

Embodied cognition requires agents to connect high-level task reasoning with the physical states to be achieved. We introduce Hy-Embodied-RxBrain, an embodied cognition foundation model with joint language-visual reasoning and imagination. Unlike vision-language models that emphasize scene understanding and textual decision making, or generative world models that mainly predict future visual states, RxBrain represents embodied plans in a single planning sequence where language and visual imagination play complementary roles. Language provides the abstract structure of a plan, including task decomposition, planning primitives, constraints, temporal order, and decision logic, while visual imagination grounds this structure through world state prediction and joint subgoal planning, associating each planning step with intermediate and final physical states. RxBrain adopts a unified multimodal Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that supports language, image, and video understanding and generation within one model. To train this capability, we build an automatic pipeline that converts embodied videos into joint text-visual planning supervision by decomposing videos into planning steps and aligning them with visual state transitions. We further introduce RxBrain-Bench to evaluate whether models can represent embodied plans through joint textual and visual components rather than separate understanding or generation. Experiments show that RxBrain maintains embodied understanding and generation abilities, and produces plans with coupled textual reasoning, world state prediction, and joint subgoal planning. We also extend RxBrain to continuous robot action generation, where it shows promising real-robot performance without large-scale action-data pretraining. These results provide an initial step toward foundation models for embodied cognition.

cs.AI

Agentic AI-RAN Empowering Synergetic Sensing, Communication, Computing, and Control

Future sixth-generation (6G) networks are expected to support low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs), where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and aerial robots operate in highly dynamic three-dimensional environments under stringent latency, reliability, and autonomy requirements. In such scenarios, autonomous task execution at the network edge demands holistic coordination among sensing, communication, computing, and control (SC3) processes. Agentic Artificially Intelligent Radio Access Networks (Agentic AI-RAN) offer a promising paradigm by enabling the edge network to function as an autonomous decision-making entity for low-altitude agents with limited onboard resources. In this article, we propose a task-oriented Agentic AI-RAN architecture that enables SC3 task execution within a single edge node. The proposed architecture addresses the challenge of coordinating heterogeneous workloads in resource-constrained edge environments. To validate this framework, we prototype a representative low-altitude UAV system on a general-purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) platform and evaluate it through an autonomous drone-navigation case study. The current prototype instantiates the platform-agnostic design through Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) partitioning and containerized deployment, providing physical resource isolation and coordinated execution between real-time communication and multimodal inference. Experimental results demonstrate low closed-loop latency, robust bidirectional communication, and stable performance under dynamic runtime conditions, highlighting the feasibility of the proposed framework for mission-critical low-altitude wireless networks in 6G.

eess.SY

ProAct: A Benchmark and Multimodal Framework for Structure-Aware Proactive Response

While passive agents merely follow instructions, proactive agents align with higher-level objectives, such as assistance and safety by continuously monitoring the environment to determine when and how to act. However, developing proactive agents is hindered by the lack of specialized resources. To address this, we introduce ProAct-75, a benchmark designed to train and evaluate proactive agents across diverse domains, including assistance, maintenance, and safety monitoring. Spanning 75 tasks, our dataset features 91,581 step-level annotations enriched with explicit task graphs. These graphs encode step dependencies and parallel execution possibilities, providing the structural grounding necessary for complex decision-making. Building on this benchmark, we propose ProAct-Helper, a reference baseline powered by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that grounds decision-making in state detection, and leveraging task graphs to enable entropy-driven heuristic search for action selection, allowing agents to execute parallel threads independently rather than mirroring the human's next step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProAct-Helper outperforms strong closed-source models, improving trigger detection mF1 by 6.21%, saving 0.25 more steps in online one-step decision, and increasing the rate of parallel actions by 15.58%.

cs.RO

Diffusion Inpainting MIMO-OFDM Channels with Limited Noisy Observations

Acquiring the channel state information from limited and noisy observations at pilot positions is critical for wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, we view this process as a conditional generative task in which the partial noisy channel estimates at the pilots are utilized as a ``prompt'' to guide the diffusion ``inpainting'' of the underlying channel. To this end, we resort to a general Conditional Diffusion Transformer (CDiT) framework with a well-designed network architecture and update rule. In particular, we design a dedicated embedding strategy to encode and adapt to different pilot patterns and noise levels, and utilize a special cross-attention mechanism to align the partial raw channel observations with the denoised channel at each time step of the generation process. This architecture effectively anchors the diffusion process, enabling the model to accurately recover full channel details from limited noisy observations. Comprehensive experimental results show that, the proposed approach achieves a performance gain of over 5 dB compared to the baselines under varying noise conditions, and provides robust channel acquisition even under a sparse pilot density of 1/32 without significant performance loss compared to the denser pilot cases. Moreover, it is capable of generating high-quality channel matrices within just 10 inference steps, effectively balancing estimation accuracy with computational efficiency and inference speed. Ablation studies demonstrate the rationality of the model design and the necessity of its modules.

eess.SP

UniBYD: A Unified Framework for Learning Robotic Manipulation Across Embodiments Beyond Imitation of Human Demonstrations

In embodied intelligence, the embodiment gap between robotic and human hands brings significant challenges for learning from human demonstrations. Although some studies have attempted to bridge this gap using reinforcement learning, they remain confined to merely reproducing human manipulation, resulting in limited task performance. Moreover, current methods struggle to support diverse robotic hand configurations. In this paper, we propose UniBYD, a unified framework that uses a dynamic reinforcement learning algorithm to discover manipulation policies aligned with the robot's physical characteristics. To enable consistent modeling across diverse robotic hand morphologies, UniBYD incorporates a unified morphological representation (UMR). Building on UMR, we design a dynamic PPO with an annealed reward schedule, enabling reinforcement learning to transition from offline-informed imitation of human demonstrations to online-adaptive exploration of policies better adapted to diverse robotic morphologies, thereby going beyond mere imitation of human hands. To address the severe state drift caused by the incapacity of early-stage policies, we design a hybrid Markov-based shadow engine that provides fine-grained guidance to anchor the imitation within the expert's manifold. To evaluate UniBYD, we propose UniManip, the first benchmark for cross-embodiment manipulation spanning diverse robotic morphologies. Experiments demonstrate a 44.08% average improvement in success rate over the current state-of-the-art. Upon acceptance, we will release our code and benchmark.

cs.RO

Listening with the Eyes: Benchmarking Egocentric Co-Speech Grounding across Space and Time

In situated collaboration, speakers often use intentionally underspecified deictic commands (e.g., ``pass me \textit{that}''), whose referent becomes identifiable only by aligning speech with a brief co-speech pointing \emph{stroke}. However, many embodied benchmarks admit language-only shortcuts, allowing MLLMs to perform well without learning the \emph{audio--visual alignment} required by deictic interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{Egocentric Co-Speech Grounding (EcoG)}, where grounding is executable only if an agent jointly predicts \textit{What}, \textit{Where}, and \textit{When}. To operationalize this, we present \textbf{EcoG-Bench}, an evaluation-only bilingual (EN/ZH) diagnostic benchmark of \textbf{811} egocentric clips with dense spatial annotations and millisecond-level stroke supervision. It is organized under a \textbf{Progressive Cognitive Evaluation} protocol. Benchmarking state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals a severe executability gap: while human subjects achieve near-ceiling performance on EcoG-Bench (\textbf{96.9\%} strict Eco-Accuracy), the best native video-audio setting remains low (Gemini-3-Pro: \textbf{17.0\%}). Moreover, in a diagnostic ablation, replacing the native video--audio interface with timestamped frame samples and externally verified ASR (with word-level timing) substantially improves the same model (\textbf{17.0\%}$\to$\textbf{42.9\%}). Overall, EcoG-Bench provides a strict, executable testbed for event-level speech--gesture binding, and suggests that multimodal interfaces may bottleneck the observability of temporal alignment cues, independently of model reasoning.

cs.CV

SteerEval: A Framework for Evaluating Steerability with Natural Language Profiles for Recommendation

Natural-language user profiles have recently attracted attention not only for improved interpretability, but also for their potential to make recommender systems more steerable. By enabling direct editing, natural-language profiles allow users to explicitly articulate preferences that may be difficult to infer from past behavior. However, it remains unclear whether current natural-language-based recommendation methods can follow such steering commands. While existing steerability evaluations have shown some success for well-recognized item attributes (e.g., movie genres), we argue that these benchmarks fail to capture the richer forms of user control that motivate steerable recommendations. To address this gap, we introduce SteerEval, an evaluation framework designed to measure more nuanced and diverse forms of steerability by using interventions that range from genres to content-warning for movies. We assess the steerability of a family of pretrained natural-language recommenders, examine the potential and limitations of steering on relatively niche topics, and compare how different profile and recommendation interventions impact steering effectiveness. Finally, we offer practical design suggestions informed by our findings and discuss future steps in steerable recommender design.

cs.IR

ESearch-R1: Learning Cost-Aware MLLM Agents for Interactive Embodied Search via Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have empowered embodied agents with remarkable capabilities in planning and reasoning. However, when facing ambiguous natural language instructions (e.g., "fetch the tool" in a cluttered room), current agents often fail to balance the high cost of physical exploration against the cognitive cost of human interaction. They typically treat disambiguation as a passive perception problem, lacking the strategic reasoning to minimize total task execution costs. To bridge this gap, we propose ESearch-R1, a cost-aware embodied reasoning framework that unifies interactive dialogue (Ask), episodic memory retrieval (GetMemory), and physical navigation (Navigate) into a single decision process. We introduce HC-GRPO (Heterogeneous Cost-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization). Unlike traditional PPO which relies on a separate value critic, HC-GRPO optimizes the MLLM by sampling groups of reasoning trajectories and reinforcing those that achieve the optimal trade-off between information gain and heterogeneous costs (e.g., navigate time, and human attention). Extensive experiments in AI2-THOR demonstrate that ESearch-R1 significantly outperforms standard ReAct-based agents. It improves task success rates while reducing total operational costs by approximately 50\%, validating the effectiveness of GRPO in aligning MLLM agents with physical world constraints.

cs.AI

Diffusion Models for Wireless Transceivers: From Pilot-Efficient Channel Estimation to AI-Native 6G Receivers

With the development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, implementing AI-based techniques to improve wireless transceivers becomes an emerging research topic. Within this context, AI-based channel characterization and estimation become the focus since these methods have not been solved by traditional methods very well and have become the bottleneck of transceiver efficiency in large-scale orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Specifically, by formulating channel estimation as a generative AI problem, generative AI methods such as diffusion models (DMs) can efficiently deal with rough initial estimations and have great potential to cooperate with traditional signal processing methods. This paper focuses on the transceiver design of OFDM systems based on DMs, provides an illustration of the potential of DMs in wireless transceivers, and points out the related research directions brought by DMs. We also provide a proof-of-concept case study of further adapting DMs for better wireless receiver performance.

eess.SP

LightPlanner: Unleashing the Reasoning Capabilities of Lightweight Large Language Models in Task Planning

In recent years, lightweight large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention in the robotics field due to their low computational resource requirements and suitability for edge deployment. However, in task planning -- particularly for complex tasks that involve dynamic semantic logic reasoning -- lightweight LLMs have underperformed. To address this limitation, we propose a novel task planner, LightPlanner, which enhances the performance of lightweight LLMs in complex task planning by fully leveraging their reasoning capabilities. Unlike conventional planners that use fixed skill templates, LightPlanner controls robot actions via parameterized function calls, dynamically generating parameter values. This approach allows for fine-grained skill control and improves task planning success rates in complex scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce hierarchical deep reasoning. Before generating each action decision step, LightPlanner thoroughly considers three levels: action execution (feedback verification), semantic parsing (goal consistency verification), and parameter generation (parameter validity verification). This ensures the correctness of subsequent action controls. Additionally, we incorporate a memory module to store historical actions, thereby reducing context length and enhancing planning efficiency for long-term tasks. We train the LightPlanner-1.5B model on our LightPlan-40k dataset, which comprises 40,000 action controls across tasks with 2 to 13 action steps. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves the highest task success rate despite having the smallest number of parameters. In tasks involving spatial semantic reasoning, the success rate exceeds that of ReAct by 14.9 percent. Moreover, we demonstrate LightPlanner's potential to operate on edge devices.

cs.RO

PhysVLM-AVR: Active Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models in Physical Environments

Visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has primarily been studied in static, fully observable settings, limiting their effectiveness in real-world environments where information is often incomplete due to occlusion or limited field of view. Humans, in contrast, actively explore and interact with their environment-moving, examining, and manipulating objects-to gather information through a closed-loop process integrating perception, reasoning, and action. Inspired by this human capability, we introduce the Active Visual Reasoning (AVR) task, extending visual reasoning to partially observable, interactive environments. AVR necessitates agents to: (1) actively acquire information via sequential physical actions, (2) integrate observations across multiple steps for coherent reasoning, and (3) dynamically adjust decisions based on evolving visual feedback. To rigorously evaluate AVR, we introduce CLEVR-AVR, a simulation benchmark featuring multi-round interactive environments designed to assess both reasoning correctness and information-gathering efficiency. We present AVR-152k, a large-scale dataset that offers rich Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations detailing iterative reasoning for uncertainty identification, action-conditioned information gain prediction, and information-maximizing action selection, crucial for training agents in a higher-order Markov Decision Process. Building on this, we develop PhysVLM-AVR, an MLLM achieving state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-AVR, embodied reasoning (OpenEQA, RoboVQA), and passive visual reasoning (GeoMath, Geometry30K). Our analysis also reveals that current embodied MLLMs, despite detecting information incompleteness, struggle to actively acquire and integrate new information through interaction, highlighting a fundamental gap in active reasoning capabilities.

cs.CV

PhysVLM: Enabling Visual Language Models to Understand Robotic Physical Reachability

Understanding the environment and a robot's physical reachability is crucial for task execution. While state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) excel in environmental perception, they often generate inaccurate or impractical responses in embodied visual reasoning tasks due to a lack of understanding of robotic physical reachability. To address this issue, we propose a unified representation of physical reachability across diverse robots, i.e., Space-Physical Reachability Map (S-P Map), and PhysVLM, a vision-language model that integrates this reachability information into visual reasoning. Specifically, the S-P Map abstracts a robot's physical reachability into a generalized spatial representation, independent of specific robot configurations, allowing the model to focus on reachability features rather than robot-specific parameters. Subsequently, PhysVLM extends traditional VLM architectures by incorporating an additional feature encoder to process the S-P Map, enabling the model to reason about physical reachability without compromising its general vision-language capabilities. To train and evaluate PhysVLM, we constructed a large-scale multi-robot dataset, Phys100K, and a challenging benchmark, EQA-phys, which includes tasks for six different robots in both simulated and real-world environments. Experimental results demonstrate that PhysVLM outperforms existing models, achieving a 14\% improvement over GPT-4o on EQA-phys and surpassing advanced embodied VLMs such as RoboMamba and SpatialVLM on the RoboVQA-val and OpenEQA benchmarks. Additionally, the S-P Map shows strong compatibility with various VLMs, and its integration into GPT-4o-mini yields a 7.1\% performance improvement.

cs.RO

Optical skyrmion lattices accelerating in free space

Generation and propagation of optical skyrmions provide a versatile plalform for topologically nontrivial optical informatics and light-matter interactions, but their acceleration along curved trajectories is to be studied. In this study, we experimentally demonstrate the first accelerating skyrmion lattices conveyed by Airy structured light, characterized by topologically stable skyrmion textures with self-acceleration along parabolic trajectories. We show that the skyrmion unit cell can maintain a Skyrme number $|N_\text{sk}|>0.9$ within a propagation range of $\pm1.22\ z_R$ upon parabolic acceleration. Notably, the meron structure remains $|N_\text{sk}|$ stable within $0.5\pm0.02$ over a significantly extended range of $\pm3.06\ z_R$. Our work provides a new potential carrier for topologically robust information distribution, particle sorting and manipulation.

physics.optics

Discrete Messages Improve Communication Efficiency among Isolated Intelligent Agents

Individuals, despite having varied life experiences and learning processes, can communicate effectively through languages. This study aims to explore the efficiency of language as a communication medium. We put forth two specific hypotheses: First, discrete messages are more effective than continuous ones when agents have diverse personal experiences. Second, communications using multiple discrete tokens are more advantageous than those using a single token. To valdate these hypotheses, we designed multi-agent machine learning experiments to assess communication efficiency using various information transmission methods between speakers and listeners. Our empirical findings indicate that, in scenarios where agents are exposed to different data, communicating through sentences composed of discrete tokens offers the best inter-agent communication efficiency. The limitations of our finding include lack of systematic advantages over other more sophisticated encoder-decoder model such as variational autoencoder and lack of evluation on non-image dataset, which we will leave for future studies.

cs.LG

Capture Artifacts via Progressive Disentangling and Purifying Blended Identities for Deepfake Detection

The Deepfake technology has raised serious concerns regarding privacy breaches and trust issues. To tackle these challenges, Deepfake detection technology has emerged. Current methods over-rely on the global feature space, which contains redundant information independent of the artifacts. As a result, existing Deepfake detection techniques suffer performance degradation when encountering unknown datasets. To reduce information redundancy, the current methods use disentanglement techniques to roughly separate the fake faces into artifacts and content information. However, these methods lack a solid disentanglement foundation and cannot guarantee the reliability of their disentangling process. To address these issues, a Deepfake detection method based on progressive disentangling and purifying blended identities is innovatively proposed in this paper. Based on the artifact generation mechanism, the coarse- and fine-grained strategies are combined to ensure the reliability of the disentanglement method. Our method aims to more accurately capture and separate artifact features in fake faces. Specifically, we first perform the coarse-grained disentangling on fake faces to obtain a pair of blended identities that require no additional annotation to distinguish between source face and target face. Then, the artifact features from each identity are separated to achieve fine-grained disentanglement. To obtain pure identity information and artifacts, an Identity-Artifact Correlation Compression module (IACC) is designed based on the information bottleneck theory, effectively reducing the potential correlation between identity information and artifacts. Additionally, an Identity-Artifact Separation Contrast Loss is designed to enhance the independence of artifact features post-disentangling. Finally, the classifier only focuses on pure artifact features to achieve a generalized Deepfake detector.

cs.CV

A novel discrete grey seasonal model and its applications

In order to accurately describe real systems with seasonal disturbances, which normally appear monthly or quarterly cycles, a novel discrete grey seasonal model, abbreviated as , is put forward by incorporating the seasonal dummy variables into the conventional model. Moreover, the mechanism and properties of this proposed model are discussed in depth, revealing the inherent differences from the existing seasonal grey models. For validation and explanation purposes, the proposed model is implemented to describe three actual cases with monthly and quarterly seasonal fluctuations (quarterly wind power production, quarterly PM10, and monthly natural gas consumption), in comparison with five competing models involving grey prediction models , conventional econometric technology , and artificial intelligences . Experimental results from the cases consistently demonstrated that the proposed model significantly outperforms the other benchmark models in terms of several error criteria. Moreover, further discussions about the influences of different sequence lengths on the forecasting performance reveal that the proposed model still performs the best with strong robustness and high reliability in addressing seasonal sequences. In general, the new model is validated to be a powerful and promising methodology for handling sequences with seasonal fluctuations.

stat.AP