Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Xuelong Li

Publications and source records attributed to Xuelong Li.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

UniDiff: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multimodal Time Series Forecasting

As multimodal data proliferates across diverse real-world applications, leveraging heterogeneous information such as texts and timestamps for accurate time series forecasting (TSF) has become a critical challenge. While diffusion models demonstrate exceptional performance in generation tasks, their application to TSF remains largely confined to modeling single-modality numerical sequences, overlooking the abundant cross-modal signals inherent in complex heterogeneous data. To address this gap, we propose UniDiff, a unified diffusion framework for multimodal time series forecasting. To process the numerical sequence, our framework first tokenizes the time series into patches, preserving local temporal dynamics by mapping each patch to an embedding space via a lightweight MLP. At its core lies a unified and parallel fusion module, where a single cross-attention mechanism adaptively weighs and integrates structural information from timestamps and semantic context from texts in one step, enabling a flexible and efficient interplay between modalities. Furthermore, we introduce a novel classifier-free guidance mechanism designed for multi-source conditioning, allowing for decoupled control over the guidance strength of textual and temporal information during inference, which significantly enhances model robustness. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets across eight domains demonstrate that the proposed UniDiff model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.LG↗

ERF-BA-TFD+: A Multimodal Model for Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection

Deepfake detection is a critical task in identifying manipulated multimedia content. In real-world scenarios, deepfake content can manifest across multiple modalities, including audio and video. To address this challenge, we present ERF-BA-TFD+, a novel multimodal deepfake detection model that combines enhanced receptive field (ERF) and audio-visual fusion. Our model processes both audio and video features simultaneously, leveraging their complementary information to improve detection accuracy and robustness. The key innovation of ERF-BA-TFD+ lies in its ability to model long-range dependencies within the audio-visual input, allowing it to better capture subtle discrepancies between real and fake content. In our experiments, we evaluate ERF-BA-TFD+ on the DDL-AV dataset, which consists of both segmented and full-length video clips. Unlike previous benchmarks, which focused primarily on isolated segments, the DDL-AV dataset allows us to assess the model's performance in a more comprehensive and realistic setting. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on this dataset, outperforming existing techniques in terms of both accuracy and processing speed. The ERF-BA-TFD+ model demonstrated its effectiveness in the "Workshop on Deepfake Detection, Localization, and Interpretability," Track 2: Audio-Visual Detection and Localization (DDL-AV), and won first place in this competition.

cs.AI↗

TempoMaster: Efficient Long Video Generation via Next-Frame-Rate Prediction

We present TempoMaster, a novel framework that formulates long video generation as next-frame-rate prediction. Specifically, we first generate a low-frame-rate clip that serves as a coarse blueprint of the entire video sequence, and then progressively increase the frame rate to refine visual details and motion continuity. During generation, TempoMaster employs bidirectional attention within each frame-rate level while performing autoregression across frame rates, thus achieving long-range temporal coherence while enabling efficient and parallel synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TempoMaster establishes a new state-of-the-art in long video generation, excelling in both visual and temporal quality.

cs.CV↗

Steering Vision-Language-Action Models as Anti-Exploration: A Test-Time Scaling Approach

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, trained via flow-matching or diffusion objectives, excel at learning complex behaviors from large-scale, multi-modal datasets (e.g., human teleoperation, scripted policies). However, since VLAs incorporate diverse data modes in the pre-training stage, and the finetuning dataset often contains demonstration data collected in a kinematically suboptimal or undesirable way, it exists redundant action modes that are irrelevant to the success action modes of the downstream task. Specifically, we observe a critical inference-time fragility among various sampled noises after supervised finetuning of pre-trained VLAs. In this paper, we attribute this instability to the distribution shift between the VLA policy and the policy induced by stable success modes of the downstream task dataset. Thus, we propose \textbf{TACO}, a test-time-scaling (TTS) framework that applies a lightweight pseudo-count estimator as a high-fidelity verifier of action chunks. The VLA models integrated with TACO can execute the actions with maximum pseudo-count from all sampled action chunks, thereby preventing distribution shifts while preserving the generalization ability of VLAs since the constraint is applied only during inference. Our method resembles the classical anti-exploration principle in offline reinforcement learning (RL), and being gradient-free, it incurs significant computational benefits compared to RL update, especially for flow or diffusion-based VLAs which are difficult to perform RL update due to denoising process. Extensive experiments across four simulation benchmarks (RoboTwin2.0, Robotwin, LIBERO, SimplerEnv) and a dual-arm platform demonstrate that our method significantly improves the inference stability and success rates in downstream-task adaptations.

cs.RO↗

CtrlVDiff: Controllable Video Generation via Unified Multimodal Video Diffusion

We tackle the dual challenges of video understanding and controllable video generation within a unified diffusion framework. Our key insights are two-fold: geometry-only cues (e.g., depth, edges) are insufficient: they specify layout but under-constrain appearance, materials, and illumination, limiting physically meaningful edits such as relighting or material swaps and often causing temporal drift. Enriching the model with additional graphics-based modalities (intrinsics and semantics) provides complementary constraints that both disambiguate understanding and enable precise, predictable control during generation. However, building a single model that uses many heterogeneous cues introduces two core difficulties. Architecturally, the model must accept any subset of modalities, remain robust to missing inputs, and inject control signals without sacrificing temporal consistency. Data-wise, training demands large-scale, temporally aligned supervision that ties real videos to per-pixel multimodal annotations. We then propose CtrlVDiff, a unified diffusion model trained with a Hybrid Modality Control Strategy (HMCS) that routes and fuses features from depth, normals, segmentation, edges, and graphics-based intrinsics (albedo, roughness, metallic), and re-renders videos from any chosen subset with strong temporal coherence. To enable this, we build MMVideo, a hybrid real-and-synthetic dataset aligned across modalities and captions. Across understanding and generation benchmarks, CtrlVDiff delivers superior controllability and fidelity, enabling layer-wise edits (relighting, material adjustment, object insertion) and surpassing state-of-the-art baselines while remaining robust when some modalities are unavailable.

cs.CV↗

FAIM: Frequency-Aware Interactive Mamba for Time Series Classification

Time series classification (TSC) is crucial in numerous real-world applications, such as environmental monitoring, medical diagnosis, and posture recognition. TSC tasks require models to effectively capture discriminative information for accurate class identification. Although deep learning architectures excel at capturing temporal dependencies, they often suffer from high computational cost, sensitivity to noise perturbations, and susceptibility to overfitting on small-scale datasets. To address these challenges, we propose FAIM, a lightweight Frequency-Aware Interactive Mamba model. Specifically, we introduce an Adaptive Filtering Block (AFB) that leverages Fourier Transform to extract frequency-domain features from time series data. The AFB incorporates learnable adaptive thresholds to dynamically suppress noise and employs element-wise coupling of global and local semantic adaptive filtering, enabling in-depth modeling of the synergy among different frequency components. Furthermore, we design an Interactive Mamba Block (IMB) to facilitate efficient multi-granularity information interaction, balancing the extraction of fine-grained discriminative features and comprehensive global contextual information, thereby endowing FAIM with powerful and expressive representations for TSC tasks. Additionally, we incorporate a self-supervised pre-training mechanism to enhance FAIM's understanding of complex temporal patterns and improve its robustness across various domains and high-noise scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FAIM consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency and exhibits outstanding performance.

cs.LG↗

Introducing Visual Scenes and Reasoning: A More Realistic Benchmark for Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) consists of two sub-tasks: intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF). Given its broad range of real-world applications, enhancing SLU for practical deployment is increasingly critical. Profile-based SLU addresses ambiguous user utterances by incorporating context awareness (CA), user profiles (UP), and knowledge graphs (KG) to support disambiguation, thereby advancing SLU research toward real-world applicability. However, existing SLU datasets still fall short in representing real-world scenarios. Specifically, (1) CA uses one-hot vectors for representation, which is overly idealized, and (2) models typically focuses solely on predicting intents and slot labels, neglecting the reasoning process that could enhance performance and interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VRSLU, a novel SLU dataset that integrates both Visual images and explicit Reasoning. For over-idealized CA, we use GPT-4o and FLUX.1-dev to generate images reflecting users' environments and statuses, followed by human verification to ensure quality. For reasoning, GPT-4o is employed to generate explanations for predicted labels, which are then refined by human annotators to ensure accuracy and coherence. Additionally, we propose an instructional template, LR-Instruct, which first predicts labels and then generates corresponding reasoning. This two-step approach helps mitigate the influence of reasoning bias on label prediction. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of incorporating visual information and highlight the promise of explicit reasoning in advancing SLU.

cs.AI↗

UniModel: A Visual-Only Framework for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

We present UniModel, a unified generative model that jointly supports visual understanding and visual generation within a single pixel-to-pixel diffusion framework. Our goal is to achieve unification along three axes: the model, the tasks, and the representations. At the representation level, we eliminate modality discrepancies by mapping both text and images into a shared visual space: textual prompts are rendered as painted text images on a clean canvas, and all inputs and outputs are treated purely as RGB pixels. This yields a fully vision-native formulation of multimodal learning. At the task level, a broad range of vision-language problems are cast as pixel-to-pixel transformations in this visual space. For understanding tasks, the model takes an RGB image and produces a painted text image that visually encodes the semantic prediction. For generation tasks, painted text images serve as visual conditions that guide realistic and semantically aligned image synthesis. Captioning and text-to-image generation thus become different directions of the same underlying visual translation process. At the model level, we instantiate a single Unified Diffusion Transformer trained with rectified flow in pixel space. A shared backbone jointly learns bidirectional mappings between natural images and painted text images, with lightweight task embeddings to specify the desired direction. Experiments on text-to-image synthesis and image-to-text understanding demonstrate strong cross-modal alignment and emergent controllability such as cycle-consistent image-caption-image loops. Our initial exploration suggests that unifying model, tasks, and representations in a single visual space is a promising paradigm for general-purpose multimodal intelligence.

cs.CV↗

GRPO-RM: Fine-Tuning Representation Models via GRPO-Driven Reinforcement Learning

The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), has proved its effectiveness in practical applications such as DeepSeek-R1. It raises a question whether GRPO can be generalized to representation learning models. In this paper, we propose Group Relative Policy Optimization for Representation Model (GRPO-RM), and investigate the performance of GRPO-like policy in post-training representation models. Specifically, our method establishes a predefined output set to functionally replace token sequence sampling in LLMs, thereby generating an output group, which is essential for the probability-driven optimization of GRPO. In addition, a specialized reward function is designed to accommodate the properties of representation models. Extensive experiments are conducted on various real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.LG↗

QSentry: Backdoor Detection for Quantum Neural Networks via Measurement Clustering

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are an important model for implementing quantum machine learning (QML), while they demonstrate a high degree of vulnerability to backdoor attacks similar to classical networks. To address this issue, a quantum backdoor attack detection framework called QSentry is proposed, in which a quantum Measurement Clustering method is introduced to detect backdoors by identifying statistical anomalies in measurement outputs. It is demonstrated that QSentry can effectively detect anomalous distributions induced by backdoor samples with extensive experiments. It achieves a 75.8% F1 score even under a 1% poisoning rate, and further improves to 85.7% and 93.2% as the poisoning rate increases to 5% and 10%, respectively. The integration of silhouette coefficients and relative cluster size enable QSentry to precisely isolate backdoor samples, yielding estimates that closely match actual poisoning ratios. Evaluations under various quantum attack scenarios demonstrate that QSentry delivers superior robustness and accuracy compared with three state-of-the-art detection methods. This work establishes a practical and effective framework for mitigating backdoor threats in QML.

quant-ph↗

A Generative Data Framework with Authentic Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement

Underwater image restoration and enhancement are crucial for correcting color distortion and restoring image details, thereby establishing a fundamental basis for subsequent underwater visual tasks. However, current deep learning methodologies in this area are frequently constrained by the scarcity of high-quality paired datasets. Since it is difficult to obtain pristine reference labels in underwater scenes, existing benchmarks often rely on manually selected results from enhancement algorithms, providing debatable reference images that lack globally consistent color and authentic supervision. This limits the model's capabilities in color restoration, image enhancement, and generalization. To overcome this limitation, we propose using in-air natural images as unambiguous reference targets and translating them into underwater-degraded versions, thereby constructing synthetic datasets that provide authentic supervision signals for model learning. Specifically, we establish a generative data framework based on unpaired image-to-image translation, producing a large-scale dataset that covers 6 representative underwater degradation types. The framework constructs synthetic datasets with precise ground-truth labels, which facilitate the learning of an accurate mapping from degraded underwater images to their pristine scene appearances. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments across 6 representative network architectures and 3 independent test sets show that models trained on our synthetic data achieve comparable or superior color restoration and generalization performance to those trained on existing benchmarks. This research provides a reliable and scalable data-driven solution for underwater image restoration and enhancement. The generated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/yftian2025/SynUIEDatasets.git.

cs.CV↗

OmniVDiff: Omni Controllable Video Diffusion for Generation and Understanding

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for controllable video diffusion, OmniVDiff , aiming to synthesize and comprehend multiple video visual content in a single diffusion model. To achieve this, OmniVDiff treats all video visual modalities in the color space to learn a joint distribution, while employing an adaptive control strategy that dynamically adjusts the role of each visual modality during the diffusion process, either as a generation modality or a conditioning modality. Our framework supports three key capabilities: (1) Text-conditioned video generation, where all modalities are jointly synthesized from a textual prompt; (2) Video understanding, where structural modalities are predicted from rgb inputs in a coherent manner; and (3) X-conditioned video generation, where video synthesis is guided by finegrained inputs such as depth, canny and segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniVDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in video generation tasks and competitive results in video understanding. Its flexibility and scalability make it well-suited for downstream applications such as video-to-video translation, modality adaptation for visual tasks, and scene reconstruction.

cs.CV↗

Aligning MLLM Benchmark With Human Preferences via Structural Equation Modeling

Evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is fundamentally challenged by the absence of structured, interpretable, and theoretically grounded benchmarks; current heuristically-grouped tasks have vague cognitive targets, overlapping abilities, redundant indicators, and weak diagnostic power. We therefore propose a structural-equation-modeling-aligned framework that quantifies internal validity, dimensional separability, and component contributions, and introduce a Piaget-inspired capability hierarchy that stratifies MLLM abilities into Perception, Memory, and Reasoning. Reorganizing existing tasks under this theory, we build the GOLD benchmark, whose experiments show superior interpretability, lower indicator redundancy, and clearer cognitive consistency than prior benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

MLM: Learning Multi-task Loco-Manipulation Whole-Body Control for Quadruped Robot with Arm

Whole-body loco-manipulation for quadruped robots with arms remains a challenging problem, particularly in achieving multi-task control. To address this, we propose MLM, a reinforcement learning framework driven by both real-world and simulation data. It enables a six-DoF robotic arm-equipped quadruped robot to perform whole-body loco-manipulation for multiple tasks autonomously or under human teleoperation. To address the problem of balancing multiple tasks during the learning of loco-manipulation, we introduce a trajectory library with an adaptive, curriculum-based sampling mechanism. This approach allows the policy to efficiently leverage real-world collected trajectories for learning multi-task loco-manipulation. To address deployment scenarios with only historical observations and to enhance the performance of policy execution across tasks with different spatial ranges, we propose a Trajectory-Velocity Prediction policy network. It predicts unobservable future trajectories and velocities. By leveraging extensive simulation data and curriculum-based rewards, our controller achieves whole-body behaviors in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world deployment. Ablation studies in simulation verify the necessity and effectiveness of our approach, while real-world experiments on a Go2 robot with an Airbot robotic arm demonstrate the policy's good performance in multi-task execution.

cs.RO↗

DIFFA: Large Language Diffusion Models Can Listen and Understand

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across textual and multimodal domains. In parallel, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative to the autoregressive paradigm, offering improved controllability, bidirectional context modeling, and robust generation. However, their application to the audio modality remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce \textbf{DIFFA}, the first diffusion-based large audio-language model designed to perform spoken language understanding. DIFFA integrates a frozen diffusion language model with a lightweight dual-adapter architecture that bridges speech understanding and natural language reasoning. We employ a two-stage training pipeline: first, aligning semantic representations via an ASR objective; then, learning instruction-following abilities through synthetic audio-caption pairs automatically generated by prompting LLMs. Despite being trained on only 960 hours of ASR and 127 hours of synthetic instruction data, DIFFA demonstrates competitive performance on major benchmarks, including MMSU, MMAU, and VoiceBench, outperforming several autoregressive open-source baselines. Our results reveal the potential of diffusion-based language models for efficient and scalable audio understanding, opening a new direction for speech-driven AI. Our code will be available at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/DIFFA.git.

cs.SD↗

Bridging the Gap between Continuous and Informative Discrete Representations by Random Product Quantization

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become a core technique in speech processing, but the high dimensionality of its representations makes discretization essential for improving efficiency. However, existing discretization methods still suffer from significant information loss, resulting in a notable performance gap compared to continuous representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose two quantization-based discretization methods: Product Quantization (PQ) and Random Product Quantization (RPQ). PQ partitions the original feature space into multiple subspaces and independently quantizes each sub-vector, producing a fused set of discrete units that retain diverse information from different subspaces, thereby mitigating the loss associated with single-cluster quantization. RPQ further enhances representation diversity by randomly sampling a fixed proportion of feature dimensions multiple times to construct sub-vectors, thereby better capturing the variability in the data distribution. Theoretical analysis shows that RPQ reduces the correlation coefficient rho (where 0 <= rho <= 1) between sub-quantizers. Its quantization error is lower-bounded by the product of rho and epsilon-kms, where epsilon-kms denotes the quantization error of a single K-means quantizer. Experimental results on a combined dataset built from LibriSpeech and ML-SUPERB show that PQ and RPQ outperform standard K-means discretization, achieving relative improvements of 21.8 percent and 20.0 percent in WER on LibriSpeech, and 24.1 percent and 19.6 percent in CER on ML-SUPERB, respectively. Moreover, their performance is competitive with, and in some cases even surpasses, that of continuous SSL representations.

eess.AS↗

Gestura: A LVLM-Powered System Bridging Motion and Semantics for Real-Time Free-Form Gesture Understanding

Free-form gesture understanding is highly appealing for human-computer interaction, as it liberates users from the constraints of predefined gesture categories. However, the sole existing solution GestureGPT suffers from limited recognition accuracy and slow response times. In this paper, we propose Gestura, an end-to-end system for free-form gesture understanding. Gestura harnesses a pre-trained Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to align the highly dynamic and diverse patterns of free-form gestures with high-level semantic concepts. To better capture subtle hand movements across different styles, we introduce a Landmark Processing Module that compensate for LVLMs' lack of fine-grained domain knowledge by embedding anatomical hand priors. Further, a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning strategy enables step-by-step semantic inference, transforming shallow knowledge into deep semantic understanding and significantly enhancing the model's ability to interpret ambiguous or unconventional gestures. Together, these components allow Gestura to achieve robust and adaptable free-form gesture comprehension. Additionally, we have developed the first open-source dataset for free-form gesture intention reasoning and understanding with over 300,000 annotated QA pairs.

cs.CV↗

SmartFreeEdit: Mask-Free Spatial-Aware Image Editing with Complex Instruction Understanding

Recent advancements in image editing have utilized large-scale multimodal models to enable intuitive, natural instruction-driven interactions. However, conventional methods still face significant challenges, particularly in spatial reasoning, precise region segmentation, and maintaining semantic consistency, especially in complex scenes. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SmartFreeEdit, a novel end-to-end framework that integrates a multimodal large language model (MLLM) with a hypergraph-enhanced inpainting architecture, enabling precise, mask-free image editing guided exclusively by natural language instructions. The key innovations of SmartFreeEdit include:(1)the introduction of region aware tokens and a mask embedding paradigm that enhance the spatial understanding of complex scenes;(2) a reasoning segmentation pipeline designed to optimize the generation of editing masks based on natural language instructions;and (3) a hypergraph-augmented inpainting module that ensures the preservation of both structural integrity and semantic coherence during complex edits, overcoming the limitations of local-based image generation. Extensive experiments on the Reason-Edit benchmark demonstrate that SmartFreeEdit surpasses current state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics, including segmentation accuracy, instruction adherence, and visual quality preservation, while addressing the issue of local information focus and improving global consistency in the edited image. Our project will be available at https://github.com/smileformylove/SmartFreeEdit.

cs.CV↗