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Xu Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Yang.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Existence of nonlinearly scalarized black holes in Einstein-scalar-Gauss-Bonnet theory with polynomial couplings

Nonlinearly scalarized black holes are investigated in Einstein-scalar-Gauss-Bonnet (EsGB) theory with polynomial coupling functions $ζ(ϕ)$ satisfying $ζ''(0) = 0$, where $ζ'(ϕ) = 0$ features besides $ϕ=0$ solutions with constant $ϕ_{\rm s} \ne 0$. We determine the threshold amplitudes for Gaussian pulses, above which Schwarzschild black holes (SBHs) %become unstable and may transition to scalarized black holes for two coupling functions: $ζ(ϕ)=αϕ^4-βϕ^8$ and $ζ(ϕ)=αϕ^4-βϕ^6$. In contrast, for the quartic coupling function $ζ(ϕ)=αϕ^4$ SBHs are stable. Treating $ζ(ϕ)R_{GB}^2$ as an effective potential $V_\text{eff}$ provides an explanation for the ``plateau" and the divergence observed in the time evolution. We then construct the branches of nonlinearly scalarized black holes in the probe limit and with backreaction. While the pattern of the solution branches in the probe limit exhibits universal features, the presence of backreaction reveals a distinct dependence on the coupling strength $β$.

gr-qc↗

Recover to Predict: Progressive Retrospective Learning for Variable-Length Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction is critical for autonomous driving, enabling safe and efficient planning in dense, dynamic traffic. Most existing methods optimize prediction accuracy under fixed-length observations. However, real-world driving often yields variable-length, incomplete observations, posing a challenge to these methods. A common strategy is to directly map features from incomplete observations to those from complete ones. This one-shot mapping, however, struggles to learn accurate representations for short trajectories due to significant information gaps. To address this issue, we propose a Progressive Retrospective Framework (PRF), which gradually aligns features from incomplete observations with those from complete ones via a cascade of retrospective units. Each unit consists of a Retrospective Distillation Module (RDM) and a Retrospective Prediction Module (RPM), where RDM distills features and RPM recovers previous timesteps using the distilled features. Moreover, we propose a Rolling-Start Training Strategy (RSTS) that enhances data efficiency during PRF training. PRF is plug-and-play with existing methods. Extensive experiments on datasets Argoverse 2 and Argoverse 1 demonstrate the effectiveness of PRF. Code is available at https://github.com/zhouhao94/PRF.

cs.RO↗

Motion-Aware Transformer for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in videos remains challenging due to complex object motions and crowded scenes. Recent DETR-based frameworks offer end-to-end solutions but typically process detection and tracking queries jointly within a single Transformer Decoder layer, leading to conflicts and degraded association accuracy. We introduce the Motion-Aware Transformer (MATR), which explicitly predicts object movements across frames to update track queries in advance. By reducing query collisions, MATR enables more consistent training and improves both detection and association. Extensive experiments on DanceTrack, SportsMOT, and BDD100k show that MATR delivers significant gains across standard metrics. On DanceTrack, MATR improves HOTA by more than 9 points over MOTR without additional data and reaches a new state-of-the-art score of 71.3 with supplementary data. MATR also achieves state-of-the-art results on SportsMOT (72.2 HOTA) and BDD100k (54.7 mTETA, 41.6 mHOTA) without relying on external datasets. These results demonstrate that explicitly modeling motion within end-to-end Transformers offers a simple yet highly effective approach to advancing multi-object tracking.

cs.CV↗

Extinction behaviour for competing continuous-state population dynamics

We consider a system of two stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with competing two-way interactions driven by Brownian motions and spectrally positive $α$-stable random measures. Such a SDE system can be identified as a Lotka-Volterra type population model. We find nearly sharp conditions for one of the population to become extinct or extinguished.

math.PR↗

Fly360: Omnidirectional Obstacle Avoidance within Drone View

Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited field-of-view sensors and are ill-suited for UAV scenarios which require full-spatial awareness when the movement direction differs from the UAV's heading. This limitation motivates us to explore omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for panoramic drones with full-view perception. We first study an under explored problem setting in which a UAV must generate collision-free motion in environments with obstacles from arbitrary directions, and then construct a benchmark that consists of three representative flight tasks. Based on such settings, we propose Fly360, a two-stage perception-decision pipeline with a fixed random-yaw training strategy. At the perception stage, panoramic RGB observations are input and converted into depth maps as a robust intermediate representation. For the policy network, it is lightweight and used to output body-frame velocity commands from depth inputs. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Fly360 achieves stable omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and outperforms forward-view baselines across all tasks. Our model is available at https://zxkai.github.io/fly360/

cs.RO↗

On the Generalization of SFT: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective with Reward Rectification

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through mathematical analysis, we reveal that standard SFT gradients implicitly encode a problematic reward structure that may severely restrict the generalization capabilities of model compared to RL. To rectify this, we propose Dynamic Fine-Tuning (\model), stabilizing gradient updates for each token by dynamically rescaling the objective function with the probability of this token. With just a single-line change, the method outperforms standard SFT on multiple difficult benchmarks and base models, from math reasoning to code generation and multi-modal tasks, demonstrating improved generalization. Additionally, \model~achieves competitive results in offline RL settings, providing an effective yet streamlined alternative. By bridging theoretical insights with practical solutions, this work advances the state of SFT. The source code will be available at https://github.com/yongliang-wu/DFT.

cs.LG↗

Divide and Conquer: Accelerating Diffusion-Based Large Language Models via Adaptive Parallel Decoding

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have shown promising performance across various reasoning tasks, establishing themselves as an alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). Unlike autoregressive LLMs that generate one token per step based on all previous tokens, dLLMs theoretically enable parallel generation of multiple tokens at each decoding step. However, recent dLLMs still favor one-token-per-step generation in practice, as directly decoding multiple masked tokens often leads to degraded generation quality and stability. This reveals a substantial gap between the theoretical parallelism and practical performance of dLLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce an adaptive parallel decoding approach, namely DiCo, which features a three-phase divide-and-conquer paradigm to unleash the inherent parallelism of dLLMs. During the Divide phase, DiCo first explores the input masked sequence and identifies masked tokens as seed tokens, which are then expanded to construct a set of local clusters. During the Conquer phase, DiCo performs parallel decoding across different local clusters constructed in the Divide phase. The divide-and-conquer process repeatedly alternates between the Divide and Conquer phases until convergence. During the Finalize phase, DiCo decodes the remaining few masked tokens using an effective fine-grained compound decoding scheme to finalize the generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiCo can achieve significant inference speedups while maintaining competitive generation quality.

cs.CL↗

DP-aware AdaLN-Zero: Taming Conditioning-Induced Heavy-Tailed Gradients in Differentially Private Diffusion

Condition injection enables diffusion models to generate context-aware outputs, which is essential for many time-series tasks. However, heterogeneous conditional contexts (e.g., observed history, missingness patterns or outlier covariates) can induce heavy-tailed per-example gradients. Under Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD), these rare conditioning-driven heavy-tailed gradients disproportionately trigger global clipping, resulting in outlier-dominated updates, larger clipping bias, and degraded utility under a fixed privacy budget. In this paper, we propose DP-aware AdaLN-Zero, a drop-in sensitivity-aware conditioning mechanism for conditional diffusion transformers that limits conditioning-induced gain without modifying the DP-SGD mechanism. DP-aware AdaLN-Zero jointly constrains conditioning representation magnitude and AdaLN modulation parameters via bounded re-parameterization, suppressing extreme gradient tail events before gradient clipping and noise injection. Empirically, DP-SGD equipped with DP-aware AdaLN-Zero improves interpolation/imputation and forecasting under matched privacy settings. We observe consistent gains on a real-world power dataset and two public ETT benchmarks over vanilla DP-SGD. Moreover, gradient diagnostics attribute these improvements to conditioning-specific tail reshaping and reduced clipping distortion, while preserving expressiveness in non-private training. Overall, these results show that sensitivity-aware conditioning can substantially improve private conditional diffusion training without sacrificing standard performance.

cs.LG↗

Two-Stage Active Distribution Network Voltage Control via LLM-RL Collaboration: A Hybrid Knowledge-Data-Driven Approach

The growing integration of distributed photovoltaics (PVs) into active distribution networks (ADNs) has exacerbated operational challenges, making it imperative to coordinate diverse equipment to mitigate voltage violations and enhance power quality. Although existing data-driven approaches have demonstrated effectiveness in the voltage control problem, they often require extensive trial-and-error exploration and struggle to incorporate heterogeneous information, such as day-ahead forecasts and semantic-based grid codes. Considering the operational scenarios and requirements in real-world ADNs, in this paper, we propose a hybrid knowledge-data-driven approach that leverages dynamic collaboration between a large language model (LLM) agent and a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to achieve two-stage voltage control. In the day-ahead stage, the LLM agent receives coarse region-level forecasts and generates scheduling strategies for on-load tap changer (OLTC) and shunt capacitors (SCs) to regulate the overall voltage profile. Then in the intra-day stage, based on accurate node-level measurements, the RL agent refines terminal voltages by deriving reactive power generation strategies for PV inverters. On top of the LLM-RL collaboration framework, we further propose a self-evolution mechanism for the LLM agent and a pretrain-finetune pipeline for the RL agent, effectively enhancing and coordinating the policies for both agents. The proposed approach not only aligns more closely with practical operational characteristics but also effectively utilizes the inherent knowledge and reasoning capabilities of the LLM agent, significantly improving training efficiency and voltage control performance. Comprehensive comparisons and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

eess.SY↗

OPRIDE: Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning via In-Dataset Exploration

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences can be expensive and time-consuming, which forms a strong barrier for PbRL. In this work, we address the problem of low query efficiency in offline PbRL, pinpointing two primary reasons: inefficient exploration and overoptimization of learned reward functions. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm, \textbf{O}ffline \textbf{P}b\textbf{R}L via \textbf{I}n-\textbf{D}ataset \textbf{E}xploration (OPRIDE), designed to enhance the query efficiency of offline PbRL. OPRIDE consists of two key features: a principled exploration strategy that maximizes the informativeness of the queries and a discount scheduling mechanism aimed at mitigating overoptimization of the learned reward functions. Through empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that OPRIDE significantly outperforms prior methods, achieving strong performance with notably fewer queries. Moreover, we provide theoretical guarantees of the algorithm's efficiency. Experimental results across various locomotion, manipulation, and navigation tasks underscore the efficacy and versatility of our approach.

cs.LG↗

Flatter Tokens are More Valuable for Speculative Draft Model Training

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a key technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, but it typically requires training a draft model on a large dataset. We approach this problem from a data-centric perspective, finding that not all training samples contribute equally to the SD acceptance rate. Specifically, our theoretical analysis and empirical validation reveals that tokens inducing flatter predictive distributions from the target model are more valuable than those yielding sharply peaked distributions. Based on this insight, we propose flatness, a new metric to quantify this property, and develop the Sample-level-flatness-based Dataset Distillation (SFDD) approach, which filters the training data to retain only the most valuable samples. Experiments on the EAGLE framework demonstrate that SFDD can achieve over 2$\times$ training speedup using only 50% of the data, while keeping the final model's inference speedup within 4% of the full-dataset baseline. This work introduces an effective, data-centric approach that substantially improves the training efficiency for Speculative Decoding. Our code is available at https://github.com/fjm9933/Flatness.

cs.CL↗

GlobeDiff: State Diffusion Process for Partial Observability in Multi-Agent Systems

In the realm of multi-agent systems, the challenge of \emph{partial observability} is a critical barrier to effective coordination and decision-making. Existing approaches, such as belief state estimation and inter-agent communication, often fall short. Belief-based methods are limited by their focus on past experiences without fully leveraging global information, while communication methods often lack a robust model to effectively utilize the auxiliary information they provide. To solve this issue, we propose Global State Diffusion Algorithm~(GlobeDiff) to infer the global state based on the local observations. By formulating the state inference process as a multi-modal diffusion process, GlobeDiff overcomes ambiguities in state estimation while simultaneously inferring the global state with high fidelity. We prove that the estimation error of GlobeDiff under both unimodal and multi-modal distributions can be bounded. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GlobeDiff achieves superior performance and is capable of accurately inferring the global state.

cs.AI↗

d$^2$Cache: Accelerating Diffusion-Based LLMs via Dual Adaptive Caching

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs), despite their promising performance, still suffer from inferior inference efficiency. This is because dLLMs rely on bidirectional attention and cannot directly benefit from the standard key-value (KV) cache as autoregressive models (ARMs) do. To tackle this issue, we introduce \textit{Dual aDaptive Cache} (d$^2$Cache), which is a training-free approximate KV cache framework for accelerating dLLM inference. d$^2$Cache features a two-stage fine-grained selection strategy to identify tokens and adaptively update their KV states at each decoding step, while caching the KV states of the remaining tokens for reuse. Furthermore, d$^2$Cache naturally offers a more reliable decoding alternative, which can enable quasi left-to-right generation and mitigate premature overconfidence in tokens at the end of the sequence. Extensive experimental results on two representative dLLMs (\ie, LLaDA and Dream) demonstrate that d$^2$Cache not only achieves substantial inference speedups, but also yields consistent improvements in generation quality. The code is available at https://github.com/Kamichanw/d2Cache.

cs.CL↗

Past- and Future-Informed KV Cache Policy with Salience Estimation in Autoregressive Video Diffusion

Video generation is pivotal to digital media creation, and recent advances in autoregressive video generation have markedly enhanced the efficiency of real-time video synthesis. However, existing approaches generally rely on heuristic KV Cache policies, which ignore differences in token importance in long-term video generation. This leads to the loss of critical spatiotemporal information and the accumulation of redundant, invalid cache, thereby degrading video generation quality and efficiency. To address this limitation, we first observe that token contributions to video generation are highly time-heterogeneous and accordingly propose a novel Past- and Future-Informed KV Cache Policy (PaFu-KV). Specifically, PaFu-KV introduces a lightweight Salience Estimation Head distilled from a bidirectional teacher to estimate salience scores, allowing the KV cache to retain informative tokens while discarding less relevant ones. This policy yields a better quality-efficiency trade-off by shrinking KV cache capacity and reducing memory footprint at inference time. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method preserves high-fidelity video generation quality while enables accelerated inference, thereby enabling more efficient long-horizon video generation. Our code will be released upon paper acceptance.

cs.CV↗

Beyond Global Alignment: Fine-Grained Motion-Language Retrieval via Pyramidal Shapley-Taylor Learning

As a foundational task in human-centric cross-modal intelligence, motion-language retrieval aims to bridge the semantic gap between natural language and human motion, enabling intuitive motion analysis, yet existing approaches predominantly focus on aligning entire motion sequences with global textual representations. This global-centric paradigm overlooks fine-grained interactions between local motion segments and individual body joints and text tokens, inevitably leading to suboptimal retrieval performance. To address this limitation, we draw inspiration from the pyramidal process of human motion perception (from joint dynamics to segment coherence, and finally to holistic comprehension) and propose a novel Pyramidal Shapley-Taylor (PST) learning framework for fine-grained motion-language retrieval. Specifically, the framework decomposes human motion into temporal segments and spatial body joints, and learns cross-modal correspondences through progressive joint-wise and segment-wise alignment in a pyramidal fashion, effectively capturing both local semantic details and hierarchical structural relationships. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving precise alignment between motion segments and body joints and their corresponding text tokens. The code of this work will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

SpecFLASH: A Latent-Guided Semi-autoregressive Speculative Decoding Framework for Efficient Multimodal Generation

Large language models and large multimodal models (LLMs and LMMs) deliver strong generative performance but suffer from slow decoding, a problem that becomes more severe when handling visual inputs, whose sequences typically contain many more tokens with lower information density than text. Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by letting a compact draft model propose candidate tokens that are selectively accepted by a larger target model, achieving speed-up without degrading quality. However, existing multimodal speculative decoding approaches largely ignore the structural characteristics of visual representations and usually rely on text-only draft models. In this paper, we introduce SpecFLASH, a speculative decoding framework tailored to LMMs that explicitly exploits multimodal structure when designing the draft model. We first mitigate redundancy in visual token sequences with a lightweight, latent-guided token compression module that compacts visual features while preserving semantics, and then leverage the co-occurrence and local correlations of visual entities via a semi-autoregressive decoding scheme that predicts multiple tokens in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpecFLASH consistently surpasses prior speculative decoding baselines, achieving up to $2.68\times$ speed-up on video captioning and $2.55\times$ on visual instruction tuning, relative to the original LMM. Our code is available here: https://github.com/ZihuaEvan/FlashSD/.

cs.CV↗

Federated k-Means over Networks

We study federated clustering, where interconnected devices collaboratively cluster the data points of private local datasets. Focusing on hard clustering via the k-means principle, we formulate federated k-means as an instance of generalized total variation minimization (GTVMin). This leads to a federated k-means algorithm in which each device updates its local cluster centroids by solving a regularized k-means problem with a regularizer that enforces consistency between neighbouring devices. The resulting algorithm is privacy-friendly, as only aggregated information is exchanged.

cs.LG↗

GeoSSA: Geometric Sparrow Search Algorithm for UAV Path Planning and Engineering Design Optimization

The Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA), characterized by its simple structure and ease of implementation, nevertheless suffers from an insufficient balance between exploration and exploitation, making it prone to premature convergence and slow optimization progress. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes a Geometric Sparrow Search Algorithm (GeoSSA). By integrating Good Nodes Set initialization, a Sine-Cosine Enhanced Producer position update strategy, and a Triangular-Walk Enhanced Edge Sparrow update strategy, GeoSSA significantly improves the global exploration ability, local exploitation efficiency, and convergence stability of the original SSA. To thoroughly validate the effectiveness of GeoSSA, we conducted ablation studies, qualitative analysis, and comparative experiments on 23 benchmark functions against state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results show that GeoSSA achieves the best or near-best performance in terms of average fitness, standard deviation, Wilcoxon tests, and Friedman rankings, with an Overall Effectiveness ($OE$) of 95.65\%. Its overall performance is significantly superior to all compared algorithms. In three-dimensional UAV path planning tasks, GeoSSA demonstrates excellent stability and superior path quality. In four categories of engineering design optimization problems, GeoSSA consistently attains the highest solution accuracy and strongest stability. GeoSSA not only exhibits outstanding global optimization performance on standard benchmark functions but also shows strong robustness and generalization ability in practical applications such as UAV path planning and engineering design. Therefore, GeoSSA provides an efficient and reliable solution framework for complex optimization problems.

cs.CE↗