arXiv subjects

Xu Bin

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Bin.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Multi-Step Reasoning for Embodied Question Answering via Tool Augmentation

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires agents to explore 3D environments to obtain observations and answer questions related to the scene. Existing methods leverage VLMs to directly explore the environment and answer questions without explicit thinking or planning, which limits their reasoning ability and results in excessive or inefficient exploration as well as ineffective responses. In this paper, we introduce ToolEQA, an agent that integrates external tools with multi-step reasoning, where external tools can provide more useful information for completing the task, helping the model derive better exploration directions in the next step of reasoning and thus obtaining additional effective information. This enables ToolEQA to generate more accurate responses with a shorter exploration distance. To enhance the model's ability for tool-usage and multi-step reasoning, we further design a novel EQA data generation pipeline that automatically constructs large-scale EQA tasks with reasoning trajectories and corresponding answers. Based on the pipeline, we collect the EQA-RT dataset that contains about 18K tasks, divided into a training set EQA-RT-Train, and two test sets EQA-RT-Seen (scenes overlapping with the training set) and EQA-RT-Unseen (novel scenes). Experiments on EQA-RT-Seen and EQA-RT-Unseen show that ToolEQA improves the success rate by 9.2~20.2% over state-of-the-art baselines, while outperforming the zero-shot ToolEQA by 10% in success rate. In addition, ToolEQA also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HM-EQA, OpenEQA, and EXPRESS-Bench datasets, demonstrating its generality. Our homepage see https://tooleqa.github.io.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

LLMAEL: Large Language Models are Good Context Augmenters for Entity Linking

Specialized entity linking (EL) models are well-trained at mapping mentions to unique knowledge base (KB) entities according to a given context. However, specialized EL models struggle to disambiguate long-tail entities due to their limited training data. Meanwhile, extensively pre-trained large language models (LLMs) possess broader knowledge of uncommon entities. Yet, with a lack of specialized EL training, LLMs frequently fail to generate accurate KB entity names, limiting their standalone effectiveness in EL. With the observation that LLMs are more adept at context generation instead of EL execution, we introduce LLM-Augmented Entity Linking (LLMAEL), the first framework to enhance specialized EL models with LLM data augmentation. LLMAEL leverages off-the-shelf, tuning-free LLMs as context augmenters, generating entity descriptions to serve as additional input for specialized EL models. Experiments show that LLMAEL sets new state-of-the-art results across 6 widely adopted EL benchmarks: compared to prior methods that integrate tuning-free LLMs into EL, LLMAEL achieves an absolute 8.9% gain in EL accuracy. We release our code and datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Modulation of interfacial thermal transport between fumed silica nanoparticles by surface chemical functionalization for advanced thermal insulation

Since solid-state heat transport in a highly porous nanocomposite strongly depends on the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) between constituent nanomaterials, further suppression of the TBC is important for improving performance of thermal insulators. Here, targeting a nanocomposite fabricated by stamping fumed silica nanoparticles, we perform a wide variety of surface functionalization on fumed silica nanoparticles by silane coupling method and investigate the impact on the thermal conductivity (Km). The Km of the silica nanocomposite is approximately 20 and 9 mW/m/K under atmospheric and vacuum condition at the material density of 0.2 g/cm3 without surface functionalization, respectively, and the experimental results indicate that the Km can be modulated depending on the chemical structure of molecules. The surface modification with a linear alkyl chain of optimal length significantly suppresses Km by approximately 30%, and the suppression can be further enhanced to approximately 50% with the infrared opacifier. The magnitude of suppression was found to sensitively depend on the length of terminal chain. The magnitude is also related to the number of reactive silanol groups in the chemical structure, where the surface modification with fluorocarbon gives the largest suppression. The surface hydrophobization merits thermal insulation through significant suppression of the TBC, presumably by reducing the water molecules that otherwise would serve as heat conduction channels at the interface. On the other hand, when the chain length is long, the suppression is counteracted by the enhanced phonon transmission through the silane coupling molecules that grows with the chain length. This is supported by the analytical model and present simulation results, leading to predict the optimal chemical structure for better thermal insulation.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2014

Objective Information Theory: A Sextuple Model and 9 Kinds of Metrics

In the contemporary era, the importance of information is undisputed, but there has never been a common understanding of information, nor a unanimous conclusion to the researches on information metrics. Based on the previous studies, this paper analyzes the important achievements in the researches of the properties and metrics of information as well as their main insufficiencies, and explores the essence and connotation, the mathematical expressions and other basic problems related to information. On the basis of the understanding of the objectivity of information, it proposes the definitions and a Sextuple model of information; discusses the basic properties of information, and brings forward the definitions and mathematical expressions of nine kinds of metrics of information, i.e., extensity, detailedness, sustainability, containability, delay, richness, distribution, validity and matchability. Through these, this paper establishes a basic theory frame of Objective Information Theory to support the analysis and research on information and information system systematically and comprehensively.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

HCMU metrics with cusp singularities and conical singularities

An HCMU metric is a conformal metric which has a finite number of singularities on a compact Riemann surface and satisfies the equation of the extremal Kähler metric. In this paper, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a kind of HCMU metrics which has both cusp singularities and conical singularities.

math.DG↗