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Xingyu Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xingyu Chen.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agents

Large language models (LLMs) excel at logical and algorithmic reasoning, yet their emotional intelligence (EQ) still lags far behind their cognitive prowess. While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced in other domains, its application to dialogue-especially for emotional intelligence-remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce RLVER, the first end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that leverages verifiable emotion rewards from simulated users to cultivate higher-order empathetic abilities in LLMs. Within this framework, self-consistent affective simulated users engage in dialogue rollouts and produce deterministic emotion scores during conversations, serving as reward signals to guide the LLM's learning. Fine-tuning publicly available Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct model with PPO boosts its Sentient-Benchmark score from 13.3 to 79.2 while largely preserving mathematical and coding competence. Extensive experiments reveal that: (i) RLVER consistently improves multiple dialogue capabilities; (ii) Thinking and non-thinking models show distinct trends--thinking models excel in empathy and insight, while non-thinking models favor action; (iii) GRPO often yields stable gains, while PPO can push certain capabilities to a higher ceiling; (iv) More challenging environments are not always better-moderate ones can yield stronger outcomes. Our results show that RLVER is a practical route toward emotionally intelligent and broadly capable language agents.

cs.CL↗

You Only Render Once: Enhancing Energy and Computation Efficiency of Mobile Virtual Reality

Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) is essential to achieving convenient and immersive human-computer interaction and realizing emerging applications such as Metaverse. However, existing VR technologies require two separate renderings of binocular images, causing a significant bottleneck for mobile devices with limited computing capability and power supply. This paper proposes an approach to rendering optimization for mobile VR called EffVR. By utilizing the per-pixel attribute, EffVR can generate binocular VR images from the monocular image through genuinely one rendering, saving half the computation over conventional approaches. Our evaluation indicates that, compared with the state-of-art, EffVRcan save 27% power consumption on average while achieving high binocular image quality (0.9679 SSIM and 34.09 PSNR) in mobile VR applications. Additionally, EffVR can increase the frame rate by 115.2%. These results corroborate EffVRsuperior computation/energy-saving performance, paving the road to a sustainable mobile VR. The source code, demo video, android app, and more are released anonymously at https://yoro-vr.github.io/

cs.GR↗

Rex-Thinker: Grounded Object Referring via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Object referring aims to detect all objects in an image that match a given natural language description. We argue that a robust object referring model should be grounded, meaning its predictions should be both explainable and faithful to the visual content. Specifically, it should satisfy two key properties: 1) Verifiable, by producing interpretable reasoning that justifies its predictions and clearly links them to visual evidence; and 2) Trustworthy, by learning to abstain when no object in the image satisfies the given expression. However, most methods treat referring as a direct bounding box prediction task, offering limited interpretability and struggling to reject expressions with no matching object. In this work, we propose Rex-Thinker, a model that formulates object referring as an explicit CoT reasoning task. Given a referring expression, we first identify all candidate object instances corresponding to the referred object category. Rex-Thinker then performs step-by-step reasoning over each candidate to assess whether it matches the given expression, before making a final prediction. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale CoT-style referring dataset named HumanRef-CoT by prompting GPT-4o on the HumanRef dataset. Each reasoning trace follows a structured planning, action, and summarization format, enabling the model to learn decomposed, interpretable reasoning over object candidates. We then train Rex-Thinker in two stages: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning phase to teach the model how to perform structured reasoning, followed by GRPO-based RL learning to improve accuracy and generalization. Experiments show that our approach outperforms standard baselines in both precision and interpretability on in-domain evaluation, while also demonstrating improved ability to reject hallucinated outputs and strong generalization in out-of-domain settings.

cs.CV↗

Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures within Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive reasoning capabilities by selectively activating experts to facilitate structured cognitive processes. Despite notable advances, existing reasoning models often suffer from cognitive inefficiencies like overthinking and underthinking. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel inference-time steering methodology called Reinforcing Cognitive Experts (RICE), designed to improve reasoning performance without additional training or complex heuristics. Leveraging normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (nPMI), we systematically identify specialized experts, termed ''cognitive experts'' that orchestrate meta-level reasoning operations characterized by tokens like '' ''. Empirical evaluations with leading MoE-based LRMs (DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B) on rigorous quantitative and scientific reasoning benchmarks demonstrate noticeable and consistent improvements in reasoning accuracy, cognitive efficiency, and cross-domain generalization. Crucially, our lightweight approach substantially outperforms prevalent reasoning-steering techniques, such as prompt design and decoding constraints, while preserving the model's general instruction-following skills. These results highlight reinforcing cognitive experts as a promising, practical, and interpretable direction to enhance cognitive efficiency within advanced reasoning models.

cs.AI↗

Ctrl-DNA: Controllable Cell-Type-Specific Regulatory DNA Design via Constrained RL

Designing regulatory DNA sequences that achieve precise cell-type-specific gene expression is crucial for advancements in synthetic biology, gene therapy and precision medicine. Although transformer-based language models (LMs) can effectively capture patterns in regulatory DNA, their generative approaches often struggle to produce novel sequences with reliable cell-specific activity. Here, we introduce Ctrl-DNA, a novel constrained reinforcement learning (RL) framework tailored for designing regulatory DNA sequences with controllable cell-type specificity. By formulating regulatory sequence design as a biologically informed constrained optimization problem, we apply RL to autoregressive genomic LMs, enabling the models to iteratively refine sequences that maximize regulatory activity in targeted cell types while constraining off-target effects. Our evaluation on human promoters and enhancers demonstrates that Ctrl-DNA consistently outperforms existing generative and RL-based approaches, generating high-fitness regulatory sequences and achieving state-of-the-art cell-type specificity. Moreover, Ctrl-DNA-generated sequences capture key cell-type-specific transcription factor binding sites (TFBS), short DNA motifs recognized by regulatory proteins that control gene expression, demonstrating the biological plausibility of the generated sequences.

cs.LG↗

DeepMath-103K: A Large-Scale, Challenging, Decontaminated, and Verifiable Mathematical Dataset for Advancing Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models shows promise in complex reasoning. However, its progress is hindered by the lack of large-scale training data that is sufficiently challenging, contamination-free and verifiable. To this end, we introduce DeepMath-103K, a large-scale mathematical dataset designed with high difficulty (primarily levels 5-9), rigorous decontamination against numerous benchmarks, and verifiable answers for rule-based RL reward. It further includes three distinct R1 solutions adaptable for diverse training paradigms such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Spanning a wide range of mathematical topics, DeepMath-103K fosters the development of generalizable and advancing reasoning. Notably, models trained on DeepMath-103K achieve state-of-the-art results on challenging mathematical benchmarks and demonstrate generalization beyond math such as biology, physics and chemistry, underscoring its broad efficacy. Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/zwhe99/DeepMath-103K.

cs.CL↗

Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models

Assessing how well a large language model (LLM) understands human, rather than merely text, remains an open challenge. To bridge the gap, we introduce Sentient Agent as a Judge (SAGE), an automated evaluation framework that measures an LLM's higher-order social cognition. SAGE instantiates a Sentient Agent that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts during interaction, providing a more realistic evaluation of the tested model in multi-turn conversations. At every turn, the agent reasons about (i) how its emotion changes, (ii) how it feels, and (iii) how it should reply, yielding a numerical emotion trajectory and interpretable inner thoughts. Experiments on 100 supportive-dialogue scenarios show that the final Sentient emotion score correlates strongly with Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory (BLRI) ratings and utterance-level empathy metrics, validating psychological fidelity. We also build a public Sentient Leaderboard covering 18 commercial and open-source models that uncovers substantial gaps (up to 4x) between frontier systems (GPT-4o-Latest, Gemini2.5-Pro) and earlier baselines, gaps not reflected in conventional leaderboards (e.g., Arena). SAGE thus provides a principled, scalable and interpretable tool for tracking progress toward genuinely empathetic and socially adept language agents.

cs.CL↗

AdaToken-3D: Dynamic Spatial Gating for Efficient 3D Large Multimodal-Models Reasoning

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have become a pivotal research focus in deep learning, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in 3D scene understanding. However, current 3D LMMs employing thousands of spatial tokens for multimodal reasoning suffer from critical inefficiencies: excessive computational overhead and redundant information flows. Unlike 2D VLMs processing single images, 3D LMMs exhibit inherent architectural redundancy due to the heterogeneous mechanisms between spatial tokens and visual tokens. To address this challenge, we propose AdaToken-3D, an adaptive spatial token optimization framework that dynamically prunes redundant tokens through spatial contribution analysis. Our method automatically tailors pruning strategies to different 3D LMM architectures by quantifying token-level information flows via attention pattern mining. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-3D (a 7B parameter 3D-LMM) demonstrate that AdaToken-3D achieves 21\% faster inference speed and 63\% FLOPs reduction while maintaining original task accuracy. Beyond efficiency gains, this work systematically investigates redundancy patterns in multimodal spatial information flows through quantitative token interaction analysis. Our findings reveal that over 60\% of spatial tokens contribute minimally ($<$5\%) to the final predictions, establishing theoretical foundations for efficient 3D multimodal learning.

cs.GR↗

DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understanding

In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP and 5.0 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

cs.CV↗

Method-of-Moments Inference for GLMs and Doubly Robust Functionals under Proportional Asymptotics

In this paper, we consider the estimation of regression coefficients and signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio in high-dimensional Generalized Linear Models (GLMs), and explore their implications in inferring popular estimands such as average treatment effects in high-dimensional observational studies. Under the ``proportional asymptotic'' regime and Gaussian covariates with known (population) covariance $Σ$, we derive Consistent and Asymptotically Normal (CAN) estimators of our targets of inference through a Method-of-Moments type of estimators that bypasses estimation of high dimensional nuisance functions and hyperparameter tuning altogether. Additionally, under non-Gaussian covariates, we demonstrate universality of our results under certain additional assumptions on the regression coefficients and $Σ$. We also demonstrate that knowing $Σ$ is not essential to our proposed methodology when the sample covariance matrix estimator is invertible. Finally, we complement our theoretical results with numerical experiments and comparisons with existing literature.

math.ST↗

PRISM: Projection-based Reward Integration for Scene-Aware Real-to-Sim-to-Real Transfer with Few Demonstrations

Learning from few demonstrations to develop policies robust to variations in robot initial positions and object poses is a problem of significant practical interest in robotics. Compared to imitation learning, which often struggles to generalize from limited samples, reinforcement learning (RL) can autonomously explore to obtain robust behaviors. Training RL agents through direct interaction with the real world is often impractical and unsafe, while building simulation environments requires extensive manual effort, such as designing scenes and crafting task-specific reward functions. To address these challenges, we propose an integrated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that constructs simulation environments based on expert demonstrations by identifying scene objects from images and retrieving their corresponding 3D models from existing libraries. We introduce a projection-based reward model for RL policy training that is supervised by a vision-language model (VLM) using human-guided object projection relationships as prompts, with the policy further fine-tuned using expert demonstrations. In general, our work focuses on the construction of simulation environments and RL-based policy training, ultimately enabling the deployment of reliable robotic control policies in real-world scenarios.

cs.RO↗

Active Sampling and Gaussian Reconstruction for Radio Frequency Radiance Field

Radio-frequency (RF) Radiance Field reconstruction is a challenging problem. The difficulty lies in the interactions between the propagating signal and objects, such as reflections and diffraction, which are hard to model precisely, especially when the shapes and materials of the objects are unknown. Previously, a neural network-based method was proposed to reconstruct the RF Radiance Field, showing promising results. However, this neural network-based method has some limitations: it requires a large number of samples for training and is computationally expensive. Additionally, the neural network only provides the predicted mean of the RF Radiance Field and does not offer an uncertainty model. In this work, we propose a training-free Gaussian reconstruction method for RF Radiance Field. Our method demonstrates that the required number of samples is significantly smaller compared to the neural network-based approach. Furthermore, we introduce an uncertainty model that provides confidence estimates for predictions at any selected position in the scene. We also combine the Gaussian reconstruction method with active sampling, which further reduces the number of samples needed to achieve the same performance. Finally, we explore the potential benefits of our method in a quasi-dynamic setting, showcasing its ability to adapt to changes in the scene without requiring the entire process to be repeated.

eess.SP↗

HOIGPT: Learning Long Sequence Hand-Object Interaction with Language Models

We introduce HOIGPT, a token-based generative method that unifies 3D hand-object interactions (HOI) perception and generation, offering the first comprehensive solution for captioning and generating high-quality 3D HOI sequences from a diverse range of conditional signals (\eg text, objects, partial sequences). At its core, HOIGPT utilizes a large language model to predict the bidrectional transformation between HOI sequences and natural language descriptions. Given text inputs, HOIGPT generates a sequence of hand and object meshes; given (partial) HOI sequences, HOIGPT generates text descriptions and completes the sequences. To facilitate HOI understanding with a large language model, this paper introduces two key innovations: (1) a novel physically grounded HOI tokenizer, the hand-object decomposed VQ-VAE, for discretizing HOI sequences, and (2) a motion-aware language model trained to process and generate both text and HOI tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HOIGPT sets new state-of-the-art performance on both text generation (+2.01% R Precision) and HOI generation (-2.56 FID) across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

Dancing with Critiques: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Stepwise Natural Language Self-Critique

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex tasks requiring multi-step logical deductions, remains a significant challenge. Traditional inference time scaling methods utilize scalar reward signals from process reward models to evaluate candidate reasoning steps, but these scalar rewards lack the nuanced qualitative information essential for understanding and justifying each step. In this paper, we propose a novel inference-time scaling approach -- stepwise natural language self-critique (PANEL), which employs self-generated natural language critiques as feedback to guide the step-level search process. By generating rich, human-readable critiques for each candidate reasoning step, PANEL retains essential qualitative information, facilitating better-informed decision-making during inference. This approach bypasses the need for task-specific verifiers and the associated training overhead, making it broadly applicable across diverse tasks. Experimental results on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including AIME and GPQA, demonstrate that PANEL significantly enhances reasoning performance, outperforming traditional scalar reward-based methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/puddingyeah/PANEL to support and encourage future research in this promising field.

cs.CL↗

HandOS: 3D Hand Reconstruction in One Stage

Existing approaches of hand reconstruction predominantly adhere to a multi-stage framework, encompassing detection, left-right classification, and pose estimation. This paradigm induces redundant computation and cumulative errors. In this work, we propose HandOS, an end-to-end framework for 3D hand reconstruction. Our central motivation lies in leveraging a frozen detector as the foundation while incorporating auxiliary modules for 2D and 3D keypoint estimation. In this manner, we integrate the pose estimation capacity into the detection framework, while at the same time obviating the necessity of using the left-right category as a prerequisite. Specifically, we propose an interactive 2D-3D decoder, where 2D joint semantics is derived from detection cues while 3D representation is lifted from those of 2D joints. Furthermore, hierarchical attention is designed to enable the concurrent modeling of 2D joints, 3D vertices, and camera translation. Consequently, we achieve an end-to-end integration of hand detection, 2D pose estimation, and 3D mesh reconstruction within a one-stage framework, so that the above multi-stage drawbacks are overcome. Meanwhile, the HandOS reaches state-of-the-art performances on public benchmarks, e.g., 5.0 PA-MPJPE on FreiHand and 64.6\% PCK@0.05 on HInt-Ego4D. Project page: idea-research.github.io/HandOSweb.

cs.CV↗

RaSA: Rank-Sharing Low-Rank Adaptation

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has been prominently employed for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). However, the limited expressive capacity of LoRA, stemming from the low-rank constraint, has been recognized as a bottleneck, particularly in rigorous tasks like code generation and mathematical reasoning. To address this limitation, we introduce Rank-Sharing Low-Rank Adaptation (RaSA), an innovative extension that enhances the expressive capacity of LoRA by leveraging partial rank sharing across layers. By forming a shared rank pool and applying layer-specific weighting, RaSA effectively increases the number of ranks without augmenting parameter overhead. Our theoretically grounded and empirically validated approach demonstrates that RaSA not only maintains the core advantages of LoRA but also significantly boosts performance in challenging code and math tasks. Code, data and scripts are available at: https://github.com/zwhe99/RaSA.

cs.CL↗

Alignment for Efficient Tool Calling of Large Language Models

Recent advancements in tool learning have enabled large language models (LLMs) to integrate external tools, enhancing their task performance by expanding their knowledge boundaries. However, relying on tools often introduces tradeoffs between performance, speed, and cost, with LLMs sometimes exhibiting overreliance and overconfidence in tool usage. This paper addresses the challenge of aligning LLMs with their knowledge boundaries to make more intelligent decisions about tool invocation. We propose a multi objective alignment framework that combines probabilistic knowledge boundary estimation with dynamic decision making, allowing LLMs to better assess when to invoke tools based on their confidence. Our framework includes two methods for knowledge boundary estimation, consistency based and absolute estimation, and two training strategies for integrating these estimates into the model decision making process. Experimental results on various tool invocation scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, showing significant improvements in tool efficiency by reducing unnecessary tool usage.

cs.CL↗

The First Few Tokens Are All You Need: An Efficient and Effective Unsupervised Prefix Fine-Tuning Method for Reasoning Models

Improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) typically requires supervised fine-tuning with labeled data or computationally expensive sampling. We introduce Unsupervised Prefix Fine-Tuning (UPFT), which leverages the observation of Prefix Self-Consistency -- the shared initial reasoning steps across diverse solution trajectories -- to enhance LLM reasoning efficiency. By training exclusively on the initial prefix substrings (as few as 8 tokens), UPFT removes the need for labeled data or exhaustive sampling. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks show that UPFT matches the performance of supervised methods such as Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning, while reducing training time by 75% and sampling cost by 99%. Further analysis reveals that errors tend to appear in later stages of the reasoning process and that prefix-based training preserves the model's structural knowledge. This work demonstrates how minimal unsupervised fine-tuning can unlock substantial reasoning gains in LLMs, offering a scalable and resource-efficient alternative to conventional approaches.

cs.CL↗