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Weilin Ruan

Publications and source records attributed to Weilin Ruan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

MedZERO: Self-Evolving Agents for Open-Ended Medical Reasoning Through Controlled Knowledge Accumulation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical question answering and clinical reasoning, yet their improvement remains constrained by static parametric knowledge and costly expert supervision. Self-evolving agents offer a promising alternative by enabling models to improve through iterative task generation and problem-solving. However, most existing self-evolving methods are designed for easily verifiable domains such as mathematics and coding, where solutions can be checked by exact answers or executable programs. Medical reasoning is fundamentally different: it is open-ended, knowledge-intensive, and often only partially verifiable. We present MedZERO, a self-evolving framework for open-ended medical reasoning. MedZERO couples an Examiner that generates frontier medical question-option pairs with a Reasoner that solves them through evidence-grounded multi-turn reasoning with external knowledge tools. To support reliable, continual improvement, MedZERO adopts controlled knowledge accumulation, which maintains temporary exploratory knowledge and curated persistent knowledge in reasoning. We evaluate MedZERO on five public medical reasoning benchmarks using 4B- and 8B-scale base models under open-ended evaluation. At both model scales, MedZERO achieves the highest average accuracy among the evaluated methods. Code available at https://github.com/IcecreamArtist/MedZERO.

cs.AI↗

EKT-Router: Expert-Evidence Alignment for Embodied Vision-Language Models

Embodied vision-language models must answer questions from partial, evolving observations. Their success depends on both the reasoning capability selected and the evidence available to it. Expert routers adapt internal computation, while tool-augmented systems acquire external evidence; choosing these independently can leave a suitable expert without the evidence it needs. We introduce EKT-Router, a bounded framework that jointly selects a capability expert, optional knowledge, and perceptual tools. Outcome-derived signatures represent the overlapping strengths of General, Spatial Reasoning, and Spatiotemporal experts. A joint utility scores complete expert-evidence routes under a call budget. After acquisition, a packet verifier admits valid evidence with positive predicted expert-conditioned gain. The selected expert then answers once, reverting to the unchanged observation if all packets are rejected. Across 6 embodied QA benchmarks, EKT-Router achieves a mean score of 61.4, the highest among the compared systems, and averages 74.7 on 10 general vision-language benchmarks. With all external evidence disabled, question-conditioned expert selection alone improves over the best fixed expert by 1.75 points. Ablations show that learned routing is the dominant component and that knowledge and perception are complementary.

cs.CV↗

Anvil: Scaling Embodied Spatial Intelligence through Knowledge Recirculation

Embodied spatial intelligence requires more than visual recognition: models must localize entities, reason about their relations, and express this knowledge in action-relevant forms. Yet joint training can conflate the knowledge needed at different stages because supervision is fragmented across incompatible geometric and semantic outputs. We introduce Anvil, a unified framework for data generation, training, and benchmarking for embodied spatial intelligence. (1) Anvil-Gen is a heterogeneous data flywheel that combines form-specific generation, cross-stage consistency verification, and failure-driven recollection across 11 Ground--Relation--Act forms. (2) Anvil-Ben provides scene-aligned supervision for learning diverse embodied spatial capabilities and scene-linked assessments that distinguish stage competence from error propagation. (3) Anvil-MOPD is a 9B student that consolidates heterogeneous spatial knowledge through distillation from specialist teachers. Semantic-first-fault routing targets teacher supervision to the student's earliest decisive failure, while stage normalization controls the loss scale across native outputs of different lengths. We construct 5.8M source-grounded records spanning 160K images, reserving 580K spatial records for held-out evaluation and using the remaining 5.22M records for training. On average across seven public benchmarks, Anvil-MOPD outperforms Qwen3.5-9B and RynnBrain-8B by 9.29 and 11.03 percentage points, respectively, while reaching 80.67% on VABench-Point. Controlled studies support targeted coverage, selective transfer, and feedback-guided repair as complementary framework components.

cs.CV↗

ChampionKV: Head-Wise Adaptive Budget Allocation for KV Cache Compression

Some observation-window-based KV cache compressors use prompt attention to identify important tokens but allocate uniform or predefined budgets across heads, overlooking input-dependent differences in budget demand. We propose ChampionKV, an input-adaptive head-wise budget allocator for long-context KV cache compression. It uses the maximum aggregated observation-window attention score as a lightweight empirical proxy for attention concentration, assigning larger budgets to heads with dispersed attention and smaller budgets to concentrated heads. An abnormal-head mask and a floor-budget mechanism improve robustness under weak attention responses. ChampionKV plugs into compressors such as SnapKV and PyramidKV without changing their token-selection procedures. On LongBench and RULER, both Champion variants consistently improve over their SnapKV and PyramidKV base compressors; the improvements are largest and statistically significant on Llama3.1-70B-Instruct, especially under tight budgets, whereas results on the tested 7B/8B models remain competitive but mixed. ChampionKV does not uniformly outperform Ada-KV, whose global cross-head Top-K selection retains an advantage in several settings. Controlled analysis further shows improved retained attention mass over the corresponding base compressors at negligible overhead.

cs.LG↗

RoboAware: Learning to Coordinate Embodied Skills from Counterfactual Outcomes

Embodied coding agents can combine modular robot skills with frozen end-to-end policies, yet effective composition requires anticipating which policy family will succeed in the current physical state. We present RoboAware, which builds on coding agents' skill orchestration by learning only a state-conditioned responsibility coordinator from counterfactual outcomes. Inspired by the success of REPL, we propose the $P^5$ schema and formulate a hierarchical MDP based on it. $P^5$ organizes skills uniformly into five semantic stages, defining where responsibility can be compared. To address the lack of counterfactual branch outcomes in existing work, we introduce State-Locked Counterfactual Branching (SCB), which restores the same training state to generate and execute a code block from each admissible family, exposing outcomes that selected-branch experience leaves unobserved. Building on this, we propose Execution-Aware Learning (EAL), which combines Monte Carlo tree search with Q-learning to distill these outcomes into family-conditioned values. At deployment, the coordinator selects the policy family according to observable context, and the frozen coding agent generates the next local code block. Comprehensive single-episode evaluations on 100 tasks show that RoboAware reaches a 77.0% overall success rate, with SOTA averages of 90.0% on RoboSuite, 73.8% on diverse LIBERO-Pro task clusters, and 90.0% on challenging RoboTwin bimanual tasks, outperforming existing code-as-policy and VLA-harness baselines.

cs.RO↗

In-Context Learning for Robots: Methods and Applications

General-purpose robots must infer what a new task requires and translate that understanding into appropriate physical action. In-context learning (ICL) for robots supports this process by using demonstrations and interaction to direct existing competence with neural parameters held fixed during deployment. We organize this literature review around the interfaces connecting contextual evidence to execution, distinguishing four families: context-conditioned policies, geometric demonstration transfer, world-model-based control, and skill- and agent-based execution. Comparing these interfaces clarifies their transfer assumptions and the roles of training, correspondence, and memory in making context useful. Across manipulation and navigation, we examine how these mechanisms preserve taught requirements as objects, environments, and execution conditions change. This analysis links method design to evaluation practices that distinguish responsiveness to teaching, physical transfer, and benefits from retained experience. The resulting agenda connects compositional task acquisition and faithful transfer with physical recursive self-improvement, in which experience improves the ability to learn subsequent tasks.

cs.RO↗

A Game-Theoretic Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Learning Framework for Collaborative Public Resource Allocation

Public resource allocation involves distributing resources, including urban infrastructure, energy, and transportation, which are typically limited in capacity, to meet social demands. In real-world scenarios, resources are typically limited in capacity, which makes coordination among multiple resources essential. However, existing methods often optimize resource movements in an isolated manner and do not explicitly account for capacity-aware collaboration under spatio-temporal dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce the Collaborative Public Resource Allocation (CPRA) problem, and propose a Game-Theoretic Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Learning (GSTRL) framework to solve it. Our contributions are twofold: 1) We formulate CPRA as a potential game and construct the potential function based on the objective function of CPRA, laying a theoretical foundation for approximating the Nash equilibrium of this NP-hard problem; and 2) Our GSTRL framework effectively captures the spatio-temporal dynamics of the overall system. We evaluate GSTRL on two real-world datasets, where experiments show its superior performance. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/thunderlrr/GSTRL.

cs.LG↗

Symmetric Composition of Anisotropic Operators for Global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Forecasting

Accurate global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) climate forecasting is critical for disaster preparedness and resource management, yet it remains challenging due to chaotic atmospheric dynamics. Despite advances in geometry-aware representations, existing methods do not specify how the zonal and meridional interactions that govern real atmospheric dynamics should be explicitly coordinated and composed, leaving an important architectural gap for S2S forecasting. In this paper, we propose AnisoCast, which explicitly models anisotropic global atmospheric dynamics for accurate S2S climate forecasting. It couples: (1) an Anisotropic Embedding strategy that tokenizes the global grid into latitudinal rings, preserving the integrity of zonal periodic structures; and (2) stacked Aniso Blocks that arrange latent Zonal and Meridional Operators in a weight-shared palindromic composition inspired by symmetric operator splitting. Extensive experiments on the ERA5 reanalysis dataset demonstrate that AnisoCast establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in both forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency.

physics.ao-ph↗

GenRouter: Unified Workflow Routing for Agentic Image Generation

The rapid evolution of text-to-image (T2I) generation models has effectively solved the foundational challenge of raw pixel synthesis, shifting the community's focus toward fulfilling increasingly intricate user requests. While recent agentic image generation workflows enhance static inference with advanced capabilities like external knowledge retrieval and iterative reasoning, they mostly operate in isolated silos with fixed ``one-size-fits-all" topologies. This inevitably leads to severe compute-mismatch, where simple queries are forced through computationally heavy pipelines. To bridge this gap, we present GenRouter, the first unified workflow routing framework for agentic image generation. We first formulate GenCanvas, standardizing diverse agentic pipelines into a universal set of foundational primitives and executable templates. Operating over this unified space, GenRouter adaptively routes heterogeneous prompts to their optimal workflows via (i) demand profiling, (ii) experience matching, and (iii) Pareto filtering. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that GenRouter achieves superior visual alignment while reducing execution costs by over 95% and latency by 65% compared to heavyweight static pipelines. Furthermore, the system continuously self-evolves via accumulated experience, enabling robust zero-shot generalization that boosts performance and halves computational overhead.

cs.CV↗

MemoryCPT: An End-to-End Agent Memory Framework for Cost-Performance Trade-off

Long-horizon LLM agents require memory systems that recover useful evidence from large interaction histories without passing excessive context to downstream models. Existing memory pipelines often rely on hand-crafted heuristics and repeated LLM calls, which can introduce redundant context and high inference cost. We propose MemoryCPT, an end-to-end trainable agent memory pipeline that spans offline memory construction and online query-conditioned context generation. MemoryCPT consists of two stages: Query-agnostic Distillation (QAD), which distills a modular memory-construction pipeline into a compact model using explicit reasoning traces; and Query-aware Retrieval and Summarization (QAR), which combines reciprocal rank fusion (RRF) with a LoRA-based summarizer trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) under a cost-aware reward. We further introduce Quality per Cost (QPC) to quantify answer quality per unit inference cost. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that MemoryCPT improves the cost-performance trade-off over the evaluated baselines, while ablation and sensitivity analyses characterize the contributions of its components and the effects of key design choices.

cs.IR↗

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

cs.LG↗

Understanding the Anchoring Effect of LLM with Synthetic Data: Existence, Mechanism, and Potential Mitigations

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has advanced natural language processing, yet concerns about cognitive biases are growing. In this paper, we investigate the anchoring effect, a cognitive bias where the mind relies heavily on the first information as anchors to make affected judgments. We explore whether LLMs are affected by anchoring, the underlying mechanisms, and potential mitigation strategies. To facilitate studies at scale on the anchoring effect, we introduce a new dataset, SynAnchors (https://huggingface.co/datasets/TimTargaryen/SynAnchors). Combining refined evaluation metrics, we benchmark current widely used LLMs. Our findings show that LLMs' anchoring bias exists commonly with shallow-layer acting and can not be eliminated by conventional strategies, while reasoning can offer some mitigation.

cs.CL↗

SEDformer: Event-Synchronous Spiking Transformers for Irregular Telemetry Time Series Forecasting

Telemetry streams from large-scale Internet-connected systems (e.g., IoT deployments and online platforms) naturally form an irregular multivariate time series (IMTS) whose accurate forecasting is operationally vital. A closer examination reveals a defining Sparsity-Event Duality (SED) property of IMTS, i.e., long stretches with sparse or no observations are punctuated by short, dense bursts where most semantic events (observations) occur. However, existing Graph- and Transformer-based forecasters ignore SED: pre-alignment to uniform grids with heavy padding violates sparsity by inflating sequences and forcing computation at non-informative steps, while relational recasting weakens event semantics by disrupting local temporal continuity. These limitations motivate a more faithful and natural modeling paradigm for IMTS that aligns with its SED property. We find that Spiking Neural Networks meet this requirement, as they communicate via sparse binary spikes and update in an event-driven manner, aligning naturally with the SED nature of IMTS. Therefore, we present SEDformer, an SED-enhanced Spiking Transformer for telemetry IMTS forecasting that couples: (1) a SED-based Spike Encoder converts raw observations into event synchronous spikes using an Event-Aligned LIF neuron, (2) an Event-Preserving Temporal Downsampling module compresses long gaps while retaining salient firings and (3) a stack of SED-based Spike Transformer blocks enable intra-series dependency modeling with a membrane-based linear attention driven by EA-LIF spiking features. Experiments on public telemetry IMTS datasets show that SEDformer attains state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy while reducing energy and memory usage, providing a natural and efficient path for modeling IMTS.

cs.LG↗

Visual Reasoning over Time Series via Multi-Agent System

Time series analysis underpins many real-world applications, yet existing time-series-specific methods and pretrained large-model-based approaches remain limited in integrating intuitive visual reasoning and generalizing across tasks with adaptive tool usage. To address these limitations, we propose MAS4TS, a tool-driven multi-agent system for general time series tasks, built upon an Analyzer-Reasoner-Executor paradigm that integrates agent communication, visual reasoning, and latent reconstruction within a unified framework. MAS4TS first performs visual reasoning over time series plots with structured priors using a Vision-Language Model to extract temporal structures, and subsequently reconstructs predictive trajectories in latent space. Three specialized agents coordinate via shared memory and gated communication, while a router selects task-specific tool chains for execution. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MAS4TS achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of time series tasks, while exhibiting strong generalization and efficient inference.

cs.AI↗

RAST: A Retrieval Augmented Spatio-Temporal Framework for Traffic Prediction

Traffic prediction is a cornerstone of modern intelligent transportation systems and a critical task in spatio-temporal forecasting. Although advanced Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) and pre-trained models have achieved significant progress in traffic prediction, two key challenges remain: (i) limited contextual capacity when modeling complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and (ii) low predictability at fine-grained spatio-temporal points due to heterogeneous patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), we propose RAST, a universal framework that integrates retrieval-augmented mechanisms with spatio-temporal modeling to address these challenges. Our framework consists of three key designs: 1) Decoupled Encoder and Query Generator to capture decoupled spatial and temporal features and construct a fusion query via residual fusion; 2) Spatio-temporal Retrieval Store and Retrievers to maintain and retrieve vectorized fine-grained patterns; and 3) Universal Backbone Predictor that flexibly accommodates pre-trained STGNNs or simple MLP predictors. Extensive experiments on six real-world traffic networks, including large-scale datasets, demonstrate that RAST achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency.

cs.LG↗

OccamVTS: Distilling Vision Models to 1% Parameters for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is fundamental to diverse applications, with recent approaches leverage large vision models (LVMs) to capture temporal patterns through visual representations. We reveal that while vision models enhance forecasting performance, 99% of their parameters are unnecessary for time series tasks. Through cross-modal analysis, we find that time series align with low-level textural features but not high-level semantics, which can impair forecasting accuracy. We propose OccamVTS, a knowledge distillation framework that extracts only the essential 1% of predictive information from LVMs into lightweight networks. Using pre-trained LVMs as privileged teachers, OccamVTS employs pyramid-style feature alignment combined with correlation and feature distillation to transfer beneficial patterns while filtering out semantic noise. Counterintuitively, this aggressive parameter reduction improves accuracy by eliminating overfitting to irrelevant visual features while preserving essential temporal patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that OccamVTS consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 1% of the original parameters, particularly excelling in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

cs.LG↗

VQualA 2025 Challenge on Face Image Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

Face images play a crucial role in numerous applications; however, real-world conditions frequently introduce degradations such as noise, blur, and compression artifacts, affecting overall image quality and hindering subsequent tasks. To address this challenge, we organized the VQualA 2025 Challenge on Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) as part of the ICCV 2025 Workshops. Participants created lightweight and efficient models (limited to 0.5 GFLOPs and 5 million parameters) for the prediction of Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) on face images with arbitrary resolutions and realistic degradations. Submissions underwent comprehensive evaluations through correlation metrics on a dataset of in-the-wild face images. This challenge attracted 127 participants, with 1519 final submissions. This report summarizes the methodologies and findings for advancing the development of practical FIQA approaches.

cs.CV↗

ST-LoRA: Low-rank Adaptation for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Spatio-temporal forecasting is essential for understanding future dynamics within real-world systems by leveraging historical data from multiple locations. Existing methods often prioritize the development of intricate neural networks to capture the complex dependencies of the data. These methods neglect node-level heterogeneity and face over-parameterization when attempting to model node-specific characteristics. In this paper, we present a novel low-rank adaptation framework for existing spatio-temporal prediction models, termed \model, which alleviates the aforementioned problems through node-level adjustments. Specifically, we introduce the node-adaptive low-rank layer and node-specific predictor, capturing the complex functional characteristics of nodes while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently achieves superior performance across various forecasting models with minimal computational overhead, improving performance by 7% with only 1% additional parameter cost. The source code is available at https://github.com/RWLinno/ST-LoRA.

cs.LG↗