arXiv subjects

Wenliang Zhong

Publications and source records attributed to Wenliang Zhong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Who Holds the Pen? Let Specifications, Not Agents, Sign Off

Large language model agents increasingly combine generation, decision-making, execution, and self-evaluation within a single agentic loop. Although they operate under external specifications such as task instructions, guidelines, output schemas, and reusable skills, these specifications typically remain context for the same model that acts and declares completion, leaving no independent specification authority boundary. We identify two resulting gaps. The understanding--execution gap arises when a requirement is understood but not satisfied in execution; the state--authority gap arises when an agent's interpretation or completion claim does not establish the required state. On SkillsBench, using only agent-visible prompts, workspace information, and injected skill specifications, we extract 509 source-grounded task directions. Across seven models, only 79.6%--86.4% are satisfied, while completion-claim rates exceed official evaluator pass rates by 28.7--37.9 percentage points. We therefore separate agent proposals from authoritative state. Agents may plan, act, and request completion, but only admissible evidence from qualified providers may establish specification-governed state. SpecHarness operationalizes this principle by compiling visible specifications into source-linked obligations and governing execution and finalization through versioned obligation state. Verifiable requirements are mediated or validated at runtime, while ambiguous or subjective requirements remain advisory. Experiments on guideline-following and artifact-generation tasks show that specifications can serve not merely as behavioral guidance, but as authority over compliant execution and completion.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Histopathology Multi-modal Embedding for Pathology Composed Retrieval

To overcome the black-box nature of predictive AI and the hallucination risks of generative models, retrieval-based models offer an interpretable, evidence-based paradigm for pathology clinical workflow. However, real-world clinical queries are inherently interleaved (e.g., pathology images and text). Current dual-encoders suffer from an \textbf{Architectural Mismatch}, lacking the mechanism to fuse such composed queries. To address this, we formalize the task of Pathology Composed Retrieval (PCR). While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer deep-fusion capabilities, directly applying them exposes a \textbf{Task Mismatch} and a \textbf{Domain Mismatch}. To resolve these challenges, we propose HOMIE, a model-agnostic adaptation framework that transforms any generative MLLM into a specialized pathology retrieval expert. Evaluated on our newly introduced PCR Benchmark, a lightweight 2B-parameter HOMIE variant substantially outperforms existing paradigms, surpassing specialized 7B pathology MLLMs and dual-encoders by large margins on composed retrieval, while maintaining strong performance on traditional simple retrieval. The project page is available at https://qfchou.github.io/HOMIE_page/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Universal Guideline-Driven Image Clustering via a Hybrid LLM Agent

Unifying image clustering across different clustering scenarios remains challenging due to fundamental gaps among tasks. We introduce a Guideline-Driven Image Clustering Agent, the first universal framework that bridges these gaps through textual guidelines. To incorporate complex guidelines without task-specific training, we propose Generative Concept Proxy Modeling, which generates guideline-aware embeddings via concept proxy extraction. For scenarios requiring automatic cluster discovery, we introduce LLM Traversal based on Minimum Spanning Tree that selectively applies LLM reasoning for complex semantic judgments. Our method generalizes across diverse clustering scenarios spanning from general to fine-grained categorization, from global to local criteria, and from balanced to long-tail distributions. Our framework consistently outperforms specialized methods across diverse clustering tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Optimizing Few-Step Generation with Adaptive Matching Distillation

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) is a powerful acceleration paradigm, yet its stability is often compromised in Forbidden Zone, regions where the real teacher provides unreliable guidance while the fake teacher exerts insufficient repulsive force. In this work, we propose a unified optimization framework that reinterprets prior art as implicit strategies to avoid these corrupted regions. Based on this insight, we introduce Adaptive Matching Distillation (AMD), a self-correcting mechanism that utilizes reward proxies to explicitly detect and escape Forbidden Zones. AMD dynamically prioritizes corrective gradients via structural signal decomposition and introduces Repulsive Landscape Sharpening to enforce steep energy barriers against failure mode collapse. Extensive experiments across image and video generation tasks (e.g., SDXL, Wan2.1) and rigorous benchmarks (e.g., VBench, GenEval) demonstrate that AMD significantly enhances sample fidelity and training robustness. For instance, AMD improves the HPSv2 score on SDXL from 30.64 to 31.25, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. These findings validate that explicitly rectifying optimization trajectories within Forbidden Zones is essential for pushing the performance ceiling of few-step generative models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LIVEditor-14B: Lightning Unified Video Editing via In-Context Sparse Attention

Video editing has evolved toward In-Context Learning (ICL) paradigms, yet the resulting quadratic attention costs create a critical computational bottleneck. In this work, we propose In-context Sparse Attention (ISA), the first near-lossless empirical sparse framework tailored for ICL video editing. Our design is grounded in two key insights: first, context tokens exhibit significantly lower saliency than source tokens; second, we theoretically prove and empirically validate that Query sharpness correlates with approximation error. Motivated by these findings, ISA implements an efficient pre-selection strategy to prune redundant context, followed by a dynamic query grouping mechanism that routes high-error queries to full attention and low-error ones to a computationally efficient 0-th order Taylor sparse attention. Furthermore, we build \textbf{\texttt{LIVEditor-14B}} , a novel lightning video editing model via ISA and a proposed video-editing data pipeline that curated a 1.7M high-quality dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LIVEditor-14B achieves a $\sim$60% reduction in attention-module latency while surpassing state-of-the-art methods across EditVerseBench, IVE-Bench, and VIE-Bench, delivering near-lossless acceleration without compromising visual fidelity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Exploring Data-Free LoRA Transferability for Video Diffusion Models

Video diffusion models leveraging step distillation or causal distillation have achieved remarkable performance. However, adapting existing LoRAs to these variants remains a critical challenge due to weight space mismatches. We observe that direct application leads to style degradation and structural collapse, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we delve into the weight space and identify that the incompatibility stems from spectral interference within shared functional clusters defined over singular subspaces. Specifically, our analysis reveals that while both paradigms respect spectral rigidity, they establish conflicting routing pathways that clash through constructive overload or destructive cancellation. To address this issue, we propose Cluster-Aware Spectral Arbitration (CASA), a data-free framework that dynamically arbitrates between safeguarding the target's manifold and restoring LoRA alignment based on spectral density. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CASA effectively mitigates artifacts and revives LoRA functionality. Our code is available at https://github.com/Noahwangyuchen/CASA

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

scpFormer: A Foundation Model for Unified Representation and Integration of the Single-Cell Proteomics

The integration of single-cell proteomic data is often hindered by the fragmented nature of targeted antibody panels. To address this limitation, we introduce scpFormer, a transformer-based foundation model designed for single-cell proteomics. Pre-trained on over 390 million cells, scpFormer replaces standard index-based tokenization with a continuous, sequence-anchored approach. By combining Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM) with value-aware expression embeddings, it dynamically maps variable panels into a shared semantic space without artificial discretization. We demonstrate that scpFormer generates global cell representations that perform competitively in large-scale batch integration and unsupervised clustering. Moreover, its open-vocabulary architecture facilitates in silico panel expansion, assisting in the reconstruction of biological manifolds in sparse clinical datasets. Finally, this learned protein co-expression logic is transferable to bulk-omics tasks, supporting applications like cancer drug response prediction. scpFormer provides a versatile, panel-agnostic framework to facilitate scalable biomarker discovery and precision oncology.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2026

LiveMCPBench: Can Agents Navigate an Ocean of MCP Tools?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools. Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current evaluation: they typically assume single-server settings and directly inject tools into the model's context, bypassing the challenges of large-scale retrieval and multi-tool composition. To bridge this gap, we propose LiveMCPBench, which evaluates 95 real-world daily tasks explicitly constructed to stress diverse tools and scaled multi-server routing. The benchmark includes a ready-to-deploy tool suite of 70 servers with 527 tools, ensuring reproducibility without scattered API configuration. We further introduce an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework that directly verifies task outcomes, handling dynamic data sources and multiple valid solution paths. We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and observe a substantial performance gap: while Claude-Sonnet-4 reaches 78.95% task success, most models achieve only 30-50%. Our analysis reveals that the active tool composition strongly correlates with task success, whereas retrieval errors account for nearly half of all failures, highlighting retrieval as the dominant bottleneck. Together, these results provide the first large-scale, reproducible diagnosis of MCP agent capabilities and point towards future research on improving retrieval robustness and encouraging effective tool composition. Our code and data are publicly available at https://icip-cas.github.io/LiveMCPBench.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PISA: Piecewise Sparse Attention Is Wiser for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers are fundamental for video and image generation, but their efficiency is bottlenecked by the quadratic complexity of attention. While block sparse attention accelerates computation by attending only critical key-value blocks, it suffers from degradation at high sparsity by discarding context. In this work, we discover that attention scores of non-critical blocks exhibit distributional stability, allowing them to be approximated accurately and efficiently rather than discarded, which is essentially important for sparse attention design. Motivated by this key insight, we propose PISA, a training-free Piecewise Sparse Attention that covers the full attention span with sub-quadratic complexity. Unlike the conventional keep-or-drop paradigm that directly drop the non-critical block information, PISA introduces a novel exact-or-approximate strategy: it maintains exact computation for critical blocks while efficiently approximating the remainder through block-wise Taylor expansion. This design allows PISA to serve as a faithful proxy to full attention, effectively bridging the gap between speed and quality. Experimental results demonstrate that PISA achieves 1.91 times and 2.57 times speedups on Wan2.1-14B and Hunyuan-Video, respectively, while consistently maintaining the highest quality among sparse attention methods. Notably, even for image generation on FLUX, PISA achieves a 1.2 times acceleration without compromising visual quality. Code is available at: https://github.com/xie-lab-ml/piecewise-sparse-attention.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

EmbedAgent: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Embedded System Development

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in various tasks, yet few benchmarks assess their capabilities in embedded system development. In this paper, we introduce EmbedAgent, a paradigm designed to simulate real-world roles in embedded system development, such as Embedded System Programmer, Architect, and Integrator. This paradigm enables LLMs to be tested in tasks that bridge the gap between digital and physical systems, allowing for a more comprehensive assessment of their capabilities. To evaluate LLMs on these tasks, we propose Embedbench, the first comprehensive benchmark for embedded system programming, circuit design, and cross-platform migration. Embedbench consists of 126 cases, covering 9 electronic components across 3 hardware platforms. Through extensive experiments on 10 mainstream LLMs, we uncover several key findings. Surprisingly, despite the simplicity of the cases, DeepSeek-R1 achieves only a 55.6% pass@1 rate when provided with schematic information, and 50.0% when tasked with generating the schematics itself. In the cross-platform migration tasks, LLMs show relatively strong performance with MicroPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico (with the top model achieving 73.8% pass@1), but perform poorly on ESP-IDF, where the best model reaches only 29.4% pass@1. Interestingly, we observe that general-purpose chat LLMs like DeepSeek-V3 often fail to utilize relevant pre-trained knowledge in this domain, while reasoning LLMs tend to overthink and overlook efficient knowledge during pretraining. Based on these insights, we propose two strategies: retrieval augmented generation and compiler feedback-to enhance LLM performance. These strategies result in significant improvements, with Deepseek-R1 reaching a 65.1% pass@1 with correct schematics, and 53.1% without. Additionally, the accuracy of the Arduino to ESP32 migration task improves from 21.4% to 27.8%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

M^2VAE: Multi-Modal Multi-View Variational Autoencoder for Cold-start Item Recommendation

Cold-start item recommendation is a significant challenge in recommendation systems, particularly when new items are introduced without any historical interaction data. While existing methods leverage multi-modal content to alleviate the cold-start issue, they often neglect the inherent multi-view structure of modalities, the distinction between shared and modality-specific features. In this paper, we propose Multi-Modal Multi-View Variational AutoEncoder (M^2VAE), a generative model that addresses the challenges of modeling common and unique views in attribute and multi-modal features, as well as user preferences over single-typed item features. Specifically, we generate type-specific latent variables for item IDs, categorical attributes, and image features, and use Product-of-Experts (PoE) to derive a common representation. A disentangled contrastive loss decouples the common view from unique views while preserving feature informativeness. To model user inclinations, we employ a preference-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to adaptively fuse representations. We further incorporate co-occurrence signals via contrastive learning, eliminating the need for pretraining. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

FedBiF: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning via Bits Freezing

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative model training without sharing local data. Despite its advantages, FL suffers from substantial communication overhead, which can affect training efficiency. Recent efforts have mitigated this issue by quantizing model updates to reduce communication costs. However, most existing methods apply quantization only after local training, introducing quantization errors into the trained parameters and potentially degrading model accuracy. In this paper, we propose Federated Bit Freezing (FedBiF), a novel FL framework that directly learns quantized model parameters during local training. In each communication round, the server first quantizes the model parameters and transmits them to the clients. FedBiF then allows each client to update only a single bit of the multi-bit parameter representation, freezing the remaining bits. This bit-by-bit update strategy reduces each parameter update to one bit while maintaining high precision in parameter representation. Extensive experiments are conducted on five widely used datasets under both IID and Non-IID settings. The results demonstrate that FedBiF not only achieves superior communication compression but also promotes sparsity in the resulting models. Notably, FedBiF attains accuracy comparable to FedAvg, even when using only 1 bit-per-parameter (bpp) for uplink and 3 bpp for downlink communication. The code is available at https://github.com/Leopold1423/fedbif-tpds25.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Put Teacher in Student's Shoes: Cross-Distillation for Ultra-compact Model Compression Framework

In the era of mobile computing, deploying efficient Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in resource-restricted edge settings presents significant challenges, particularly in environments requiring strict privacy compliance, real-time responsiveness, and diverse multi-tasking capabilities. These challenges create a fundamental need for ultra-compact models that maintain strong performance across various NLP tasks while adhering to stringent memory constraints. To this end, we introduce Edge ultra-lIte BERT framework (EI-BERT) with a novel cross-distillation method. EI-BERT efficiently compresses models through a comprehensive pipeline including hard token pruning, cross-distillation and parameter quantization. Specifically, the cross-distillation method uniquely positions the teacher model to understand the student model's perspective, ensuring efficient knowledge transfer through parameter integration and the mutual interplay between models. Through extensive experiments, we achieve a remarkably compact BERT-based model of only 1.91 MB - the smallest to date for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. This ultra-compact model has been successfully deployed across multiple scenarios within the Alipay ecosystem, demonstrating significant improvements in real-world applications. For example, it has been integrated into Alipay's live Edge Recommendation system since January 2024, currently serving the app's recommendation traffic across \textbf{8.4 million daily active devices}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Towards Principled Learning for Re-ranking in Recommender Systems

As the final stage of recommender systems, re-ranking presents ordered item lists to users that best match their interests. It plays such a critical role and has become a trending research topic with much attention from both academia and industry. Recent advances of re-ranking are focused on attentive listwise modeling of interactions and mutual influences among items to be re-ranked. However, principles to guide the learning process of a re-ranker, and to measure the quality of the output of the re-ranker, have been always missing. In this paper, we study such principles to learn a good re-ranker. Two principles are proposed, including convergence consistency and adversarial consistency. These two principles can be applied in the learning of a generic re-ranker and improve its performance. We validate such a finding by various baseline methods over different datasets.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Compositional Image Retrieval via Instruction-Aware Contrastive Learning

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

End-to-end Learnable Clustering for Intent Learning in Recommendation

Intent learning, which aims to learn users' intents for user understanding and item recommendation, has become a hot research spot in recent years. However, existing methods suffer from complex and cumbersome alternating optimization, limiting performance and scalability. To this end, we propose a novel intent learning method termed \underline{ELCRec}, by unifying behavior representation learning into an \underline{E}nd-to-end \underline{L}earnable \underline{C}lustering framework, for effective and efficient \underline{Rec}ommendation. Concretely, we encode user behavior sequences and initialize the cluster centers (latent intents) as learnable neurons. Then, we design a novel learnable clustering module to separate different cluster centers, thus decoupling users' complex intents. Meanwhile, it guides the network to learn intents from behaviors by forcing behavior embeddings close to cluster centers. This allows simultaneous optimization of recommendation and clustering via mini-batch data. Moreover, we propose intent-assisted contrastive learning by using cluster centers as self-supervision signals, further enhancing mutual promotion. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of ELCRec from six perspectives. Compared to the runner-up, ELCRec improves NDCG@5 by 8.9\% and reduces computational costs by 22.5\% on the Beauty dataset. Furthermore, due to the scalability and universal applicability, we deploy this method on the industrial recommendation system with 130 million page views and achieve promising results. The codes are available on GitHub (https://github.com/yueliu1999/ELCRec). A collection (papers, codes, datasets) of deep group recommendation/intent learning methods is available on GitHub (https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Group-Recommendation).

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Identify Then Recommend: Towards Unsupervised Group Recommendation

Group Recommendation (GR), which aims to recommend items to groups of users, has become a promising and practical direction for recommendation systems. This paper points out two issues of the state-of-the-art GR models. (1) The pre-defined and fixed number of user groups is inadequate for real-time industrial recommendation systems, where the group distribution can shift dynamically. (2) The training schema of existing GR methods is supervised, necessitating expensive user-group and group-item labels, leading to significant annotation costs. To this end, we present a novel unsupervised group recommendation framework named \underline{I}dentify \underline{T}hen \underline{R}ecommend (\underline{ITR}), where it first identifies the user groups in an unsupervised manner even without the pre-defined number of groups, and then two pre-text tasks are designed to conduct self-supervised group recommendation. Concretely, at the group identification stage, we first estimate the adaptive density of each user point, where areas with higher densities are more likely to be recognized as group centers. Then, a heuristic merge-and-split strategy is designed to discover the user groups and decision boundaries. Subsequently, at the self-supervised learning stage, the pull-and-repulsion pre-text task is proposed to optimize the user-group distribution. Besides, the pseudo group recommendation pre-text task is designed to assist the recommendations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of ITR on both user recommendation (e.g., 22.22\% NDCG@5 $\uparrow$) and group recommendation (e.g., 22.95\% NDCG@5 $\uparrow$). Furthermore, we deploy ITR on the industrial recommender and achieve promising results.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

PathM3: A Multimodal Multi-Task Multiple Instance Learning Framework for Whole Slide Image Classification and Captioning

In the field of computational histopathology, both whole slide images (WSIs) and diagnostic captions provide valuable insights for making diagnostic decisions. However, aligning WSIs with diagnostic captions presents a significant challenge. This difficulty arises from two main factors: 1) Gigapixel WSIs are unsuitable for direct input into deep learning models, and the redundancy and correlation among the patches demand more attention; and 2) Authentic WSI diagnostic captions are extremely limited, making it difficult to train an effective model. To overcome these obstacles, we present PathM3, a multimodal, multi-task, multiple instance learning (MIL) framework for WSI classification and captioning. PathM3 adapts a query-based transformer to effectively align WSIs with diagnostic captions. Given that histopathology visual patterns are redundantly distributed across WSIs, we aggregate each patch feature with MIL method that considers the correlations among instances. Furthermore, our PathM3 overcomes data scarcity in WSI-level captions by leveraging limited WSI diagnostic caption data in the manner of multi-task joint learning. Extensive experiments with improved classification accuracy and caption generation demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both WSI classification and captioning task.

cs.CV↗