arXiv subjects

Xiaoli Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoli Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Task-Driven 3D Printability Assistance via Geometry- and Knowledge-Grounded LLM Reasoning

Printability assessment in additive manufacturing is typically conducted at the geometry level before printing to determine whether a computer-aided design (CAD) model or stereolithography (STL) file can be successfully fabricated. Task suitability, in contrast, is usually evaluated after printing to determine whether the fabricated part satisfies the requirements of its intended use. As a result, for non-expert users to print functional parts, unsuitable material or process choices may only be identified after fabrication, leading to repeated printing, material waste, and user frustration. To address this challenge, this paper leverages the reasoning and language-understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs), while grounding the reasoning with geometry evidence and structured material/printer knowledge to generate reliable pre-print recommendations. Given a stereolithography (STL) model and a natural-language task description, the framework generates a structured recommendation covering printability, material choice, process parameters, design guidance, risks, and explanations. We evaluate the framework on focused STL benchmark scenarios with novice-style task descriptions. The proposed method achieves 75.0% printability over 96 physical validation trials, with 88.9% task suitability among successfully printed samples. It also improves Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite material-selection accuracy from 37.5% under pure LLM to 90.0%. Expert evaluation further shows improved report quality, while post-print feedback improves recommendations on selected problematic cases. These results suggest that user task intent, geometry evidence, and structured material knowledge are all important for reliable task-driven printability assistance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Comparative analysis of missing data imputation methods for CSST survey: Impact on photometric redshift estimation performance

Improving the accuracy of photometric redshifts (photo-$z$) is essential for reliable statistical studies of cosmology and galaxy evolution. However, missing photometric bands are a common observational challenge that can significantly degrade photo-$z$ estimation accuracy. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of data imputation methods aimed at improving photo-$z$ performance. We benchmark a range of representative machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) architectures, identifying k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and the attention-based SAITS model as the leading performers. These models are then applied to China Space Station Survey Telescope (CSST) mock data to assess their performance under realistic observational conditions. Our results show that KNN yields the highest accuracy under idealized missing completely at random (MCAR) conditions with complete training sets, whereas robustness tests reveal that SAITS significantly outperforms KNN when training data is incomplete or when applied to realistic mixed-mechanism scenarios. We find that domain consistency between training and testing missingness patterns is a prerequisite for optimal performance, highlighting the risks of domain shift in supervised regression tasks. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that while general imputation models are highly effective for MCAR and missing at random (MAR) data, they are detrimental when applied to missing not at random (MNAR) data arising from flux limits, as statistical models fail to capture the physical information inherent in these non-detections. Consequently, we advocate for more sophisticated architectures capable of disentangling stochastic missingness from physical non-detections to address these distinct mechanisms individually.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

FinRL-X: An AI-Native Modular Infrastructure for Quantitative Trading

We present FinRL-X, a modular and deployment-consistent trading architecture that unifies data processing, strategy construction, backtesting, and broker execution under a weight-centric interface. While existing open-source platforms are often backtesting- or model-centric, they rarely provide system-level consistency between research evaluation and live deployment. FinRL-X addresses this gap through a composable strategy pipeline that integrates stock selection, portfolio allocation, timing, and portfolio-level risk overlays within a unified protocol. The framework supports both rule-based and AI-driven components, including reinforcement learning allocators and LLM-based sentiment signals, without altering downstream execution semantics. FinRL-X provides an extensible foundation for reproducible, end-to-end quantitative trading research and deployment. The official FinRL-X implementation is available at https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRL-Trading.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2026

Decision-Aware Uncertainty Evaluation of Vision-Language Model-Based Early Action Anticipation for Human-Robot Interaction

Robots in shared workspaces must interpret human actions from partial, ambiguous observations, where overconfident early predictions can lead to unsafe or disruptive interaction. This challenge is amplified in egocentric views, where viewpoint changes and occlusions increase perceptual noise and ambiguity. As a result, downstream human-robot interaction modules require not only an action hypothesis but also a trustworthy estimate of confidence under partial observation. Recent vision-language model-based approaches have been proposed for short-term action recognition due to their open-vocabulary and context-aware reasoning, but their uncertainty reliability in the temporal-prefix regime is largely uncharacterized. We present the first systematic evaluation of uncertainty in vision-language model-based short-term action recognition for human-robot interaction. We introduce a temporal-prefix evaluation protocol and metrics for calibration and selective prediction. We also characterize miscalibration patterns and failure modes under partial observations. Our study provides the missing reliability evidence needed to use vision-language model predictions in confidence-gated human-robot interaction modules.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

KPLM-STA: Physically-Accurate Shadow Synthesis for Human Relighting via Keypoint-Based Light Modeling

Image composition aims to seamlessly integrate a foreground object into a background, where generating realistic and geometrically accurate shadows remains a persistent challenge. While recent diffusion-based methods have outperformed GAN-based approaches, existing techniques, such as the diffusion-based relighting framework IC-Light, still fall short in producing shadows with both high appearance realism and geometric precision, especially in composite images. To address these limitations, we propose a novel shadow generation framework based on a Keypoints Linear Model (KPLM) and a Shadow Triangle Algorithm (STA). KPLM models articulated human bodies using nine keypoints and one bounding block, enabling physically plausible shadow projection and dynamic shading across joints, thereby enhancing visual realism. STA further improves geometric accuracy by computing shadow angles, lengths, and spatial positions through explicit geometric formulations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on shadow realism benchmarks, particularly under complex human poses, and generalizes effectively to multi-directional relighting scenarios such as those supported by IC-Light.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Human Motion Intent Inferencing in Teleoperation Through a SINDy Paradigm

Intent inferencing in teleoperation has been instrumental in aligning operator goals and coordinating actions with robotic partners. However, current intent inference methods often ignore subtle motion that can be strong indicators for a sudden change in intent. Specifically, we aim to tackle 1) if we can detect sudden jumps in operator trajectories, 2) how we appropriately use these sudden jump motions to infer an operator's goal state, and 3) how to incorporate these discontinuous and continuous dynamics to infer operator motion. Our framework, called Psychic, models these small indicative motions through a jump-drift-diffusion stochastic differential equation to cover discontinuous and continuous dynamics. Kramers-Moyal (KM) coefficients allow us to detect jumps with a trajectory which we pair with a statistical outlier detection algorithm to nominate goal transitions. Through identifying jumps, we can perform early detection of existing goals and discover undefined goals in unstructured scenarios. Our framework then applies a Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) model using KM coefficients with the goal transitions as a control input to infer an operator's motion behavior in unstructured scenarios. We demonstrate Psychic can produce probabilistic reachability sets and compare our strategy to a negative log-likelihood model fit. We perform a retrospective study on 600 operator trajectories in a hands-free teleoperation task to evaluate the efficacy of our opensource package, Psychic, in both offline and online learning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Deep learning models are vulnerable, but adversarial examples are even more vulnerable

Understanding intrinsic differences between adversarial examples and clean samples is key to enhancing DNN robustness and detection against adversarial attacks. This study first empirically finds that image-based adversarial examples are notably sensitive to occlusion. Controlled experiments on CIFAR-10 used nine canonical attacks (e.g., FGSM, PGD) to generate adversarial examples, paired with original samples for evaluation. We introduce Sliding Mask Confidence Entropy (SMCE) to quantify model confidence fluctuation under occlusion. Using 1800+ test images, SMCE calculations supported by Mask Entropy Field Maps and statistical distributions show adversarial examples have significantly higher confidence volatility under occlusion than originals. Based on this, we propose Sliding Window Mask-based Adversarial Example Detection (SWM-AED), which avoids catastrophic overfitting of conventional adversarial training. Evaluations across classifiers and attacks on CIFAR-10 demonstrate robust performance, with accuracy over 62% in most cases and up to 96.5%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

In-Context-Learning-Assisted Quality Assessment Vision-Language Models for Metal Additive Manufacturing

Vision-based quality assessment in additive manufacturing often requires dedicated machine learning models and application-specific datasets. However, data collection and model training can be expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we leverage vision-language models' (VLMs') reasoning capabilities to assess the quality of printed parts and introduce in-context learning (ICL) to provide VLMs with necessary application-specific knowledge and demonstration samples. This method eliminates the requirement for large application-specific datasets for training models. We explored different sampling strategies for ICL to search for the optimal configuration that makes use of limited samples. We evaluated these strategies on two VLMs, Gemini-2.5-flash and Gemma3:27b, with quality assessment tasks in wire-laser direct energy deposition processes. The results show that ICL-assisted VLMs can reach quality classification accuracies similar to those of traditional machine learning models while requiring only a minimal number of samples. In addition, unlike traditional classification models that lack transparency, VLMs can generate human-interpretable rationales to enhance trust. Since there are no metrics to evaluate their interpretability in manufacturing applications, we propose two metrics, knowledge relevance and rationale validity, to evaluate the quality of VLMs' supporting rationales. Our results show that ICL-assisted VLMs can address application-specific tasks with limited data, achieving relatively high accuracy while also providing valid supporting rationales for improved decision transparency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Revealing the Temporally Stable Bimodal Energy Distribution of FRB 20121102A with a Tripled Burst Set from AI Detections

Active repeating Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), with their large number of bursts, burst energy distribution, and their potential energy evolution, offer critical insights into the FRBs emission mechanisms. Traditional pipelines search for bursts through conducting dedispersion trials and looking for signals above certain fluence thresholds, both of which could result in missing weak and narrow-band bursts. In order to improve the completeness of the burst set, we develop an End-to-end DedispersE-agnostic Nonparametric AI model (EDEN), which directly detect bursts from dynamic spectrum and is the first detection pipeline that operates without attempting dedispersion. We apply EDEN to archival FAST L-band observations during the extreme active phase of the repeating source FRB 20121102A, resulting in the largest burst set for any FRB to date, which contains 5,927 individual bursts, tripling the original burst set. The much enhanced completeness enables a refined analysis of the temporal behavior of energy distribution, revealing that the bimodal energy distribution remains stable over time. It is rather an intrinsic feature of the emission mechanisms than a consequence of co-evolving with burst rate.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

MAFS: Masked Autoencoder for Infrared-Visible Image Fusion and Semantic Segmentation

Infrared-visible image fusion methods aim at generating fused images with good visual quality and also facilitate the performance of high-level tasks. Indeed, existing semantic-driven methods have considered semantic information injection for downstream applications. However, none of them investigates the potential for reciprocal promotion between pixel-wise image fusion and cross-modal feature fusion perception tasks from a macroscopic task-level perspective. To address this limitation, we propose a unified network for image fusion and semantic segmentation. MAFS is a parallel structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a segmentation sub-network. On the one hand, We devise a heterogeneous feature fusion strategy to enhance semantic-aware capabilities for image fusion. On the other hand, by cascading the fusion sub-network and a segmentation backbone, segmentation-related knowledge is transferred to promote feature-level fusion-based segmentation. Within the framework, we design a novel multi-stage Transformer decoder to aggregate fine-grained multi-scale fused features efficiently. Additionally, a dynamic factor based on the max-min fairness allocation principle is introduced to generate adaptive weights of two tasks and guarantee smooth training in a multi-task manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Abraham-Einstein/MAFS/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

QA-VLM: Providing human-interpretable quality assessment for wire-feed laser additive manufacturing parts with Vision Language Models

Image-based quality assessment (QA) in additive manufacturing (AM) often relies heavily on the expertise and constant attention of skilled human operators. While machine learning and deep learning methods have been introduced to assist in this task, they typically provide black-box outputs without interpretable justifications, limiting their trust and adoption in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce a novel QA-VLM framework that leverages the attention mechanisms and reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), enriched with application-specific knowledge distilled from peer-reviewed journal articles, to generate human-interpretable quality assessments. Evaluated on 24 single-bead samples produced by laser wire direct energy deposition (DED-LW), our framework demonstrates higher validity and consistency in explanation quality than off-the-shelf VLMs. These results highlight the potential of our approach to enable trustworthy, interpretable quality assessment in AM applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ST-SAM: SAM-Driven Self-Training Framework for Semi-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection

Semi-supervised Camouflaged Object Detection (SSCOD) aims to reduce reliance on costly pixel-level annotations by leveraging limited annotated data and abundant unlabeled data. However, existing SSCOD methods based on Teacher-Student frameworks suffer from severe prediction bias and error propagation under scarce supervision, while their multi-network architectures incur high computational overhead and limited scalability. To overcome these limitations, we propose ST-SAM, a highly annotation-efficient yet concise framework that breaks away from conventional SSCOD constraints. Specifically, ST-SAM employs Self-Training strategy that dynamically filters and expands high-confidence pseudo-labels to enhance a single-model architecture, thereby fundamentally circumventing inter-model prediction bias. Furthermore, by transforming pseudo-labels into hybrid prompts containing domain-specific knowledge, ST-SAM effectively harnesses the Segment Anything Model's potential for specialized tasks to mitigate error accumulation in self-training. Experiments on COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that ST-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 1\% labeled data, outperforming existing SSCOD methods and even matching fully supervised methods. Remarkably, ST-SAM requires training only a single network, without relying on specific models or loss functions. This work establishes a new paradigm for annotation-efficient SSCOD. Codes will be available at https://github.com/hu-xh/ST-SAM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Cross Spatial Temporal Fusion Attention for Remote Sensing Object Detection via Image Feature Matching

Effectively describing features for cross-modal remote sensing image matching remains a challenging task due to the significant geometric and radiometric differences between multimodal images. Existing methods primarily extract features at the fully connected layer but often fail to capture cross-modal similarities effectively. We propose a Cross Spatial Temporal Fusion (CSTF) mechanism that enhances feature representation by integrating scale-invariant keypoints detected independently in both reference and query images. Our approach improves feature matching in two ways: First, by creating correspondence maps that leverage information from multiple image regions simultaneously, and second, by reformulating the similarity matching process as a classification task using SoftMax and Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) layers. This dual approach enables CSTF to maintain sensitivity to distinctive local features while incorporating broader contextual information, resulting in robust matching across diverse remote sensing modalities. To demonstrate the practical utility of improved feature matching, we evaluate CSTF on object detection tasks using the HRSC2016 and DOTA benchmark datasets. Our method achieves state-of-theart performance with an average mAP of 90.99% on HRSC2016 and 90.86% on DOTA, outperforming existing models. The CSTF model maintains computational efficiency with an inference speed of 12.5 FPS. These results validate that our approach to crossmodal feature matching directly enhances downstream remote sensing applications such as object detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

The Use of Gaze-Derived Confidence of Inferred Operator Intent in Adjusting Safety-Conscious Haptic Assistance

Humans directly completing tasks in dangerous or hazardous conditions is not always possible where these tasks are increasingly be performed remotely by teleoperated robots. However, teleoperation is difficult since the operator feels a disconnect with the robot caused by missing feedback from several senses, including touch, and the lack of depth in the video feedback presented to the operator. To overcome this problem, the proposed system actively infers the operator's intent and provides assistance based on the predicted intent. Furthermore, a novel method of calculating confidence in the inferred intent modifies the human-in-the-loop control. The operator's gaze is employed to intuitively indicate the target before the manipulation with the robot begins. A potential field method is used to provide a guiding force towards the intended target, and a safety boundary reduces risk of damage. Modifying these assistances based on the confidence level in the operator's intent makes the control more natural, and gives the robot an intuitive understanding of its human master. Initial validation results show the ability of the system to improve accuracy, execution time, and reduce operator error.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing accuracy of uncertainty estimation in appearance-based gaze tracking with probabilistic evaluation and calibration

Accurately knowing uncertainties in appearance-based gaze tracking is critical for ensuring reliable downstream applications. Due to the lack of individual uncertainty labels, current uncertainty-aware approaches adopt probabilistic models to acquire uncertainties by following distributions in the training dataset. Without regulations, this approach lets the uncertainty model build biases and overfits the training data, leading to poor performance when deployed. We first presented a strict proper evaluation metric from the probabilistic perspective based on comparing the coverage probability between prediction and observation to provide quantitative evaluation for better assessment on the inferred uncertainties. We then proposed a correction strategy based on probability calibration to mitigate biases in the estimated uncertainties of the trained models. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the correction strategy with experiments performed on two popular gaze estimation datasets with distinctive image characteristics caused by data collection settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

OTA-Key: Over the Air Key Management for Flexible and Reliable IoT Device Provision

As the Internet of Things (IoT) industry advances, the imperative to secure IoT devices has become increasingly critical. Current practices in both industry and academia advocate for the enhancement of device security through key installation. However, it has been observed that, in practice, IoT vendors frequently assign shared keys to batches of devices. This practice can expose devices to risks, such as data theft by attackers or large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. To address this issue, our intuition is to assign a unique key to each device. Unfortunately, this strategy proves to be highly complex within the IoT context, as existing keys are typically hardcoded into the firmware, necessitating the creation of bespoke firmware for each device. Furthermore, correct pairing of device keys with their respective devices is crucial. Errors in this pairing process would incur substantial human and temporal resources to rectify and require extensive communication between IoT vendors, device manufacturers, and cloud platforms, leading to significant communication overhead. To overcome these challenges, we propose the OTA-Key scheme. This approach fundamentally decouples device keys from the firmware features stored in flash memory, utilizing an intermediary server to allocate unique device keys in two distinct stages and update keys. We conducted a formal security verification of our scheme using ProVerif and assessed its performance through a series of evaluations. The results demonstrate that our scheme is secure and effectively manages the large-scale distribution and updating of unique device keys. Additionally, it achieves significantly lower update times and data transfer volumes compared to other schemes.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Real-time Dexterous Telemanipulation with an End-Effect-Oriented Learning-based Approach

Dexterous telemanipulation is crucial in advancing human-robot systems, especially in tasks requiring precise and safe manipulation. However, it faces significant challenges due to the physical differences between human and robotic hands, the dynamic interaction with objects, and the indirect control and perception of the remote environment. Current approaches predominantly focus on mapping the human hand onto robotic counterparts to replicate motions, which exhibits a critical oversight: it often neglects the physical interaction with objects and relegates the interaction burden to the human to adapt and make laborious adjustments in response to the indirect and counter-intuitive observation of the remote environment. This work develops an End-Effects-Oriented Learning-based Dexterous Telemanipulation (EFOLD) framework to address telemanipulation tasks. EFOLD models telemanipulation as a Markov Game, introducing multiple end-effect features to interpret the human operator's commands during interaction with objects. These features are used by a Deep Reinforcement Learning policy to control the robot and reproduce such end effects. EFOLD was evaluated with real human subjects and two end-effect extraction methods for controlling a virtual Shadow Robot Hand in telemanipulation tasks. EFOLD achieved real-time control capability with low command following latency (delay<0.11s) and highly accurate tracking (MSE<0.084 rad).

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Arondight: Red Teaming Large Vision Language Models with Auto-generated Multi-modal Jailbreak Prompts

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) extend and enhance the perceptual abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite offering new possibilities for LLM applications, these advancements raise significant security and ethical concerns, particularly regarding the generation of harmful content. While LLMs have undergone extensive security evaluations with the aid of red teaming frameworks, VLMs currently lack a well-developed one. To fill this gap, we introduce Arondight, a standardized red team framework tailored specifically for VLMs. Arondight is dedicated to resolving issues related to the absence of visual modality and inadequate diversity encountered when transitioning existing red teaming methodologies from LLMs to VLMs. Our framework features an automated multi-modal jailbreak attack, wherein visual jailbreak prompts are produced by a red team VLM, and textual prompts are generated by a red team LLM guided by a reinforcement learning agent. To enhance the comprehensiveness of VLM security evaluation, we integrate entropy bonuses and novelty reward metrics. These elements incentivize the RL agent to guide the red team LLM in creating a wider array of diverse and previously unseen test cases. Our evaluation of ten cutting-edge VLMs exposes significant security vulnerabilities, particularly in generating toxic images and aligning multi-modal prompts. In particular, our Arondight achieves an average attack success rate of 84.5\% on GPT-4 in all fourteen prohibited scenarios defined by OpenAI in terms of generating toxic text. For a clearer comparison, we also categorize existing VLMs based on their safety levels and provide corresponding reinforcement recommendations. Our multimodal prompt dataset and red team code will be released after ethics committee approval. CONTENT WARNING: THIS PAPER CONTAINS HARMFUL MODEL RESPONSES.

cs.LG↗