arXiv subjects

Wenwu Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Wenwu Zhu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Grounding Large Language Models as Generalizable Policies in Network Control

Designing generalizable control policies that operate reliably under changing conditions is essential for robust network services in modern digital infrastructure. Yet network control remains dominated by specialized policies built from handcrafted rules or deep learning models, which struggle to generalize under real-world dynamics. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative because of their broad pretrained knowledge and emergent generalization abilities, but their practical adoption in network control is hindered by non-textual observations, constrained action spaces, complex optimization knowledge, and strict real-time requirements. Therefore, we introduce Trailblazer, a systematic framework that combines domain alignment to adapt LLMs for network control with adaptive policy collaboration to reduce inference overhead. Simulations across two heterogeneous network control tasks, adaptive bitrate streaming and cluster job scheduling, show that Trailblazer improves performance over conventional policies by 6.5%-36.6% and 3.5%-41.3%, respectively. Moreover, in a large-scale online A/B test of congestion control on Douyin, Trailblazer outperforms a highly optimized industrial policy, corresponding to a projected reduction of approximately 3,145 hours of platform-wide video stall time per day. Further analysis reveals that effective LLM-based control can be achieved by properly aligning compact LLMs and only invoking them for complex conditions, rather than model scaling or extensive invocation. Together, our results establish an LLM-driven paradigm for designing generalizable network policies and offer practical insights into grounding foundation models for real-world network control.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

An Ordered-Reliability-Bits Chase Decoding Algorithm for BCH Codes

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity ordered-reliability-bits Chase (ORB-Chase) decoding algorithm for BCH codes. The proposed algorithm differs from the traditional Chase algorithm in two key aspects. First, it employs the logical weight as a metric to generate test error patterns (TEPs). Second, it introduces an integer-based early termination criterion that ensures computation can stop at the earliest possible stage if the maximum-likelihood codeword is identified, thereby minimizing unnecessary computational effort. Simulation results for (127, 113, 5) BCH codes and (256, 239, 6) eBCH codes demonstrate that the ORB-Chase algorithm achieves near-ML performance with significantly fewer test patterns compared to the Chase algorithm. Moreover, the average number of Berlekamp-Massey (BM) decoding calls decreases rapidly as $E_b / N_0$ increases, achieving a reduction of up to 98.1% compared to the Chase algorithm at the same BLER performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Asymmetric Generative Recommendation via Kronecker Residual Bridge and Multi-Faceted Hierarchical Quantization

Generative Recommendation (GenRec) models reformulate recommendation as a sequence generation task, representing items as discrete Semantic IDs used symmetrically as both inputs and prediction targets. We identify a critical dual-stage information bottleneck in this design: (1) the Input Bottleneck, where lossy quantization degrades fine-grained semantics, while popularity bias skews learned representations toward frequent items, and (2) the Output Bottleneck, where imprecise discrete targets limit supervision quality. To address these issues, we propose AsymRec, an asymmetric continuous-discrete framework that decouples input and output representations. Specifically, Kronecker Residual Bridge (KRB) maps continuous embeddings into the Transformer's hidden space via a Kronecker projection with a residual pathway, preserving semantic richness and improving generalization to infrequent items. Multi-faceted Hierarchical Quantization (MHQ) constructs high-capacity, structured discrete targets through multi-view and multi-level quantization with semantic regularization, preventing dimensional collapse while retaining fine-grained distinctions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AsymRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative recommenders by an average of 18.7%. Our project page is available at https://github.com/huangb23/AsymRec.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Modularized Dynamic-Granularity Video LLM for Multi-Event Long Video Understanding

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have made significant advancements in various video understanding tasks. However, long-video scenarios remain challenging due to the tension between limited visual token budgets and the need to capture multiple key events. Existing approaches typically process long videos in two stages, i.e., i) select keyframes and ii) perform detailed perception, which exhibit limitations: they lack a modular mechanism for adaptive capacity allocation and self-correction, resulting in unreliable modeling. To tackle these challenges, we propose MoD-VLLM, a novel Modularized Dynamic-Granularity Video LLM framework for multi-event long video understanding, which unifies temporal grounding and semantic understanding iteratively and self-reflectively. Specifically, we propose a Positive-Negative Video Segments Grounding module and a Modularized Dynamic-Granularity Reflection module, which form a closed loop to progressively localize the question-related video segments. The grounding module instructs a Video LLM to distinguish relevant from irrelevant video segments based on the video question. The reflection module employs a modularized scheduler that dynamically selects fine-grained encoding for relevant positive segments to capture detailed perception and coarse-grained encoding for negative segments to maintain global context. We further propose a dynamic-granularity reinforcement learning strategy, allowing MoD-VLLM to learn optimal grounding policies and dynamic granularity visual representation jointly. Moreover, we propose MEventBench, a challenging Multi-Event Long Video Benchmark for complex long video reasoning. Extensive experiments on several long video understanding benchmarks and our MEventBench demonstrate that MoD-VLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Autonomous Video Generation with Counterfactual Controllability for Self-Evolving World Models

Large-scale video generation models are increasingly described as world models because they can learn rich spatiotemporal regularities from visual data. However, we argue that an ideal world model should benefit in a self-evolving generative character. Traditional visually plausible predictions alone are not enough to establish whether an imagined future is physically actionable for a particular embodied agent, failing to provide informative feedback from environments for self-evolving improvement. To realize self-evolving world models, this article proposes the concept of autonomous video generation, which is evaluated through counterfactual controllability, i.e., the ability to i) generate intervention-conditioned futures, ii) bind these future frames to embodiment constraints, iii) verify them under distribution shifts, and iv) distil surviving branches into compact variables for decision-making. We formalize a four-stage closed-loop optimization of Generation, Binding, Verification and Distillation, together with four corresponding evaluation metrics: novelty, consistency, out-of-distribution (OOD) and efficiency. We further discuss two examples, i.e., drones and manipulators, as early embodied testbeds where wind, sensing limits, actuation delay, contact dynamics and recovery constraints can be systematically perturbed and verified. The central claim is that the framework of autonomous video generation for self-evolving world models should not be judged by video fidelity alone, but by whether the generated frames improve valid action under counterfactual interventions and various embodiment constraints.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

OOD-GraphLLM: Graph Large Language Model for Out-of-Distribution Generalized Drug Synergy Prediction

Drug synergy prediction (DSP) aims to identify efficacious drug combinations under various cellular contexts with different targets. However, the continual emergence of novel compounds results in variations in molecular scaffolds and sizes, causing drug synergy data to exhibit out-of-distribution (O.O.D.) shifts with respect to topological structure. Existing works rely on in-distribution (I.D.) assumption, failing to handle the O.O.D. shifts. To solve this problem, we study out-of-distribution generalized drug synergy prediction through a graph large language model for the first time. Nevertheless, O.O.D. generalized DSP is highly non-trivial, posing several challenges: i) how to discover structurally relevant and irrelevant molecular representations with respect to cell targets; ii) how to find the optimal graph neural architectures that accurately calculate molecular representations; and iii) how to jointly leverage molecular structural and semantic information in LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose OOD-GraphLLM, a novel graphLLM framework which is able to accurately predict drug synergy under O.O.D. settings via jointly optimizing molecular graph representation and biomedical semantic language representations in a unified manner. Furthermore, we finetune DrugSyn-LLM, a biomedical LLM, and employ a retrieval-augmented biomedical instruction tuning strategy to align molecular topological information and molecular semantic information with language-based reasoning for O.O.D. generalized DSP. Both the source code (https://github.com/EkkoXiao/Bio-GraphLLM) and released model (https://mn.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/bio-graphllm/) are publicly available, where users are allowed to download model resources and interactively use the system through a web interface.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

WorldArena 2.0: Extending Embodied World Model Benchmarking on Modality, Functionality and Platform

World models have emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling agents to predict action-conditioned future and reason about environmental dynamics. However, existing embodied world model benchmarks are still largely confined to vision-only prediction, offline embodied applications, and simulator-based evaluation, making them insufficient for assessing increasingly comprehensive world models. In this work, we introduce WorldArena 2.0, an expanded benchmark that systematically broadens embodied world model evaluation along three dimensions: modality, functionality, and platform. Along the modality dimension, WorldArena 2.0 extends evaluation from vision-only to visuotactile modalities, enabling assessment of multimodal perception and prediction. Along the functionality dimension, it extends beyond policy evaluation and planning to assess world models as interactive RL environments for policy optimization. Along the platform dimension, it moves beyond simulator-only evaluation to a diverse suite of simulated and real-world robotic settings across multiple embodiments. Under a standardized protocol, WorldArena 2.0 comprehensively evaluates perceptual quality, interactive utility, and cross-platform performance, providing a comprehensive testbed for tracking progress toward embodied world models. The benchmark is available at: https://world-arena.ai.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

A Unified Graph Language Model for Multi-Domain Multi-Task Graph Alignment Instruction Tuning

Leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as graph encoders and aligning the resulting representations with Large Language Models (LLMs) through alignment instruction tuning has become a mainstream paradigm for constructing Graph Language Models (GLMs), combining the generalization ability of LLMs with the structural modeling capacity of GNNs. However, existing GLMs that adopt GNNs as graph encoders largely overlook the problem of aligning GNN-encoded representations across domains and tasks with the LLM token space to obtain unified graph tokens, thereby limiting their ability to generalize across diverse graph data. To bridge this gap, we aim to incorporate a multi-domain, multi-task GNN encoder into GLMs and align its representations with LLMs to enable multi-domain, multi-task graph alignment instruction tuning. This alignment problem remains underexplored and poses two key challenges: 1) learning GNN-encoded representations that are simultaneously generalizable across domains and tasks and well aligned with textual semantics is difficult, due to substantial variations in graph structures, feature distributions, and supervision signals, together with the lack of textual-semantic alignment guidance in task-specific GNN training; 2) diverse graph data and task-specific instructions can exhibit different degrees of compatibility with the LLM token space during instruction tuning, leading to varying alignment difficulty and rendering a fixed alignment strategy suboptimal. To tackle these challenges, we propose UniGraphLM, a Unified Graph Language Model that incorporates a multi-domain, multi-task GNN encoder to learn generalizable graph representations aligned with textual semantics, and then adaptively aligns these representations with the LLM.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Agentic AIs Are the Missing Paradigm for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Foundation Models

Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world settings where distribution shift is the rule rather than the exception. The out-of-distribution (OOD) phenomena they face -- knowledge boundaries, capability ceilings, compositional shifts, and open-ended task variation -- differ in kind from the settings that have shaped prior OOD research, and are further complicated because the pretraining and post-training distributions of modern FMs are often only partially observed. Our position is that OOD for foundation models is a structurally distinct problem that cannot be solved within the prevailing model-centric paradigm, and that agentic systems constitute the missing paradigm required to address it. We defend this claim through four steps. First, we give a stage-aware formalization of OOD that accommodates partially observed multi-stage training distributions. Second, we prove a parameter coverage ceiling: there exist practically relevant inputs that no model-centric method (training-time or test-time) can handle within tolerance $\varepsilon$, for reasons intrinsic to parameter-based representation. Third, we characterize agentic OOD systems by four structural properties -- perception, strategy selection, external action, and closed-loop verification -- and show that they strictly extend the reachable set beyond the ceiling. Fourth, we respond to seven counterarguments, conceding two, and outline a research agenda. We do not claim that agentic methods subsume model-centric ones; we argue that the two are complementary, and that progress on FM-OOD requires explicit recognition of the agentic paradigm as a first-class research direction.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

EvolvingAgent: Curriculum Self-evolving Agent with Continual World Model for Long-Horizon Tasks

Completing Long-Horizon (LH) tasks in open-ended worlds is an important yet difficult problem for embodied agents. Existing approaches suffer from two key challenges: (1) they heavily rely on experiences obtained from human-created data or curricula, failing to autonomously update and select multimodal experiences, and (2) they may encounter catastrophic forgetting issues when faced with new tasks, failing to autonomously update world knowledge. To solve these challenges, this paper presents {\bf EvolvingAgent}, a curriculum self-evolving agent with a continual World Model (WM), which can autonomously complete various LH tasks across environments through self-planning, self-control, and self-reflection, without human intervention. Specifically, EvolvingAgent contains three modules, i.e., i) the experience-driven task planner, which uses an LLM along with multimodal experiences to convert LH tasks into executable sub-tasks; ii) the WM-guided action controller, which leverages WM to generate low-level actions and incorporates a self-verification mechanism to update multimodal experiences; iii) the Curriculum Learning (CL) -based reflector, which implements a two-stage CL algorithm to select multimodal experiences for task-adaptive WM updates. By building a planner-controller-reflector closed-loop dynamic, the continual WM for EvolvingAgent can autonomously update multimodal experiences and world knowledge. We conducted extensive experiments on Minecraft, compared with existing methods, EvolvingAgent can improve 111.74{\%} average success rate, reduce more than 6x ineffective actions, and generalize to the Atari environment with human-level performance.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

AV-Unified: A Unified Framework for Audio-visual Scene Understanding

When humans perceive the world, they naturally integrate multiple audio-visual tasks within dynamic, real-world scenes. However, current works such as event localization, parsing, segmentation and question answering are mostly explored individually, making it challenging to comprehensively understand complex audio-visual scenes and explore inter-task relationships. Hence, we propose \textbf{AV-Unified}, a unified framework that enables joint learning across a wide range of audio-visual scene understanding tasks. AV-Unified standardizes the diverse input-output formats of each task and incorporates a multi-scale spatiotemporal perception network to effectively capture audio-visual associations. Specifically, we unify the inputs and outputs of all supported tasks by converting them into sequences of discrete tokens, establishing a shared representation that allows a single architecture to be trained jointly across heterogeneous varied datasets. Considering the varying temporal granularity of audio-visual events, a multi-scale temporal perception module is designed to capture key cues. Meanwhile, to overcome the lack of auditory supervision in the visual domain, we design a cross-modal guidance-based spatial perception module that models spatial audio-visual associations. Furthermore, task-specific text prompts are employed to enhance the model's adaptability and task-awareness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (e.g., AVE, LLP, MUSIC-AVQA, VGG-SS and AVS) demonstrate the effectiveness of AV-Unified across temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Think with Grounding: Curriculum Reinforced Reasoning with Video Grounding for Long Video Understanding

Long video understanding is challenging due to rich and complicated multimodal clues in long temporal range.Current methods adopt reasoning to improve the model's ability to analyze complex video clues in long videos via text-form reasoning.However,the existing literature suffers from the fact that the text-only reasoning under fixed video context may exacerbate hallucinations since detailed crucial clues are often ignored under limited video context length due to the temporal redundancy of long videos.To address this gap,we propose Video-TwG,a curriculum reinforced framework that employs a novel Think-with-Grounding paradigm,enabling video LLMs to actively decide when to perform on-demand grounding during interleaved text-video reasoning, selectively zooming into question-relevant clips only when necessary.Video-TwG can be trained end-to-end in a straightforward manner, without relying on complex auxiliary modules or heavily annotated reasoning tracesIn detail,we design a Two-stage Reinforced Curriculum Strategy, where the model first learns think-with-grounding behavior on a small short-video GQA dataset with grounding labels,and then scales to diverse general QA data with videos of diverse domains to encourage generalization. Further, to handle complex think-with-grounding reasoning for various kinds of data,we propose TwG-GRPO algorithm which features the fine-grained grounding reward, self-confirmed pseudo reward and accuracy-gated mechanism.Finally,we propose to construct a new TwG-51K dataset that facilitates training. Experiments on Video-MME, LongVideoBench, and MLVU show that Video-TwG consistently outperforms strong LVU baselines.Further ablation validates the necessity of our Two-stage Reinforced Curriculum Strategy and shows our TwG-GRPO better leverages diverse unlabeled data to improve grounding quality and reduce redundant groundings without sacrificing QA performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

WiSparse: Boosting LLM Inference Efficiency with Weight-Aware Mixed Activation Sparsity

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong capabilities but incur high inference costs due to dense computation and memory access. Training-free activation sparsity is a promising approach for efficient LLM inference, yet existing methods often rely solely on activation information and uniform sparsity ratios. This overlooks the critical interplay with weights and inter-block sensitivity variation, leading to suboptimal performance. We identify two key phenomena in modern LLMs: 1) less significant activations may align with highly important weights, and 2) sparsity sensitivity varies non-monotonically across model blocks. We propose Weight-aware Mixed-Granularity Training-free Activation Sparsity (WiSparse), which leverages both activation and weight information for adaptive sparsity allocation. Specifically, we introduce a weight-aware mechanism integrating activation magnitudes with precomputed weight norms to accurately identify salient channels. This is combined with a mixed-granularity allocation scheme: a global budget is distributed across blocks via evolutionary search to protect sensitive regions, then refined within blocks to minimize reconstruction error. We improve sparse kernels and demonstrate effectiveness on three representative models. Notably, at 50% sparsity, WiSparse preserves 97% of Llama3.1's dense performance, surpassing the strongest baseline by 2.23 percentage points while achieving a 21.4% acceleration in end-to-end inference speed. Our research advances the limits of training-free approaches for efficient LLM inference, pushing the boundaries of achievable speedup without training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Models

While world models have emerged as a cornerstone of embodied intelligence by enabling agents to reason about environmental dynamics through action-conditioned prediction, their evaluation remains fragmented. Current evaluation of embodied world models has largely focused on perceptual fidelity (e.g., video generation quality), overlooking the functional utility of these models in downstream decision-making tasks. In this work, we introduce WorldArena, a unified benchmark designed to systematically evaluate embodied world models across both perceptual and functional dimensions. WorldArena assesses models through three dimensions: video perception quality, measured with 16 metrics across six sub-dimensions; embodied task functionality, which evaluates world models as data engines, policy evaluators, and action planners integrating with subjective human evaluation. Furthermore, we propose EWMScore, a holistic metric integrating multi-dimensional performance into a single interpretable index. Through extensive experiments on 14 representative models, we reveal a significant perception-functionality gap, showing that high visual quality does not necessarily translate into strong embodied task capability. WorldArena benchmark with the public leaderboard is released at https://world-arena.ai, providing a framework for tracking progress toward truly functional world models in embodied AI.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Self-evolving Embodied AI

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system formed by agents and their environment through active perception, embodied cognition, and action interaction. Existing embodied AI remains confined to human-crafted setting, in which agents are trained on given memory and construct models for given tasks, enabling fixed embodiments to interact with relatively static environments. Such methods fail in in-the-wild setting characterized by variable embodiments and dynamic open environments. This paper introduces self-evolving embodied AI, a new paradigm in which agents operate based on their changing state and environment with memory self-updating, task self-switching, environment self-prediction, embodiment self-adaptation, and model self-evolution, aiming to achieve continually adaptive intelligence with autonomous evolution. Specifically, we present the definition, framework, components, and mechanisms of self-evolving embodied AI, systematically review state-of-the-art works for realized components, discuss practical applications, and point out future research directions. We believe that self-evolving embodied AI enables agents to autonomously learn and interact with environments in a human-like manner and provide a new perspective toward general artificial intelligence.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2026

Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Graph Foundation Models

Graphs are a fundamental data structure for representing relational information in domains such as social networks, molecular systems, and knowledge graphs. However, graph learning models often suffer from limited generalization when applied beyond their training distributions. In practice, distribution shifts may arise from changes in graph structure, domain semantics, available modalities, or task formulations. To address these challenges, graph foundation models (GFMs) have recently emerged, aiming to learn general-purpose representations through large-scale pretraining across diverse graphs and tasks. In this survey, we review recent progress on GFMs from the perspective of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. We first discuss the main challenges posed by distribution shifts in graph learning and outline a unified problem setting. We then organize existing approaches based on whether they are designed to operate under a fixed task specification or to support generalization across heterogeneous task formulations, and summarize the corresponding OOD handling strategies and pretraining objectives. Finally, we review common evaluation protocols and discuss open directions for future research. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first survey for OOD generalization in GFMs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Aerial World Model for Long-horizon Visual Generation and Navigation in 3D Space

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as powerful embodied agents. One of the core abilities is autonomous navigation in large-scale three-dimensional environments. Existing navigation policies, however, are typically optimized for low-level objectives such as obstacle avoidance and trajectory smoothness, lacking the ability to incorporate high-level semantics into planning. To bridge this gap, we propose ANWM, an aerial navigation world model that predicts future visual observations conditioned on past frames and actions, thereby enabling agents to rank candidate trajectories by their semantic plausibility and navigational utility. ANWM is trained on 4-DoF UAV trajectories and introduces a physics-inspired module: Future Frame Projection (FFP), which projects past frames into future viewpoints to provide coarse geometric priors. This module mitigates representational uncertainty in long-distance visual generation and captures the mapping between 3D trajectories and egocentric observations. Empirical results demonstrate that ANWM significantly outperforms existing world models in long-distance visual forecasting and improves UAV navigation success rates in large-scale environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

TS-DP: Reinforcement Speculative Decoding For Temporal Adaptive Diffusion Policy Acceleration

Diffusion Policy (DP) excels in embodied control but suffers from high inference latency and computational cost due to multiple iterative denoising steps. The temporal complexity of embodied tasks demands a dynamic and adaptable computation mode. Static and lossy acceleration methods, such as quantization, fail to handle such dynamic embodied tasks, while speculative decoding offers a lossless and adaptive yet underexplored alternative for DP. However, it is non-trivial to address the following challenges: how to match the base model's denoising quality at lower cost under time-varying task difficulty in embodied settings, and how to dynamically and interactively adjust computation based on task difficulty in such environments. In this paper, we propose Temporal-aware Reinforcement-based Speculative Diffusion Policy (TS-DP), the first framework that enables speculative decoding for DP with temporal adaptivity. First, to handle dynamic environments where task difficulty varies over time, we distill a Transformer-based drafter to imitate the base model and replace its costly denoising calls. Second, an RL-based scheduler further adapts to time-varying task difficulty by adjusting speculative parameters to maintain accuracy while improving efficiency. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied environments demonstrate that TS-DP achieves up to 4.17 times faster inference with over 94% accepted drafts, reaching an inference frequency of 25 Hz and enabling real-time diffusion-based control without performance degradation.

cs.LG↗