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Wenke Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Wenke Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Noise-Aware and Dynamically Adaptive Federated Defense Framework for SAR Image Target Recognition

As a critical application of computational intelligence in remote sensing, deep learning-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image target recognition facilitates intelligent perception but typically relies on centralized training, where multi-source SAR data are uploaded to a single server, raising privacy and security concerns. Federated learning (FL) provides an emerging computational intelligence paradigm for SAR image target recognition, enabling cross-site collaboration while preserving local data privacy. However, FL confronts critical security risks, where malicious clients can exploit SAR's multiplicative speckle noise to conceal backdoor triggers, severely challenging the robustness of the computational intelligence model. To address this challenge, we propose NADAFD, a noise-aware and dynamically adaptive federated defense framework that integrates frequency-domain, spatial-domain, and client-behavior analyses to counter SAR-specific backdoor threats. Specifically, we introduce a frequency-domain collaborative inversion mechanism to expose cross-client spectral inconsistencies indicative of hidden backdoor triggers. We further design a noise-aware adversarial training strategy that embeds $Γ$-distributed speckle characteristics into mask-guided adversarial sample generation to enhance robustness against both backdoor attacks and SAR speckle noise. In addition, we present a dynamic health assessment module that tracks client update behaviors across training rounds and adaptively adjusts aggregation weights to mitigate evolving malicious contributions. Experiments on MSTAR and OpenSARShip datasets demonstrate that NADAFD achieves higher accuracy on clean test samples and a lower backdoor attack success rate on triggered inputs than existing federated backdoor defenses for SAR target recognition.

cs.CR

ROVR-Open-Dataset: A Large-Scale Depth Dataset for Autonomous Driving

Depth estimation is a fundamental component of spatial perception for autonomous driving and other unmanned systems operating in open urban environments. Existing depth datasets such as KITTI, nuScenes, and DDAD have advanced the field but are limited in diversity and scalability, and benchmark performance on them is approaching saturation. A less discussed constraint is \emph{sensor economics}: the bespoke multi-LiDAR rigs behind these datasets are expensive, power-hungry, and difficult to replicate at fleet scale, which caps the geographic and temporal diversity that any single benchmark can cover. We present ROVR, a large-scale, diverse, and cost-efficient depth dataset designed to capture the complexity of real-world driving. ROVR comprises 200K high-resolution frames across highway, rural, and urban scenarios, spanning day/night cycles and adverse weather conditions, collected across North America, Europe, and Asia. We additionally release the calibration, synchronization, preprocessing, and privacy pipeline so that the platform can be reproduced by third parties. The lightweight acquisition pipeline enables scalable collection, while sparse but statistically sufficient ground truth -- validated by a density ablation -- supports robust model training. Extensive ablation studies further characterize performance across scene types, illumination, weather conditions, and ground-truth sparsity levels, and identify three qualitatively distinct failure modes -- photometric collapse, geometric confusion, and range saturation -- that current architectures share. The dataset, data loaders, calibration and privacy pipelines, and evaluation code are publicly available at https://xiandaguo.net/ROVR-Open-Dataset.

cs.CV

PRISM: Self-Pruning Intrinsic Selection Method for Training-Free Multimodal Data Selection

Visual instruction tuning adapts pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to follow human instructions for real-world applications. However, the rapid growth of these datasets introduces significant redundancy, leading to increased computational costs. Existing methods for selecting instruction data aim to prune this redundancy, but predominantly rely on computationally demanding techniques such as proxy-based inference or training-based metrics. Consequently, the substantial computational costs incurred by these selection processes often exacerbate the very efficiency bottlenecks they are intended to resolve, posing a significant challenge to the scalable and effective tuning of MLLMs. To address this challenge, we first identify a critical, yet previously overlooked, factor: the anisotropy inherent in visual feature distributions. We find that this anisotropy induces a \textit{Global Semantic Drift}, and overlooking this phenomenon is a key factor limiting the efficiency of current data selection methods. Motivated by this insight, we devise \textbf{PRISM}, the first training-free framework for efficient visual instruction selection. PRISM surgically removes the corrupting influence of global background features by modeling the intrinsic visual semantics via implicit re-centering. Empirically, PRISM reduces the end-to-end time for data selection and model tuning to just 30\% of conventional pipelines. More remarkably, it achieves this efficiency while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across eight multimodal and three language understanding benchmarks, culminating in a 101.7\% relative improvement over the baseline. The code is available for access via \href{https://github.com/bibisbar/PRISM}{this repository}.

cs.CV

DriveCache: Action-Aware Caching for Driving World Model Inference

Driving video generation models support autonomous-driving development by predicting controllable future scenes for simulation, planning evaluation, and offline data generation. Diffusion-based driving generators repeatedly evaluate large backbones across denoising steps, which limits generation throughput. Existing diffusion acceleration methods reduce this cost, but general-purpose designs omit driving signals available before generation, such as ego speed and planned trajectories. Experiments across driving motions show that cache tolerance varies with ego translation and rotation, denoising progress, and consecutive reuse length. We propose DriveCache, a training-free, action-aware controller that uses planned motion to allocate reuse across scenes and dynamic programming to place it across denoising steps under a calibrated response budget. A causal drift check refreshes features and replans the remaining schedule when generation departs from calibration. Across three generator configurations, DriveCache improves the overall fidelity-efficiency trade-off over evaluated cache methods. Our code will be publicly available.

cs.AI

Persuasive and Compliant Tendencies Predict Group Decision-Making in Humans and Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in group decision-making with other LLMs and humans. Yet it remains unclear whether their influence is driven by persuasion-oriented expression or compliance-oriented accommodation. We introduce DecisionQE, a questionnaire-based framework for measuring each model's persuasive and compliant tendencies across multiple decision scenarios, and use the Werewolf game as an interactive testbed to study their effects on social influence and group outcomes under asymmetric information. Across experiments, stronger persuasive tendency does not significantly improve group outcomes, whereas compliant-oriented models show more stable advantages in cooperation. We further reveal a dual effect of compliance: it supports cooperation in honest roles but improves concealment in adversarial roles. These findings suggest that LLM group interactions reveal not only task outcomes, but also measurable patterns of intrinsic behavioral tendency. LLMs can therefore serve as a lens for sociological observation of language-mediated interaction, while highlighting the need to incorporate behavioral tendencies into safety evaluation of LLM systems.

cs.AI

ReflectRL: Learning from Golden Negative Trajectories via Reflective-to-Direct Reasoning

On-policy training has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, and is often enhanced by golden trajectories from stronger expert models. However, when the expert fails on harder problems, existing trajectory-guided methods lose their main source of supervision, and these failed trajectories are typically discarded as negative samples. We argue that such failures, which we call Golden Negative Trajectories, can still provide valuable reasoning signals when treated not as demonstrations to imitate, but as flawed trajectories to reflect upon. We identify a Reflection Advantage: for hard problems, reflecting on a flawed trajectory can be easier and more effective than solving the problem directly from scratch. Motivated by this, we propose ReflectRL, a lightweight plug-and-play framework that learns from Golden Negative Trajectories during on-policy training. ReflectRL first uses these trajectories to elicit Reflective Reasoning, then applies Reflective-to-Direct Policy Transition to transfer the acquired reasoning behavior back to Direct Reasoning. Experiments across 9 benchmarks, 4 LLM backbones, and 4 on-policy training methods show that ReflectRL consistently improves reasoning performance with minimal overhead.

cs.AI

Mitigating Visual Degradation in MLLMs via Spatial-Spectral Visual Anchor Learning

Despite the progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), they continue to exhibit deficiencies in visual perception. Following visual instruction tuning, internal MLLM representations rapidly deviate from their original semantic states during inference, causing severe information degradation. While existing methods attempt to leverage external vision foundation models (VFMs) to align internal representations, we find that direct alignment with VFMs enhances visual semantics but fails to mitigate representation deviation. To address this, we propose Spatial-Spectral Visual Anchor Learning (SSVAL). The core of SSVAL is Visual Anchor Prompt Injection (VAPI), which introduces prompts that absorb rich knowledge from external VFMs during training, enabling them to serve as stable visual anchors that mitigate representation deviation during inference. Additionally, we incorporate auxiliary spatial and frequency-domain representation alignment losses to provide complementary vision-specific supervision at intermediate LLM layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSVAL significantly outperforms existing methods. Code are available on our \href{https://msls38.github.io/SSVAL/}{project page}.

cs.CV

TrustVLA: Mechanism-Guided Inference-Time Defense Against Vision-Language-Action Backdoors

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are deployed through pipelines that end users cannot audit, and a poisoned VLA can behave normally on clean observations while a small visual trigger redirects a long-horizon robot policy before any failure becomes observable. Existing vision or language defenses rarely explain what a triggered VLA representation looks like or how to recover behavior without retraining. We study this gap through two independently proposed VLA attacks from groups with distinct injection strategies, BadVLA and INFUSE; the latter persists after downstream clean adaptation. Across the evaluated poisoned models, we identify a recurring internal mechanism: a \emph{compact causal footprint}, namely a small visual support that is attention-seeded, spatially compact, and \emph{causal} in a precise sense -- masking it returns a clean-calibrated evidence-evolution score to the normal operating region. This footprint motivates TrustVLA, a mechanism-guided inference-time defense that adapts the Dirichlet evidence framework from trusted classification to monitor per-token, per-layer epistemic uncertainty in VLA policies. With only a small clean calibration set, TrustVLA (i)~detects abnormal evidence evolution, (ii)~localizes the compact support by counterfactual mechanism-score drop, and (iii)~recovers the observation by localized inpainting. Across OpenVLA/LIBERO and $π_{0.5}$ transfer evaluations, TrustVLA reduces attack success while preserving clean-task performance, providing a retraining-free, mechanism-guided defense for visual-triggered VLA backdoors.

cs.RO

Behavioural Signatures of Risk-Sensitive Decision-Making in Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision support, it is important to understand whether their choices under uncertainty exhibit stable and interpretable behavioural regularities. Human decision-making combines relatively persistent risk preferences with context-dependent adjustment, yet it remains unclear whether analogous behavioural structure can be observed in LLM-based decision systems. Here we examine this question using a controlled multi-model framework based on no-limit Texas Hold'em, where behaviour is quantified by Participation, measuring voluntary engagement in uncertain opportunities, and Proactiveness, measuring pre-flop risk escalation. Across homogeneous self-play and heterogeneous mixed-model interactions, frontier LLMs exhibit stable, model-specific risk profiles, forming a spectrum from conservative to aggressive decision styles. These profiles remain largely robust under changing opponent composition, while the most conservative and most aggressive models diverge further in mixed settings. Under global risk pressure and personal resource constraint, models adapt in structured but heterogeneous ways, ranging from broad behavioural contraction to selective de-escalation and near-invariant behaviour. These findings suggest that LLMs differ not only in baseline risk disposition, but also in the risk signals they respond to and the flexibility with which they adjust, providing a behavioural basis for auditing risk-sensitive decision-making in interactive settings. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/XuankunRong/AgentTexasPoker.

cs.AI

Switch-Reasoner: Learn When to Think in Multitask Mixtures via Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often follow a fixed Think-then-Answer paradigm, which is inefficient in heterogeneous multitask settings because simple inputs may not require explicit reasoning while difficult ones can benefit substantially from it. Learning when to think is also unstable during post-training, where imbalanced rollouts can drive the model toward always-thinking or always-direct behavior. We propose Switch-Reasoner, a GRPO-based framework that learns to adaptively select reasoning modes for MLLMs. It treats thinking as a virtual tool invocation and allows the model to either answer directly or invoke explicit reasoning before answering. To stabilize this decision, we introduce a dual-level regulation mechanism that balances the overall use of Thinking Mode and Direct Mode while providing sample-level supervision based on the relative benefit of the two choices. Experiments on 11 multimodal tasks show that Switch-Reasoner reduces unnecessary reasoning while maintaining strong performance, achieving a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

cs.CV

EMO-R3: Reflective Reinforcement Learning for Emotional Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual reasoning and understanding tasks but still struggle to capture the complexity and subjectivity of human emotions. Existing approaches based on supervised fine-tuning often suffer from limited generalization and poor interpretability, while reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization fail to align with the intrinsic characteristics of emotional cognition. To address these challenges, we propose Reflective Reinforcement Learning for Emotional Reasoning (EMO-R3), a framework designed to enhance the emotional reasoning ability of MLLMs. Specifically, we introduce Structured Emotional Thinking to guide the model to perform step-by-step emotional reasoning in a structured and interpretable manner, and design a Reflective Emotional Reward that enables the model to re-evaluate its reasoning based on visual-text consistency and emotional coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMO-R3 significantly improves both the interpretability and emotional intelligence of MLLMs, achieving superior performance across multiple visual emotional understanding benchmarks.

cs.AI

Cross-Resolution Semantic Transfer for Robust Text-to-Image Retrieval in Low-Resolution Surveillance

Text-to-image person re-identification (TIPR) retrieves target persons using natural language descriptions. However, existing methods largely overlook resolution variance in real-world surveillance. They characterize cross-resolution TIPR through two coupled failure modes: Evidence Reliability Collapse (ERC), where degraded visual tokens become unreliable for grounding fine-grained text, and Ranking Distribution Drift (RDD), where mixed-resolution galleries distort similarity neighborhoods and destabilize retrieval rankings. To address this challenge, we propose Cross-Resolution Semantic Transfer (CRST), a CLIP-style framework with three modules: resolution-conditioned reasoning, text-guided refinement and CR-RDA. Resolution-conditioned reasoning estimates token reliability to suppress corrupted evidence. Text-guided refinement injects semantic priors to recover discriminative cues. CR-RDA transfers HR neighborhood geometry to stabilize LR ranking under mixed resolutions. Experiments on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid show that CRST improves ultra-low-resolution Rank-1 and mAP on average by 5.7% and 5.3%, while stabilizing mixed-resolution retrieval without sacrificing high-resolution accuracy.The code will be made publicly available.

cs.CV

ReconMIL: Synergizing Latent Space Reconstruction with Bi-Stream Mamba for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Whole slide image (WSI) analysis heavily relies on multiple instance learning (MIL). While recent methods benefit from large-scale foundation models and advanced sequence modeling to capture long-range dependencies, they still struggle with two critical issues. First, directly applying frozen, task-agnostic features often leads to suboptimal separability due to the domain gap with specific histological tasks. Second, relying solely on global aggregators can cause over-smoothing, where sparse but critical diagnostic signals are overshadowed by the dominant background context. In this paper, we present ReconMIL, a novel framework designed to bridge this domain gap and balance global-local feature aggregation. Our approach introduces a Latent Space Reconstruction module that adaptively projects generic features into a compact, task-specific manifold, improving boundary delineation. To prevent information dilution, we develop a bi-stream architecture combining a Mamba-based global stream for contextual priors and a CNN-based local stream to preserve subtle morphological anomalies. A scale-adaptive selection mechanism dynamically fuses these two streams, determining when to rely on overall architecture versus local saliency. Evaluations across multiple diagnostic and survival prediction benchmarks show that ReconMIL consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, effectively localizing fine-grained diagnostic regions while suppressing background noise. Visualization results confirm the models superior ability to localize diagnostic regions by effectively balancing global structure and local granularity.

eess.IV

Co-policy: Responsive Human-Robot Co-Creation for Musical Performances

Art has long stood as a pivotal expression of human creativity. Embodied artificial intelligence offers a route for generative models to participate in that creativity through physical action rather than disembodied digital content. In robotic music co-creation, it is challenging to connect semantic musical understanding with real-time and physically executable performance. We present Co-policy, a framework for human-robot musical co-creation that separates semantic intent grounding, constrained musical variation, and visuomotor execution. To ground musical semantics, Co-policy uses pre-inference semantic anchors and a fine-tuned Qwen-vl planner (F-Qwen) to transform speech, live musical seeds, and visual observations into structured co-creation plans. To support low-latency execution, Co-policy introduces a Gaussian-Mixture Visuomotor Policy (GMP), implemented as a conditional mixture-density policy that maps target notes and visual context to multimodal robot actions in a single forward pass. Unlike robotic playback systems that merely reproduce user-specified notes, Co-policy generates complementary musical responses under both musical and physical constraints. Real-robot chime experiments, ablations, and expert evaluation show improved intent alignment, execution accuracy, and response frequency over diffusion-policy and ablated baselines, supporting physically grounded action generation as a key requirement for embodied human-AI co-creation.

cs.RO

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7--3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

cs.CV

Shift-Dependent Asymmetry: Orthogonal Inverse Low-Rank Adaptation for Federated Medical Segmentation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient federated fine-tuning of segmentation foundation models for medical imaging. However, most federated LoRA methods adopt a uniform aggregation rule, which breaks under the encoder-decoder asymmetry in medical segmentation: the encoder is dominated by appearance shifts, while the decoder is dominated by supervision variations. This mismatch entangles shared anatomy with site-specific biases and harms generalization. To address this, we propose Inverse Asymmetric Tuning (IAT). IAT aligns adaptation with heterogeneity sources by personalizing module-specific components in the encoder to absorb appearance shifts and in the decoder to accommodate site-dependent supervision, while retaining a shared pathway for transferable consensus. However, structural separation alone is insufficient under LoRA's bilinear parameterization, where multiplicative coupling can still cause site-specific updates to leak into the shared direction. We therefore introduce a Subspace Orthogonality Regularizer that penalizes shared-local collinearity in the effective update space, mitigating leakage without extra communication. Experiments show consistent improvements over strong federated LoRA and parameter-efficient FL baselines.

cs.CV

BraveGuard: From Open-World Threats to Safer Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents extend language models from text generation to sustained interaction with files, terminals, browsers, and external tools. This shift creates safety risks that are difficult to detect from isolated prompts or final responses, because harm often emerges only through multi-step execution traces whose individual actions appear locally benign. We introduce BraveGuard, a self-evolving defense framework for training guard models from open-world threat signals and realistic agent trajectories. BraveGuard mines recent research sources to identify emerging risks and attack patterns, instantiates them as executable computer-use tasks, collects agent rollouts, and derives trajectory-level supervision for guard model training. As new threats and validation failures appear, the pipeline can be repeated, yielding an adaptive defense loop rather than a static, benchmark-driven training process. We instantiate BraveGuard by training multiple guard backbones, including Qwen3-Guard and Llama-Guard variants, and evaluate the resulting guards on trajectory-level agent-safety benchmarks. BraveGuard consistently improves safety detection across computer-use trajectories. On AgentHazard, it substantially improves detection accuracy over off-the-shelf guard models, with accuracy increasing from 38.79% to 82.38% under the averaged guard-model setting. These results show that guard supervision grounded in open-world threat discovery and realistic agent execution can improve safety monitoring beyond fixed taxonomies and synthetic prompt-level data. BraveGuard offers a scalable path toward adaptive defenses for computer-use agents facing evolving real-world risks.

cs.CR

EchoRL: Reinforcement Learning via Rollout Echoing

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards is an effective route for post-training to strengthen the reasoning capability of large language models. However, as training proceeds, the learning signal can collapse thus makes the training gain become marginal and ineffective. Specifically, a growing fraction of prompts' rollouts become advantage-degenerated: all the self-generated rollouts show verified-success, making the standard deviation over their rewards be zero; accordingly each rollout's advantage becomes degenerated (zero) as well. Given such rollouts' advantages, the policy-gradient for model optimization eventually vanishes, capping the training performance. We argue that some of these rollouts still contain valuable learning signals but unfortunately omitted with the existing RLVR methods. In this paper, inspired through analyzing the entropy pattern behind golden trajectories produced by external expert models, we propose EchoRL for better exploiting the advantage-degenerated rollouts to further improve the training performance. EchoRL is a lightweight module that first identifies an EchoClip from verified-success rollouts based on their step-level entropy values, and then feeds this clip back as an auxiliary supervision signal in the RL objective. Extensive experiments across 10 benchmarks, 5 LLM backbones, and 4 popular RLVR post-training methods demonstrate that EchoRL consistently improves RLVR post-training with minimal overhead.

cs.LG