Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xin Dong

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Dong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Heavy Flavors and Quarkonia at RHIC

After the discovery of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a nearly perfect fluid, in 200 GeV Au+Au collisions at RHIC, understanding its microscopic structure and transport properties has become a central goal of relativistic heavy-ion physics. Heavy-flavor particles, containing charm or bottom quarks, provide unique sensitivity to the QGP because they are produced predominantly in the initial hard scatterings and interact with the medium throughout its evolution. This review summarizes measurements of open heavy flavor and quarkonia by the PHENIX and STAR experiments, focusing primarily on 200 GeV collisions recorded during the first two decades of RHIC operations. We discuss key results on charm, bottom, and quarkonium production cross sections; cold nuclear matter effects in small collision systems; nuclear modification factors and elliptic flow of open heavy-flavor hadrons; charm baryon-to-meson production ratios; and the suppression patterns of quarkonium states in Au+Au collisions. We further highlight the resulting insights into the properties of the QGP, including heavy-quark transport, hadronization mechanisms, and quarkonium dissociation and regeneration in the medium. Finally, we discuss the future prospects of the RHIC heavy-flavor program, enabled by the large data sets collected by the STAR and sPHENIX experiments, and its strong synergy with the future Electron-Ion Collider, where precision measurements of heavy-flavor production in electron--proton and electron--nucleus collisions will provide complementary constraints on the structure of QCD matter.

nucl-ex↗
arXiv2026

Mitigating Bus Bunching with Reinforcement Learning Enhanced by Semantic Stop Embedding

Bus bunching degrades service regularity and increases passenger waiting in high-frequency transit. Existing reinforcement-learning-based holding controllers primarily rely on instantaneous operational variables or route-specific stop identifiers, which provide limited information about the functional and operational context of individual stops and constrain policy reuse across routes. This study introduces an LLM-assisted semantic stop representation for event-driven bus holding control. An LLM is used offline to transform heterogeneous stop information, including physical attributes, surrounding activity context, and historical operational characteristics, into fixed semantic embeddings that are incorporated into a deep Q-learning controller without requiring real-time LLM inference. Experiments are conducted in stochastic simulations calibrated with observed data from two bus routes. Compared with the best calibrated Daganzo baseline, the semantic controller reduces headway variability, bunching events, and passenger waiting time by 32.0%, 69.2%, and 24.0%, respectively. A route-specific stop identifier does not improve the spacing-only controller, whereas semantic stop information improves headway regularity, waiting time, and holding effort, providing a more favorable overall trade-off across control objectives. Cross-route experiments further show that zero-shot transfer provides limited immediate generalization, while warm-start fine-tuning accelerates early-stage learning and improves transferred policies; cold-start training nevertheless achieves the best final performance. These findings suggest that semantic state representations can complement conventional operational states and support adaptation-based policy reuse across related transit routes.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Debias in Text, Believe Your Eyes: Text-Anchored Cross-Modal Transfer for Visual Counter-Commonsense Reasoning

The visual reasoning ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for downstream applications, particularly counter-commonsense reasoning, which requires models to reason beyond common assumptions. Recent studies mainly improve visual counter-commonsense reasoning by enhancing visual inputs, following the assumption that failures originate from insufficient visual grounding. However, our empirical analysis reveals that the bottleneck is not visual perception. MLLMs already capture the relevant visual evidence, and the correct answer exists in their decoding space. Instead, the shared language decoder resolves prior--evidence conflicts by favoring dominant language priors, especially for low-frequency factual scenarios. Motivated by this, we first propose a text-anchored data construction pipeline, whose core component, Fact-Frequency Distillation (FFD), estimates the prior strength of commonsense facts and distills verified counter-commonsense scenarios into a high-quality text corpus. Building upon this corpus, we introduce TACT, a text-anchored post-training framework that debiases the shared language decoder without requiring any visual training data. TACT routes evidence-following and prior-driven reasoning trajectories into different optimization stages, enabling the decoder to resolve prior--evidence conflicts. Across counter-commonsense visual benchmarks, TACT substantially improves visual reasoning while preserving general capabilities, demonstrating effective text-to-vision cross-modal transfer.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

S-EMBER: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Streaming Egocentric Memory Retrieval

As wearable devices enable continuous first-person recording, AI assistants must reason across long time horizons to recall past experiences-a capability known as episodic memory. Current benchmarks often rely on offline evaluation with access to entire video files, failing to simulate the streaming reality of wearable intelligence. We introduce S-EMBER (Streaming Egocentric Memory Benchmark for Episodic Retrieval), a large-scale benchmark comprising 3,141 videos totaling 388 hours of organic activity captured via Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. S-EMBER formalizes grounded streaming episodic retrieval, a paradigm shift from global offline search to causal, active recall triggered by visual events in a continuous stream. We provide 9,448 QA pairs requiring manual visual proof through precise temporal localization and supporting flexible response lengths to simulate natural human-AI interaction. Our extensive benchmarking of frontier models reveals a grounded recall gap: models answer and localize with moderate competence in isolation, yet fall furthest short of human performance when both must hold for the same query, the strongest reaching less than half the human rate. S-EMBER establishes a hardware-authentic foundation for developing grounded, reliable episodic memory in the next generation of wearable AI agents.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Occlusion-Robust Multi-Object Decoupling for Physics-Based Robotic Interaction

We propose a mask-free method for lossless multi-object 3D reconstruction from sparse and occluded real-world views, enabling physically plausible robotic interaction via Material Point Method (MPM) simulation. Our key insight is that object coupling stems from occlusion and limited viewpoints, which we address by formulating multi-object decoupling as a sparse-view reconstruction problem. Using 3D Gaussian Splatting as base representation, we first obtain coarse instance partitions with a SAM2-trained segmentation field. Rather than relying on masks, we reconstruct fragmented geometries by leveraging a joint Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) process, which integrates reference-view supervision with novel-view synthesis guided by 2D and 3D diffusion priors to enforce both texture fidelity and 3D consistency. Furthermore, we incorporate geometry-aware priors such as intra-object and inter-object similarity to regularize geometric reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces complete, simulation-ready 3D objects without requiring manual masks, enabling realistic dynamic interactions on both synthetic, robotic and real-world datasets.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration for Frozen Pose-Flow Video Anomaly Detection

Pose-flow video anomaly detectors are attractive for one-class surveillance because they provide likelihood-based rankings for tracked skeleton windows. However, a single likelihood score may hide multimodal normal behavior and be sensitive to pose-observation noise. We study a frozen-detector setting in which the pose-flow backbone, cached skeleton tracks, and evaluation pipeline are fixed. Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration (RPC) is a post-hoc score calibration method for this setting. It adds a standardized nearest-prototype deviation in the frozen latent space to the standardized flow score, and uses keypoint confidence only to gate this added geometric evidence. Thus, RPC preserves the original density signal while correcting the ranking with empirical normal-mode structure under pose reliability. Across two frozen pose-flow backbones and four datasets, RPC improves frame-level AUROC in all eight backbone-dataset pairs, with gains ranging from 0.34 to 4.49 percentage points and averaging 2.03 points. Ablation and reliability analyses show that prototype deviation is the main corrective signal, while reliability gating is most useful when pose observations are less trustworthy. These results suggest that lightweight post-hoc calibration can strengthen cached pose-flow systems when retraining or reproducing the full pose pipeline is impractical.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SparDA: Sparse Decoupled Attention for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Sparse attention reduces compute and memory bandwidth for long-context LLM inference. However, two key challenges remain: (1) KV cache capacity still grows with sequence length, and offloading to CPU memory introduces a PCIe transfer bottleneck; (2) the sparse selection step itself retains $O(T^2)$ complexity and can dominate attention cost at long contexts. We propose SparDA, a decoupled sparse attention architecture that introduces a fourth per-layer projection, the Forecast, alongside Query, Key, and Value. The Forecast predicts the KV blocks needed by the next layer, enabling lookahead selection that overlaps CPU-to-GPU prefetch with current-layer execution. Because Forecast is decoupled from the attention query, our GQA implementation uses one Forecast head per GQA group, reducing selection overhead versus the original multi-head selector. SparDA adds $<$0.5% parameters and trains only the Forecast projections by matching the original selector's attention distribution. On two sparse-pretrained 8B models, SparDA matches or slightly improves accuracy and delivers up to 1.25$\times$ prefill speedup and 1.7$\times$ decode speedup over the sparse-attention offload baseline. By enabling larger feasible batch sizes on a single GPU, SparDA further reaches up to 5.3$\times$ higher decode throughput than the non-offload sparse baseline. Our source code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/SparDA.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CoSTL: Comprehensive Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection

Video Moment Retrieval (MR) and Highlight Detection (HD) are crucial tasks in video analysis that aim to localize specific moments and estimate clip-wise relevance based on a given text query. Recent approaches treat them as similar video grounding tasks and use the same architecture to solve them. These tasks require both fine-grained comprehension at the image level and high-level temporal understanding across the entire video. Existing approaches have primarily focused on temporal modeling using frame-level features, often neglecting the rich visual information related to the text query within individual frames. This oversight leads to inaccurate grounding results. To address this limitation, we propose a Comprehensive Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning Framework (CoSTL), which captures both fine-grained image-level information and temporal dynamics. Specifically, CoSTL incorporates a text-driven progressive fine-grained image encoder, performing a two-step text-driven knowledge extraction process to learn fine-grained spatial representations. Furthermore, a multi-scale temporal perception module captures comprehensive spatial-temporal representations, enhancing the model's ability to process temporal dynamics. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on four public benchmarks: QVHighlights, Charades-STA, TACoS, and TVSum.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Boosting Zero-Shot 3D Style Transfer with 2D Pre-trained Priors

In this work, we focus on zero-shot 3D style transfer that can generate multi-view consistent stylized views of the 3D scene given an arbitrary style image. We primarily tackle the issue of data scarcity in 3D style transfer, which arises when each model is trained on only a single scene, thereby limiting the number of available content images. This scarcity significantly hampers stylization performance, as model optimization relies on a sufficient number of content-style image pairs to provide supervisory signals. Our core idea is to integrate a decoder pre-trained on large-scale 2D image datasets into the 3D style transfer pipeline, thereby leveraging the prior knowledge encoded in the decoder from learning over numerous content-style image pairs. Our method combines feature Gaussian splatting and deferred stylization, enabling high-quality stylization with the data-sufficient decoder network while ensuring view consistency by unifying view-dependent operations into a view-invariant process. Experiments demonstrate that our Data-Sufficient StyleGaussian (DS-StyleGaussian) model outperforms existing zero-shot 3D style transfer methods in terms of visual quality across various datasets. This work also suggests that 2D pre-training can serve as a strong enhancement for 3D tasks, bridging the data gap between 2D and 3D.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CA-World: Multi-Object Counterfactual Alignment for Efficient Interactive-Ready Reconstruction

Reconstructing interaction-ready 3D worlds is essential for physical simulation, virtual reality, robotics, and autonomous driving. However, existing methods mainly optimize static and holistic visual fidelity, with limited support for multi-object interaction. We argue that an interaction-ready reconstruction should anticipate potential scene changes and preserve geometric completeness, visual quality, multi-object spatial relationship, and physical plausibility under potential interactions. To this end, motivated by the causal intervention, we propose CA-World, an efficient framework that integrates counterfactual alignment learning into a decoupling-reintegration reconstruction pipeline. Specifically, we formulate foreground-background decoupling as a visual intervention, separate object generation and background inpainting as counterfactual generation, and scene reintegration as an inverse intervention. According to counterfactual consistency, reversing the intervention should recover the factual world, motivating three alignment objectives between the reintegrated and original scenes: appearance, spatial, and physical consistency. This formulates interaction-ready reconstruction as counterfactual alignment learning with direct supervision. Moreover, leveraging the locality of object-level interventions, CA-World constrains counterfactual states using the observed scene, enabling efficient and coherent reintegration without jointly optimizing all object states, thereby reducing computational cost and error accumulation. Experiments on object completeness, spatial accuracy, outdoor background completion, rendering quality, simulated dynamics, and downstream applications demonstrate the effectiveness of CA-World. Project page: https://chnxindong.github.io/ca-world/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Mitigating the ID-OOD Tradeoff in Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation

Open-set test-time adaptation (OSTTA) addresses the challenge of adapting models to new environments where out-of-distribution (OOD) samples coexist with in-distribution (ID) samples affected by distribution shifts. In such settings, covariate shift-for example, changes in weather conditions such as snow-can alter ID samples, reducing model reliability. Consequently, models must not only correctly classify covariate-shifted ID (csID) samples but also effectively reject covariate-shifted OOD (csOOD) samples. Entropy minimization is a common strategy in test-time adaptation to maintain ID performance under distribution shifts, while entropy maximization is widely applied to enhance OOD detection. Several studies have sought to combine these objectives to tackle the challenges of OSTTA. However, the intrinsic conflict between entropy minimization and maximization inevitably leads to a trade-off between csID classification and csOOD detection. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of entropy maximization in OSTTA and then introduce an angular loss to regulate feature norm magnitudes, along with a feature-norm loss to suppress csOOD logits, thereby improving OOD detection. These objectives form ROSETTA, a $\underline{r}$obust $\underline{o}$pen-$\underline{se}$t $\underline{t}$est-$\underline{t}$ime $\underline{a}$daptation. Our method achieves strong OOD detection while maintaining high ID classification performance on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, Tiny-ImageNet-C and ImageNet-C. Furthermore, experiments on the Cityscapes validate the method's effectiveness in real-world semantic segmentation, and results on the HAC dataset demonstrate its applicability across different open-set TTA setups.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

AirSimAG: A High-Fidelity Simulation Platform for Air-Ground Collaborative Robotics

As spatial intelligence continues to evolve, heterogeneous multi-agent systems-particularly the collaboration between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), have demonstrated strong potential in complex applications such as search and rescue, urban surveillance, and environmental monitoring. However, existing simulation platforms are primarily designed for single-agent dynamics and lack dedicated frameworks for interactive air-ground collaborative simulation. In this paper, we present AirsimAG, a high-fidelity air-ground collaborative simulation platform built upon an extensively customized AirSim framework. The platform enables synchronized multi-agent simulation and supports heterogeneous sensing and control interfaces for UAV-UGV systems. To demonstrate its capabilities, we design a set of representative air-ground collaborative tasks, including mapping, planning, tracking, formation, and exploration. We further provide quantitative analyses based on these tasks to illustrate the platform effectiveness in supporting multi-agent coordination and cross-modal data consistency. The AirsimAG simulation platform is publicly available at https://github.com/BIULab-BUAA/AirSimAG.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Bridging the Know-Act Gap via Task-Level Autoregressive Reasoning

LLMs often generate seemingly valid answers to flawed or ill-posed inputs. This is not due to missing knowledge: under discriminative prompting, the same models can mostly identify such issues, yet fail to reflect this in standard generative responses. This reveals a fundamental know-act gap between discriminative recognition and generative behavior. Prior work largely characterizes this issue in narrow settings, such as math word problems or question answering, with limited focus on how to integrate these two modes. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis using FaultyScience, a newly constructed large-scale, cross-disciplinary benchmark of faulty scientific questions. We show that the gap is pervasive and stems from token-level autoregression, which entangles task selection (validate vs. answer) with content generation, preventing discriminative knowledge from being utilized. To address this, we propose DeIllusionLLM, a task-level autoregressive framework that explicitly models this decision. Through self-distillation, the model unifies discriminative judgment and generative reasoning within a single backbone. Empirically, DeIllusionLLM substantially reduces answer-despite-error failures under natural prompting while maintaining general reasoning performance, demonstrating that self-distillation is an effective and scalable solution for bridging the discriminative-generative know-act gap

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

MI-DPG: Decomposable Parameter Generation Network Based on Mutual Information for Multi-Scenario Recommendation

Conversion rate (CVR) prediction models play a vital role in recommendation and advertising systems. Recent research on multi-scenario recommendation shows that learning a unified model to serve multiple scenarios is effective for improving overall performance. However, it remains challenging to improve model prediction performance across scenarios at low model parameter cost, and current solutions are hard to robustly model multi-scenario diversity. In this paper, we propose MI-DPG for the multi-scenario CVR prediction, which learns scenario-conditioned dynamic model parameters for each scenario in a more efficient and effective manner. Specifically, we introduce an auxiliary network to generate scenario-conditioned dynamic weighting matrices, which are obtained by combining decomposed scenario-specific and scenario-shared low-rank matrices with parameter efficiency. For each scene, weighting the backbone model parameters by the weighting matrix helps to specialize the model parameters for different scenarios. It can not only modulate the complete parameter space of the backbone model but also improve the model effectiveness. Furthermore, we design a mutual information regularization to enhance the diversity of model parameters across different scenarios by maximizing the mutual information between the scenario-aware input and the scene-conditioned dynamic weighting matrix. Experiments from three real-world datasets show that MI-DPG significantly outperforms previous multi-scenario recommendation models.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

RA-Nav: A Risk-Aware Navigation System Based on Semantic Segmentation for Aerial Robots in Unpredictable Environments

Existing aerial robot navigation systems typically plan paths around static and dynamic obstacles, but fail to adapt when a static obstacle suddenly moves. Integrating environmental semantic awareness enables estimation of potential risks posed by suddenly moving obstacles. In this paper, we propose RA- Nav, a risk-aware navigation framework based on semantic segmentation. A lightweight multi-scale semantic segmentation network identifies obstacle categories in real time. These obstacles are further classified into three types: stationary, temporarily static, and dynamic. For each type, corresponding risk estimation functions are designed to enable real-time risk prediction, based on which a complete local risk map is constructed. Based on this map, the risk-informed path search algorithm is designed to guarantee planning that balances path efficiency and safety. Trajectory optimization is then applied to generate trajectories that are safe, smooth, and dynamically feasible. Comparative simulations demonstrate that RA-Nav achieves higher success rates than baselines in sudden obstacle state transition scenarios. Its effectiveness is further validated in simulations using real- world data.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

QuRL: Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Quantized Rollout

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a trending paradigm for training reasoning large language models (LLMs). However, due to the autoregressive decoding nature of LLMs, the rollout process becomes the efficiency bottleneck of RL training, consisting of up to 70\% of the total training time. In this work, we propose Quantized Reinforcement Learning (QuRL) that uses a quantized actor for accelerating the rollout. We address two challenges in QuRL. First, we propose Adaptive Clipping Range (ACR) that dynamically adjusts the clipping ratio based on the policy ratio between the full-precision actor and the quantized actor, which is essential for mitigating long-term training collapse. Second, we identify the weight update problem, where weight changes between RL steps are extremely small, making it difficult for the quantization operation to capture them effectively. We mitigate this problem through the invariant scaling technique that reduces quantization noise and increases weight update. We evaluate our method with INT8 and FP8 quantization experiments on DeepScaleR and DAPO, and achieve 20% to 80% faster rollout during training.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

GDPO: Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization for Multi-reward RL Optimization

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines have begun incorporating multiple rewards, each capturing a distinct preference, to guide models toward these desired behaviors. However, recent work has defaulted to apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) under multi-reward setting without examining its suitability. In this paper, we demonstrate that directly applying GRPO to normalize distinct rollout reward combinations causes them to collapse into identical advantage values, reducing the resolution of the training signal and resulting in suboptimal convergence and, in some cases, early training failure. We then introduce Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO), a new policy optimization method to resolve these issues by decoupling the normalization of individual rewards, more faithfully preserving their relative differences and enabling more accurate multi-reward optimization, along with substantially improved training stability. We compare GDPO with GRPO across three tasks: tool calling, math reasoning, and coding reasoning, evaluating both correctness metrics (accuracy, bug ratio) and constraint adherence metrics (format, length). Across all settings, GDPO consistently outperforms GRPO, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability for multi-reward reinforcement learning optimization.

cs.CL↗