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Xiaomin He

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaomin He.

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How Order-Sensitive Are LLMs? OrderProbe for Deterministic Structural Reconstruction

Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is difficult to evaluate automatically because scrambled sentences often admit multiple valid reorderings. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including Semantic Accuracy, Logical Validity, Structural Consistency, Robustness, and Information Density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent gap between meaning-oriented generation and exact structural reconstruction, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.

cs.CL

Generation as Auxiliary Supervision: Enhancing Visual Understanding at Zero Inference Overhead via Decoupled Embedding Prediction

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, visual understanding and generation are typically treated as divergent objectives. Existing unified frameworks often rely on discrete visual tokenization or diffusion objectives whose generative targets differ from the continuous representations consumed by visual understanding models, making direct transfer to enhance existing pretrained MLLMs non-trivial. In this work, we present GAS, a generation-guided training framework that reinterprets visual generation as auxiliary supervision for representation learning. Concretely, GAS adapts Next Embedding Prediction (NEP) as a cross-modal generation paradigm within a decoupled Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. By maintaining a shared lower trunk and parallel upper layers, GAS lets generation losses enrich the shared visual pathway with finer spatial precision and stronger visual retention while shielding the upper understanding layers from direct generation gradients. To maximize this synergy, we further construct highly correlated generation tasks that demand deep cognitive grounding rather than generic synthesis alone. Across model scales and training stages, GAS improves aggregate multimodal understanding, with its most reliable gains on perception and spatial comprehension. Crucially, because the auxiliary generation branch is discarded after training, these gains incur zero inference overhead. Extensive controlled comparisons and representation-level analyses further clarify when and why generation-guided training benefits understanding, and demonstrate the feasibility of generation-guided training as a practical route to stronger multimodal understanding.

cs.CV

HSSBench: Benchmarking Humanities and Social Sciences Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential to advance a broad range of domains. However, current benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily emphasize general knowledge and vertical step-by-step reasoning typical of STEM disciplines, while overlooking the distinct needs and potential of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Tasks in the HSS domain require more horizontal, interdisciplinary thinking and a deep integration of knowledge across related fields, which presents unique challenges for MLLMs, particularly in linking abstract concepts with corresponding visual representations. Addressing this gap, we present HSSBench, a dedicated benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of MLLMs on HSS tasks in multiple languages, including the six official languages of the United Nations. We also introduce a novel data generation pipeline tailored for HSS scenarios, in which multiple domain experts and automated agents collaborate to generate and iteratively refine each sample. HSSBench contains over 13,000 meticulously designed samples, covering six key categories. We benchmark more than 20 mainstream MLLMs on HSSBench and demonstrate that it poses significant challenges even for state-of-the-art models. We hope that this benchmark will inspire further research into enhancing the cross-disciplinary reasoning abilities of MLLMs, especially their capacity to internalize and connect knowledge across fields.

cs.CL

PRISM: Priority-aware Rubric Internalization via Structured Multimodal Data Synthesis

Real-world multimodal instructions often bundle multiple requirements with unequal importance, yet most multimodal training data still reduce instruction following to answering one self-contained question. We study this gap through rubric comprehension, which casts the model not as a generator measured against rubrics but as an executor that follows them: given an image and a typed, prioritized rubric, the model must verify each rule before producing an overall judgment. To support this setting, we propose PRISM, a four-stage data synthesis framework that produces persona--task pairs, prefix-guided rule sets, quality-filtered rubrics, and structured verification traces. We further introduce PRISM-Eval, whose Loose and Strict metrics use deterministic matching against fixed labels and therefore require no inference-time judge model. With only 10K synthesized samples, PRISM lifts Qwen3-VL-4B from 9.5% to 30.1% Strict accuracy on PRISM-Eval while preserving average performance on general benchmarks, and the gains transfer to four additional open-source MLLMs across dense and MoE architectures, suggesting that structured rubric supervision is a scalable path toward multi-rule, priority-aware multimodal instruction following.

cs.LG

LISA-3D: Lifting Language-Image Segmentation to 3D via Multi-View Consistency

Text-driven 3D reconstruction requires masks that understand free-form instructions and remain stable under viewpoint changes. We present LISA-3D, a two-stage framework that adapts the instruction-following segmenter LISA with geometry-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) layers while keeping the SAM-3D reconstructor frozen. During training, paired RGB-D frames and camera poses define a differentiable reprojection loss that enforces cross-view agreement without additional 3D-text annotations. At deployment, the adapted segmenter can produce an RGBA prompt for SAM-3D from one RGB image; when registered RGB-D views are available, optional logit fusion further improves the prompt. On ScanRefer and Nr3D, geometry-aware tuning improves both 2D masks and lifted 3D reconstructions while updating only 11.6M parameters. Our results separate geometry-aware training gains from optional multi-view inference gains, providing a modular route from language grounding to object-centric 3D reconstruction.

cs.CV

AVMeme Exam: A Multimodal Multilingual Multicultural Benchmark for LLMs' Contextual and Cultural Knowledge and Thinking

Internet audio-visual clips convey meaning through time-varying sound and motion, which extend beyond what text alone can represent. To examine whether AI models can understand such signals in human cultural contexts, we introduce AVMeme Exam, a human-curated benchmark of over one thousand iconic Internet sounds and videos spanning speech, songs, music, and sound effects. Each meme is paired with a unique Q&A assessing levels of understanding from surface content to context and emotion to usage and world knowledge, along with metadata such as original year, transcript, summary, and sensitivity. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) alongside human participants using this benchmark. Our results reveal a consistent limitation: current models perform poorly on textless music and sound effects, and struggle to think in context and in culture compared to surface content. These findings highlight a key gap in human-aligned multimodal intelligence and call for models that can perceive contextually and culturally beyond the surface of what they hear and see. Project page: avmemeexam.github.io/public

cs.SD

Stitch and Tell: A Structured Multimodal Data Augmentation Method for Spatial Understanding

Existing vision-language models often suffer from spatial hallucinations, i.e., generating incorrect descriptions about the relative positions of objects in an image. We argue that this problem mainly stems from the asymmetric properties between images and text. To enrich the spatial understanding ability of vision-language models, we propose a simple, annotation-free, plug-and-play method named $\text{Stitch and Tell}$ (abbreviated as SiTe), which injects structured spatial supervision into data. It constructs stitched image-text pairs by stitching images along a spatial axis and generating spatially-aware captions or question answer pairs based on the layout of stitched image, without relying on costly advanced models or human involvement. We evaluate SiTe across three architectures including LLaVA-v1.5-7B, LLaVA-Qwen2-1.5B and HALVA-7B, two training datasets, and eight benchmarks. Experiments show that SiTe improves spatial understanding tasks such as $\text{MME}_{\text{Position}}$ (+5.50%) and Spatial-MM (+4.19%), while maintaining or improving performance on general vision-language benchmarks including COCO-QA (+1.02%) and MMBench (+4.76%). Our findings suggest that explicitly injecting spatially-aware structure into training data offers an effective way to mitigate spatial hallucinations and improve spatial understanding, while preserving general vision-language capabilities.

cs.CV

Accelerated Robot Learning via Human Brain Signals

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at assessing and predicting the future consequences of actions and can serve as good reward/policy shapers to accelerate the robot learning process. Previous works have shown that the human brain generates an error-related signal, measurable using electroencephelography (EEG), when the human perceives the task being done erroneously. In this work, we propose a method that uses evaluative feedback obtained from human brain signals measured via scalp EEG to accelerate RL for robotic agents in sparse reward settings. As the robot learns the task, the EEG of a human observer watching the robot attempts is recorded and decoded into noisy error feedback signal. From this feedback, we use supervised learning to obtain a policy that subsequently augments the behavior policy and guides exploration in the early stages of RL. This bootstraps the RL learning process to enable learning from sparse reward. Using a robotic navigation task as a test bed, we show that our method achieves a stable obstacle-avoidance policy with high success rate, outperforming learning from sparse rewards only that struggles to achieve obstacle avoidance behavior or fails to advance to the goal.

cs.RO