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Xinyu Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xinyu Liu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Do Pathology Vision-Language Models Truly See Pathology?

Pathology vision-language models (VLMs) have recently progressed rapidly and are commonly evaluated by answer accuracy on pathology VQA benchmarks. However, we dig into current evaluations and identify three overlooked issues: 1) Visual evidence is not always necessary. For instance, Gemini-3-Pro achieves 53.5% average accuracy across 5 VQA benchmarks without any visual input. 2) Domain training can improve accuracy without proportional gains in visual binding. Compared with Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Patho-R1-7B exhibits a 5.8-point lower multimodal gain and a 3.7-point lower attention IoU. 3) Entity-level attention is diffuse and weakly query-specific. On PathVG, attention maps remain highly correlated across different entity queries. These issues can lead to substantial misjudgments of pathology VLMs' actual multimodal capabilities. To this end, we present PathBind, a benchmark comprising 2,600 samples: PathBind-VQA with 1,500 questions across six dimensions, PathBind-PTA with 600 questions from a private pathology teaching atlas, and PathBind-Grounding with 500 expert-curated region-level samples. Each component undergoes task-specific automated filtering and expert review to reduce textual shortcuts and improve entity-region correspondence. We evaluate 18 representative VLMs on VQA samples of PathBind and five existing pathology VQA benchmarks, and further evaluate 10 VLMs on PathBind-Grounding and PathVG. Results show that current pathology VLMs still exhibit a substantial gap between answer-side performance and visual-semantic binding.

cs.CV↗

VoLN: Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation---Paradigm, Benchmark, and Method

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions. However, route-level instructions commonly encode spatial priors, such as orientation, distance, and layout, that are not explicitly available from onboard sensing at deployment in open, GPS-denied environments. Benchmark performance under such interfaces therefore jointly reflects visual navigation ability and the use of route structure explicitly supplied by the task description. As a complementary formulation, we propose Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation (VoLN), which shifts route-relevant information from externally supplied instructions and global guidance to locally observable in-scene cues. In VoLN, goal views specify the destination, while route-relevant information is available only through locally observable in-scene cues that the agent must detect, interpret, and select online. We instantiate VoLN for aerial navigation through VoLN-UAV, a 7,210-episode benchmark that combines long-horizon goal-directed flight, continuous 3D motion, large viewpoint changes, and context-dependent beacon selection. We further provide VoLN-MLLM as an initial reference baseline. It aligns self-supervised visual features with a structured semantic space and predicts short-horizon waypoint segments from observation history, goal views, retrieved visual--semantic tokens, and proprioception. On the five-environment Test-Unseen split, it obtains success rates of 7.4%, 4.5%, and 1.8% on Easy, Normal, and Hard episodes, respectively. These results provide an initial evaluation of VoLN and reveal substantial remaining challenges in long-horizon evidence integration, cross-view goal matching, and closed-loop stability. Project page: https://admire-ljb.github.io/VoLN-UAV/

cs.RO↗

ReBind: Multi-Reference Video Editing via Structured Instructions with Explicit Reference Relationships

Recent diffusion-based video generation models have made significant progress in multi-reference image-conditioned video editing. However, existing methods still struggle to coordinate information from multiple visual sources accurately. We identify a critical deficiency in existing approaches. Existing editing instructions lack explicit reference relationships, and most multimodal large language models (MLLMs) cannot generate them reliably. To address this problem, we propose ReBind, a systematic framework that introduces semantic instructions with embedded reference tokens as the intermediate representation for multi-reference image-conditioned video editing. Our key insight is embedding reference tokens at semantic positions to eliminate ambiguity and establish precise bindings between visual attributes and their sources. We develop ReBind-Instruct, a specialized MLLM that learns to establish explicit bindings between visual attributes and their reference sources through a two-stage progressive scheme for precise reference relationships. We further develop ReBind-Edit, which enables lightweight adaptation of text-to-video models to coordinate multiple references by binding visual attributes to their designated sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReBind substantially outperforms general-purpose MLLMs in instruction quality and achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source methods on reference image conditioned video editing. Our project webpage: https://rebind-mrv2v.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

Structured Evidence Selection for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

Weakly supervised video anomaly detection relies solely on video-level labels for training, making it difficult to accurately localize anomalous events in complex scenes. In real-world videos, anomalous behaviors exhibit large variations in appearance and temporal duration, while scene appearance and action dynamics are often tightly entangled. Consequently, existing models tend to rely on scene-related statistical cues rather than true behavioral deviations, resulting in unstable detection performance. To address this challenge, we propose a Structured Evidence Selection framework (SESAD) that reformulates anomaly detection as a structured reasoning process over clip-level visual evidence. Instead of directly mapping aggregated features to anomaly scores, SESAD reorganizes clip representations into semantically structured candidate evidence and performs context-conditioned selection under scene and action constraints. This mechanism adaptively emphasizes anomaly-relevant semantics while suppressing scene interference, thereby alleviating semantic entanglement under weak supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight geometric discrimination module that constructs a dual-prototype structure in the embedding space, enabling anomaly decisions through relative geometric relations. Extensive experiments on UBnormal, ShanghaiTech, and UCF-Crime show that SESAD achieves 67.92, 97.99, and 88.46 AUC, respectively, while maintaining high computational efficiency and overall consistently stable anomaly discrimination.

cs.CV↗

Lumos-Nexus: Efficient Frequency Bridging with Homogeneous Latent Space for Video Unified Models

Connector-based video unified models have demonstrated strong capability in instruction-grounded video synthesis, but integrating a large high-fidelity generator into the unified training loop is computationally prohibitive, limiting achievable visual quality. We therefore propose Lumos-Nexus, a training-efficient unified video generation framework that facilitates the development of strong reasoning-driven generation capabilities while significantly enhancing visual fidelity. Lumos-Nexus adopts a two-stage design: 1) During training, only a lightweight generator is aligned with the understanding block to learn to take in reasoning-driven semantic control. 2) During inference, we introduce Unified Progressive Frequency Bridging (UPFB) to progressively hand off generation to a high-capacity pretrained generator in the shared latent space, enabling coarse-to-fine refinement and producing high-fidelity videos without compromising reasoning quality. To fill the gap in reasoning-driven video generation benchmarks, we introduce VR-Bench, which assesses a model's capability to translate inferred intent into coherent and semantically aligned video content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Lumos-Nexus achieves substantial gains in visual realism and temporal coherence on VBench, while exhibiting strong reasoning-based generative performance on VR-Bench. Code and models are available at https://jiazheng-xing.github.io/nexus-lumos-home/.

cs.CV↗

AERIS: Aerial-Edge Role-Driven Intelligence at Runtime via Orchestrated Language-Model Swarm

Integrating large language models into robotic systems holds promise for enhancing autonomy, yet practical deployment remains constrained by strict heartbeat-constrained scheduling and limited computational power. We propose AERIS: an edge deployment framework for aerial platforms. It organizes dedicated small language models combined with lightweight perception and control modules into roles that can be instantiated at runtime, and dynamically rebinds them across different executors as resources change, thereby pushing intelligent capabilities to the edge. AERIS achieves long-horizon instruction decomposition through an attention-subgoal alignment mechanism, which involves annotating the currently active instruction step in messages, thereby progressively approaching long-term objectives. We evaluate AERIS on a high-fidelity UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation benchmark. Under a heartbeat-timed execution mechanism, AERIS maintains a stable perception-decision-control loop between a low-frequency planner and a high-frequency controller, supporting real-time closed-loop operation. We further validate its deployability through two real-world experiments focused on planning and fast response. A demonstration video is provided in the supplementary materials.

cs.RO↗

Multi-scale Object-Aware Gaze Estimation via Geometric Reasoning

Gaze target estimation aims to predict the semantic object an observer fixates upon within an image, a task deeply rooted in the object-oriented nature of human gaze. Observers tend to select a specific semantic entity as the attentional target, rather than responding randomly across arbitrary regions of the image. However, existing methods typically model this task as a direct mapping from global features to gaze heatmaps, essentially treating it as a pixel-level regression problem. This approach fails to explicitly represent the gazed object as a distinct entity, making it difficult to produce stable and semantically consistent predictions in complex scenes. To address this, we propose a two-stage gaze estimation framework guided by object semantics, reformulating gaze target estimation as a hierarchical reasoning process. Our method incorporates object-level representations during feature encoding to align image features with discrete semantic entities, then introduces multi-scale feature fusion and geometric constraints from head pose and gaze direction for fine-grained localization and object-level discrimination. Extensive experiments on GazeFollow, VideoAttentionTarget, ChildPlay, and GOO-Real demonstrate that our method achieves AUC of 0.961, 0.948, 0.987, and 0.977 respectively, delivering strong performance across all benchmarks while maintaining a compact parameter size of 7.1M.

cs.CV↗

xGR: Efficient Generative Recommendation Serving at Scale

Recommendation system delivers substantial economic benefits by providing personalized predictions. Generative recommendation (GR) integrates LLMs to enhance the understanding of long user-item sequences. Despite employing attention-based architectures, GR's workload differs markedly from that of LLM serving. GR typically processes long prompt while producing short, fixed-length outputs, yet the computational cost of each decode phase is especially high due to the large beam width. Furthermore, since the beam search involves a vast item space, the sorting overhead becomes particularly time-consuming. We propose xGR, a GR-oriented serving system that meets strict low-latency requirements under high-concurrency scenarios. First, xGR unifies the processing of prefill and decode phases through staged computation and separated KV cache. Second, xGR enables early sorting termination and mask-based item filtering with data structure reuse. Third, xGR reconstructs the overall pipeline to exploit multi-level overlap and multi-stream parallelism. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that xGR achieves at least 2.89x throughput compared to the state-of-the-art baseline under strict latency constraints.

cs.LG↗

FlowTrain: Flow-Based Decoupled Training for Industrial-Grade Vision-Language Models

Industrial-grade distributed training of vision-language models (VLMs) remains far less efficient than that of unimodal LLMs. Existing solutions either follow a monolithic design that assigns uniform parallelism to heterogeneous modules or adopt a disaggregated deployment that separates modules while executing them as a batch-synchronized pipeline. In this paper, we highlight that the above solutions are still not sufficient, and VLM training can be further decoupled. To this end, we present FlowTrain, a flow-based decoupled training framework that reformulates VLM training as a producer-consumer dataflow coordinated through a unified memory pool. The encoder and backbone can progress independently over a global virtual address space. Since this execution decoupling fundamentally changes the optimization objective of allocation and scheduling, FlowTrain further introduces a heterogeneous parallel allocator that assigns module-specific parallelism strategies by solving a throughput matching problem. The dynamic packing scheduler is used to construct balanced microbatches at runtime according to the actual LLM-side computation cost. Extensive experiments on real-world workloads show that FlowTrain achieves over 50% MFU and up to 1.7x throughput improvement, narrowing the efficiency gap to LLM-only training.

cs.LG↗

SurgVista: Long-Horizon Surgical World Modeling with Plausible Instrument-Tissue Dynamics

Scaling robot policy learning for autonomous surgery is challenging, as expert demonstrations are expensive and in vivo exploration poses substantial safety risks. Surgical world models address this by generating realistic, action-conditioned future frames from an initial observation, but existing methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: spatial interaction incoherence, where visible instrument contact fails to induce spatially consistent tissue deformation, and temporal fidelity collapse, where prediction errors compound across autoregressive rollouts and progressively corrupt visual quality. We present SurgVista, a surgical world model that mitigates both failures through two training recipes. Deformation Consistency Regularization extracts scene-point trajectories from training videos and enforces cross-frame coherence through latent contrastive learning, strengthening physically consistent instrument-tissue dynamics. Drift Adaptation Training mitigates long-horizon drift by perturbing conditioning frames with online prediction residuals and photometric augmentations calibrated to long-horizon drift statistics, sustaining visual fidelity over extended rollouts. To enable rigorous evaluation, we further introduce SurgWorld-Bench, featuring diverse procedure types, long-range rollouts, and decoupled metrics for instrument-motion accuracy and tissue-response fidelity. Extensive experiments show that SurgVista consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across visual quality, temporal consistency, and interaction fidelity, with gains widening as the prediction horizon grows.

cs.CV↗

GePBench: Evaluating Fundamental Geometric Perception for Multimodal Large Language Models

Geometric shapes play important roles in both physical world and human cognition. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in visual understanding, their abilities to recognize geometric shapes and their spatial relationships, which we term \emph{geometric perception}, are not explicitly and systematically explored. To address this gap, we introduce GePBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the geometric perception capabilities of MLLMs. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even the current state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in geometric perception tasks. Furthermore, we show that models trained with GePBench data demonstrate considerable improvements on a wide range of downstream tasks, highlighting the critical role of geometric perception in enabling advanced multimodal applications. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}.

cs.CL↗

SpanNorm: Reconciling Training Stability and Performance in Deep Transformers

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on the stable training of deep Transformer architectures. A critical design choice is the placement of normalization layers, leading to a fundamental trade-off: the ``PreNorm'' architecture ensures training stability at the cost of potential performance degradation in deep models, while the ``PostNorm'' architecture offers strong performance but suffers from severe training instability. In this work, we propose SpanNorm, a novel technique designed to resolve this dilemma by integrating the strengths of both paradigms. Structurally, SpanNorm establishes a clean residual connection that spans the entire transformer block to stabilize signal propagation, while employing a PostNorm-style computation that normalizes the aggregated output to enhance model performance. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that SpanNorm, combined with a principled scaling strategy, maintains bounded signal variance throughout the network, preventing the gradient issues that plague PostNorm models, and also alleviating the representation collapse of PreNorm. Empirically, SpanNorm consistently outperforms standard normalization schemes in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scenarios, paving the way for more powerful and stable Transformer architectures.

cs.CL↗

HybridThinker: Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Compressed Memory and Transient Thought Steps

Extended chain-of-thought (CoT) traces improve LLM reasoning but incur substantial computational and memory costs. While existing CoT compression methods mitigate this by condensing thought steps into compact representations via memory tokens and retaining only these representations at inference time, the loss of fine-grained information makes subsequent steps more error-prone. To alleviate this, we propose \textbf{HybridThinker}, where in addition to preserved these representations, thought steps are also temporarily retained to provide fine-grained details. However, we observe that naively keeping thought steps accessible to subsequent steps \emph{during training} lets the model bypass memory tokens by retrieving information directly from these steps, leaving the model's ability to compress and retrieve information through memory tokens insufficiently trained. We therefore introduce a hybrid training scheme, in which only some thought steps are directly accessible through attention to subsequent steps, while the other thought steps are masked, forcing the model to use memory tokens for compression and retrieval. Across 4 reasoning benchmarks, HybridThinker matches the uncompressed baseline, advancing the state of the art in CoT compression by 5.8 points on average accuracy with similar inference time. Ablation studies confirm that both temporary thought-step retention and the hybrid training scheme contribute to these gains.

cs.CL↗

Cognitive Pivot Points and Visual Anchoring: Unveiling and Rectifying Hallucinations in Multimodal Reasoning Models

Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have achieved remarkable strides in visual reasoning through test time compute scaling, yet long chain reasoning remains prone to hallucinations. We identify a concerning phenomenon termed the Reasoning Vision Truth Disconnect (RVTD): hallucinations are strongly correlated with cognitive bifurcation points that often exhibit high entropy states. We attribute this vulnerability to a breakdown in visual semantic anchoring, localized within the network's intermediate layers; specifically, during these high uncertainty transitions, the model fails to query visual evidence, reverting instead to language priors. Consequently, we advocate a shift from solely outcome level supervision to augmenting it with fine grained internal attention guidance. To this end, we propose V-STAR (Visual Structural Training with Attention Reinforcement), a lightweight, holistic training paradigm designed to internalize visually aware reasoning capabilities. Central to our approach is the Hierarchical Visual Attention Reward (HVAR), integrated within the GRPO framework. Upon detecting high entropy states, this mechanism dynamically incentivizes visual attention across critical intermediate layers, thereby anchoring the reasoning process back to the visual input. Furthermore, we introduce the Forced Reflection Mechanism (FRM), a trajectory editing strategy that disrupts cognitive inertia by triggering reflection around high entropy cognitive bifurcation points and encouraging verification of subsequent steps against the visual input, thereby translating external debiasing interventions into an intrinsic capability for hallucination mitigation.

cs.AI↗

MemoSight: Unifying Context Compression and Multi Token Prediction for Reasoning Acceleration

While chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to solve challenging reasoning tasks, the linear growth of the KV cache leads to substantial memory and inference overhead. Existing approaches such as context compression and multi-token prediction (MTP) improve efficiency from two complementary directions by compressing historical tokens and generating future tokens in parallel. However, effectively combining them remains challenging due to their different training paradigms and architectural assumptions. In this work, we propose MemoSight (Memory-Foresight-Based Reasoning), a unified framework that integrates context compression and MTP to improve inference efficiency while preserving CoT performance. MemoSight adopts a shared minimalist design based on special tokens and token-specific positional layouts for both compression and parallel prediction. Experiments on four reasoning benchmarks show that, compared to the vanilla SFT baseline, MemoSight reduces KV cache usage by up to 66% and improves inference speed by 56%, while incurring less than a 3% drop in average reasoning accuracy, yielding a better efficiency-accuracy trade-off than existing CoT compression methods.

cs.AI↗

Teacher-Guided Policy Optimization for On-Policy Reasoning Distillation under Large Policy Divergence

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods rely on reverse KL (RKL)-based teacher supervision over trajectories sampled from the student policy. However, we identify a critical limitation: under large teacher--student policy divergence, RL-driven exploration often produces trajectories outside the teacher distribution, resulting in uninformative negative feedback. To address this, we propose Teacher-Guided Policy Optimization (TGPO), an on-policy reasoning distillation method that remains effective under large policy divergence settings. Rather than relying solely on evaluative supervision, TGPO uses teacher to directly guide token level generation conditioning on student-generated contexts; together with RLVR-style trajectory level rewards, TGPO steers exploration toward improved continuations. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks show that TGPO consistently outperforms existing RKL-based OPD methods and remains robust across different teacher models.

cs.LG↗

Extensions of Robbins-Siegmund Theorem with Applications in Reinforcement Learning

The Robbins-Siegmund theorem establishes the convergence of stochastic processes that are almost supermartingales and is one of the most commonly used approaches for analyzing stochastic iterative algorithms in stochastic approximation and reinforcement learning (RL). However, its original form has a significant limitation as it requires the zero-order term to be summable. In many important RL applications, this summable condition, however, cannot be met. This limitation motivates us to extend the Robbins-Siegmund theorem for almost supermartingales where the zero-order term is not summable, but only square-summable. In particular, we introduce a novel and mild assumption on the increments of the stochastic processes. This together with the square-summable condition enables an almost sure convergence to a bounded set. Additionally, we further provide almost sure convergence rates, high probability concentration bounds, and $L^p$ convergence rates. We then apply the new results to stochastic approximation and RL. Notably, we obtain the first almost sure convergence rate, the first high probability concentration bound, and the first $L^p$ convergence rate for $Q$-learning with linear function approximation.

cs.LG↗

MathlibLemma: Folklore Lemma Generation and Benchmark for Formal Mathematics

While the ecosystem of Lean and Mathlib has enjoyed celebrated success in formal mathematical reasoning with the help of large language models (LLMs), the absence of many folklore lemmas in Mathlib remains a persistent barrier that limits Lean's usability as an everyday tool for mathematicians like \LaTeX{} or Maple. To address this, we introduce MathlibLemma, a modular LLM-based pipeline for automated folklore-lemma mining: the discovery, formalization, and proving of reusable intermediate facts that mathematicians often take for granted but that are not always present in formal libraries. At its core, MathlibLemma proactively mines the missing connective tissue of mathematics. The pipeline produces a verified library of folklore-style lemmas, including 1,506 Lean-checked proofs that pass a proof-bypass screen; a small curated pilot subset has also been merged into Mathlib, providing external evidence that selected outputs can meet expert library standards. Leveraging this pipeline, we further construct the MathlibLemma benchmark, a suite of 4,028 non-trivial type-checked Lean statements spanning a broad range of mathematical domains. By transforming the role of LLMs from passive consumers to active contributors, this work takes a step toward AI-assisted expansion of formal mathematical libraries.

cs.LO↗