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Yan Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Zheng.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

DualRAG: A Dual-Process Approach to Integrate Reasoning and Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) tasks permeate real-world applications, posing challenges in orchestrating multi-step reasoning across diverse knowledge domains. While existing approaches have been improved with iterative retrieval, they still struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge. To address this, we propose DualRAG, a synergistic dual-process framework that seamlessly integrates reasoning and retrieval. DualRAG operates through two tightly coupled processes: Reasoning-augmented Querying (RaQ) and progressive Knowledge Aggregation (pKA). They work in concert: as RaQ navigates the reasoning path and generates targeted queries, pKA ensures that newly acquired knowledge is systematically integrated to support coherent reasoning. This creates a virtuous cycle of knowledge enrichment and reasoning refinement. Through targeted fine-tuning, DualRAG preserves its sophisticated reasoning and retrieval capabilities even in smaller-scale models, demonstrating its versatility and core advantages across different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this dual-process approach substantially improves answer accuracy and coherence, approaching, and in some cases surpassing, the performance achieved with oracle knowledge access. These results establish DualRAG as a robust and efficient solution for complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

cs.LG↗

MUVLA: Learning to Explore Object Navigation via Map Understanding

In this paper, we present MUVLA, a Map Understanding Vision-Language-Action model tailored for object navigation. It leverages semantic map abstractions to unify and structure historical information, encoding spatial context in a compact and consistent form. MUVLA takes the current and history observations, as well as the semantic map, as inputs and predicts the action sequence based on the description of goal object. Furthermore, it amplifies supervision through reward-guided return modeling based on dense short-horizon progress signals, enabling the model to develop a detailed understanding of action value for reward maximization. MUVLA employs a three-stage training pipeline: learning map-level spatial understanding, imitating behaviors from mixed-quality demonstrations, and reward amplification. This strategy allows MUVLA to unify diverse demonstrations into a robust spatial representation and generate more rational exploration strategies. Experiments on HM3D and Gibson benchmarks demonstrate that MUVLA achieves great generalization and learns effective exploration behaviors even from low-quality or partially successful trajectories.

cs.RO↗

Embodied Arena: A Comprehensive, Unified, and Evolving Evaluation Platform for Embodied AI

Embodied AI development significantly lags behind large foundation models due to three critical challenges: (1) lack of systematic understanding of core capabilities needed for Embodied AI, making research lack clear objectives; (2) absence of unified and standardized evaluation systems, rendering cross-benchmark evaluation infeasible; and (3) underdeveloped automated and scalable acquisition methods for embodied data, creating critical bottlenecks for model scaling. To address these obstacles, we present Embodied Arena, a comprehensive, unified, and evolving evaluation platform for Embodied AI. Our platform establishes a systematic embodied capability taxonomy spanning three levels (perception, reasoning, task execution), seven core capabilities, and 25 fine-grained dimensions, enabling unified evaluation with systematic research objectives. We introduce a standardized evaluation system built upon unified infrastructure supporting flexible integration of 22 diverse benchmarks across three domains (2D/3D Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) and 30+ advanced models from 20+ worldwide institutes. Additionally, we develop a novel LLM-driven automated generation pipeline ensuring scalable embodied evaluation data with continuous evolution for diversity and comprehensiveness. Embodied Arena publishes three real-time leaderboards (Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) with dual perspectives (benchmark view and capability view), providing comprehensive overviews of advanced model capabilities. Especially, we present nine findings summarized from the evaluation results on the leaderboards of Embodied Arena. This helps to establish clear research veins and pinpoint critical research problems, thereby driving forward progress in the field of Embodied AI.

cs.RO↗

UltraSTF: Ultra-Compact Model for Large-Scale Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Spatio-temporal data, prevalent in real-world applications such as traffic monitoring, financial transactions, and ride-share demands, represents a specialized case of multivariate time series characterized by high dimensionality. This high dimensionality necessitates computationally efficient models and benefits from applying univariate forecasting approaches through channel-independent strategies. SparseTSF, a recently proposed competitive univariate forecasting model, leverages periodicity to achieve compactness by focusing on cross-period dynamics, extending the Pareto frontier in terms of model size and predictive performance. However, it underperforms on spatio-temporal data due to limited capture of intra-period temporal dependencies. To address this limitation, we propose UltraSTF, which integrates a cross-period forecasting component with an ultra-compact shape bank component. Our model efficiently captures recurring patterns in time series using the attention mechanism of the shape bank component, significantly enhancing its capability to learn intra-period dynamics. UltraSTF achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LargeST benchmark while utilizing fewer than 0.2% of the parameters required by the second-best methods, thereby further extending the Pareto frontier of existing approaches.

cs.LG↗

Improving Similar Case Retrieval Ranking Performance By Revisiting RankSVM

Given the rapid development of Legal AI, a lot of attention has been paid to one of the most important legal AI tasks--similar case retrieval, especially with language models to use. In our paper, however, we try to improve the ranking performance of current models from the perspective of learning to rank instead of language models. Specifically, we conduct experiments using a pairwise method--RankSVM as the classifier to substitute a fully connected layer, combined with commonly used language models on similar case retrieval datasets LeCaRDv1 and LeCaRDv2. We finally come to the conclusion that RankSVM could generally help improve the retrieval performance on the LeCaRDv1 and LeCaRDv2 datasets compared with original classifiers by optimizing the precise ranking. It could also help mitigate overfitting owing to class imbalance. Our code is available in https://github.com/liuyuqi123study/RankSVM_for_SLR

cs.CL↗

Squeeze the Soaked Sponge: Efficient Off-policy Reinforcement Finetuning for Large Language Model

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in nature, i.e., data generated during the past learning process is not fully utilized. This inevitably comes at a significant cost of compute and time, posing a stringent bottleneck on continuing economic and efficient scaling. To this end, we launch the renaissance of off-policy RL and propose Reincarnating Mix-policy Proximal Policy Gradient (ReMix), a general approach to enable on-policy RFT methods like PPO and GRPO to leverage off-policy data. ReMix consists of three major components: (1) Mix-policy proximal policy gradient with an increased Update-To-Data (UTD) ratio for efficient training; (2) KL-Convex policy constraint to balance the trade-off between stability and flexibility; (3) Policy reincarnation to achieve a seamless transition from efficient early-stage learning to steady asymptotic improvement. In our experiments, we train a series of ReMix models upon PPO, GRPO and 1.5B, 7B base models. ReMix shows an average Pass@1 accuracy of 52.10% (for 1.5B model) with 0.079M response rollouts, 350 training steps and achieves 63.27%/64.39% (for 7B model) with 0.007M/0.011M response rollouts, 50/75 training steps, on five math reasoning benchmarks (i.e., AIME'24, AMC'23, Minerva, OlympiadBench, and MATH500). Compared with 15 recent advanced models, ReMix shows SOTA-level performance with an over 30x to 450x reduction in training cost in terms of rollout data volume. In addition, we reveal insightful findings via multifaceted analysis, including the implicit preference for shorter responses due to the Whipping Effect of off-policy discrepancy, the collapse mode of self-reflection behavior under the presence of severe off-policyness, etc.

cs.LG↗

Mastering Regional 3DGS: Locating, Initializing, and Editing with Diverse 2D Priors

Many 3D scene editing tasks focus on modifying local regions rather than the entire scene, except for some global applications like style transfer, and in the context of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), where scenes are represented by a series of Gaussians, this structure allows for precise regional edits, offering enhanced control over specific areas of the scene; however, the challenge lies in the fact that 3D semantic parsing often underperforms compared to its 2D counterpart, making targeted manipulations within 3D spaces more difficult and limiting the fidelity of edits, which we address by leveraging 2D diffusion editing to accurately identify modification regions in each view, followed by inverse rendering for 3D localization, then refining the frontal view and initializing a coarse 3DGS with consistent views and approximate shapes derived from depth maps predicted by a 2D foundation model, thereby supporting an iterative, view-consistent editing process that gradually enhances structural details and textures to ensure coherence across perspectives. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while delivering up to a $4\times$ speedup, providing a more efficient and effective approach to 3D scene local editing.

cs.CV↗

Tweedie Regression for Video Recommendation System

Modern recommendation systems aim to increase click-through rates (CTR) for better user experience, through commonly treating ranking as a classification task focused on predicting CTR. However, there is a gap between this method and the actual objectives of businesses across different sectors. In video recommendation services, the objective of video on demand (VOD) extends beyond merely encouraging clicks, but also guiding users to discover their true interests, leading to increased watch time. And longer users watch time will leads to more revenue through increased chances of presenting online display advertisements. This research addresses the issue by redefining the problem from classification to regression, with a focus on maximizing revenue through user viewing time. Due to the lack of positive labels on recommendation, the study introduces Tweedie Loss Function, which is better suited in this scenario than the traditional mean square error loss. The paper also provides insights on how Tweedie process capture users diverse interests. Our offline simulation and online A/B test revealed that we can substantially enhance our core business objectives: user engagement in terms of viewing time and, consequently, revenue. Additionally, we provide a theoretical comparison between the Tweedie Loss and the commonly employed viewing time weighted Logloss, highlighting why Tweedie Regression stands out as an efficient solution. We further outline a framework for designing a loss function that focuses on a singular objective.

cs.LG↗

Prioritized Trajectory Replay: A Replay Memory for Data-driven Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, data-driven reinforcement learning (RL), also known as offline RL, have gained significant attention. However, the role of data sampling techniques in offline RL has been overlooked despite its potential to enhance online RL performance. Recent research suggests applying sampling techniques directly to state-transitions does not consistently improve performance in offline RL. Therefore, in this study, we propose a memory technique, (Prioritized) Trajectory Replay (TR/PTR), which extends the sampling perspective to trajectories for more comprehensive information extraction from limited data. TR enhances learning efficiency by backward sampling of trajectories that optimizes the use of subsequent state information. Building on TR, we build the weighted critic target to avoid sampling unseen actions in offline training, and Prioritized Trajectory Replay (PTR) that enables more efficient trajectory sampling, prioritized by various trajectory priority metrics. We demonstrate the benefits of integrating TR and PTR with existing offline RL algorithms on D4RL. In summary, our research emphasizes the significance of trajectory-based data sampling techniques in enhancing the efficiency and performance of offline RL algorithms.

cs.LG↗

From Chaos to Order: The Atomic Reasoner Framework for Fine-grained Reasoning in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress, yet their capacity for logical ``slow-thinking'' reasoning persists as a critical research frontier. Current inference scaling paradigms suffer from two fundamental constraints: fragmented thought flows compromising logical coherence, and intensively computational complexity that escalates with search space dimensions. To overcome these limitations, we present \textbf{Atomic Reasoner} (\textbf{AR}), a cognitive inference strategy that enables fine-grained reasoning through systematic atomic-level operations. AR decomposes the reasoning process into atomic cognitive units, employing a cognitive routing mechanism to dynamically construct reasoning representations and orchestrate inference pathways. This systematic methodology implements stepwise, structured cognition, which ensures logical coherence while significantly reducing cognitive load, effectively simulating the cognitive patterns observed in human deep thinking processes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate AR's superior reasoning capabilities without the computational burden of exhaustive solution searches, particularly excelling in linguistic logic puzzles. These findings substantiate AR's effectiveness in enhancing LLMs' capacity for robust, long-sequence logical reasoning and deliberation.

cs.CL↗

Towards Efficient Large Scale Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting via Improved Inverted Transformers

Time series forecasting at scale presents significant challenges for modern prediction systems, particularly when dealing with large sets of synchronized series, such as in a global payment network. In such systems, three key challenges must be overcome for accurate and scalable predictions: 1) emergence of new entities, 2) disappearance of existing entities, and 3) the large number of entities present in the data. The recently proposed Inverted Transformer (iTransformer) architecture has shown promising results by effectively handling variable entities. However, its practical application in large-scale settings is limited by quadratic time and space complexity ($O(N^2)$) with respect to the number of entities $N$. In this paper, we introduce EiFormer, an improved inverted transformer architecture that maintains the adaptive capabilities of iTransformer while reducing computational complexity to linear scale ($O(N)$). Our key innovation lies in restructuring the attention mechanism to eliminate redundant computations without sacrificing model expressiveness. Additionally, we incorporate a random projection mechanism that not only enhances efficiency but also improves prediction accuracy through better feature representation. Extensive experiments on the public LargeST benchmark dataset and a proprietary large-scale time series dataset demonstrate that EiFormer significantly outperforms existing methods in both computational efficiency and forecasting accuracy. Our approach enables practical deployment of transformer-based forecasting in industrial applications where handling time series at scale is essential.

cs.LG↗

SheetAgent: Towards A Generalist Agent for Spreadsheet Reasoning and Manipulation via Large Language Models

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous across the World Wide Web, playing a critical role in enhancing work efficiency across various domains. Large language model (LLM) has been recently attempted for automatic spreadsheet manipulation but has not yet been investigated in complicated and realistic tasks where reasoning challenges exist (e.g., long horizon manipulation with multi-step reasoning and ambiguous requirements). To bridge the gap with the real-world requirements, we introduce SheetRM, a benchmark featuring long-horizon and multi-category tasks with reasoning-dependent manipulation caused by real-life challenges. To mitigate the above challenges, we further propose SheetAgent, a novel autonomous agent that utilizes the power of LLMs. SheetAgent consists of three collaborative modules: Planner, Informer, and Retriever, achieving both advanced reasoning and accurate manipulation over spreadsheets without human interaction through iterative task reasoning and reflection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SheetAgent delivers 20--40\% pass rate improvements on multiple benchmarks over baselines, achieving enhanced precision in spreadsheet manipulation and demonstrating superior table reasoning abilities. More details and visualizations are available at the project website: https://sheetagent.github.io/. The datasets and source code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SheetAgent.

cs.AI↗

MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming essential tools for various natural language processing tasks but often suffer from generating outdated or incorrect information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this issue by incorporating external, real-time information retrieval to ground LLM responses. However, the existing RAG systems frequently struggle with the quality of retrieval documents, as irrelevant or noisy documents degrade performance, increase computational overhead, and undermine response reliability. To tackle this problem, we propose Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MAIN-RAG), a training-free RAG framework that leverages multiple LLM agents to collaboratively filter and score retrieved documents. Specifically, MAIN-RAG introduces an adaptive filtering mechanism that dynamically adjusts the relevance filtering threshold based on score distributions, effectively minimizing noise while maintaining high recall of relevant documents. The proposed approach leverages inter-agent consensus to ensure robust document selection without requiring additional training data or fine-tuning. Experimental results across four QA benchmarks demonstrate that MAIN-RAG consistently outperforms traditional RAG approaches, achieving a 2-11% improvement in answer accuracy while reducing the number of irrelevant retrieved documents. Quantitative analysis further reveals that our approach achieves superior response consistency and answer accuracy over baseline methods, offering a competitive and practical alternative to training-based solutions.

cs.CL↗

Oscillation Inversion: Understand the structure of Large Flow Model through the Lens of Inversion Method

We explore the oscillatory behavior observed in inversion methods applied to large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, with a focus on the "Flux" model. By employing a fixed-point-inspired iterative approach to invert real-world images, we observe that the solution does not achieve convergence, instead oscillating between distinct clusters. Through both toy experiments and real-world diffusion models, we demonstrate that these oscillating clusters exhibit notable semantic coherence. We offer theoretical insights, showing that this behavior arises from oscillatory dynamics in rectified flow models. Building on this understanding, we introduce a simple and fast distribution transfer technique that facilitates image enhancement, stroke-based recoloring, as well as visual prompt-guided image editing. Furthermore, we provide quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness of our method for tasks such as image enhancement, makeup transfer, reconstruction quality, and guided sampling quality. Higher-quality examples of videos and images are available at \href{https://yanyanzheng96.github.io/oscillation_inversion/}{this link}.

cs.CV↗

CleanDiffuser: An Easy-to-use Modularized Library for Diffusion Models in Decision Making

Leveraging the powerful generative capability of diffusion models (DMs) to build decision-making agents has achieved extensive success. However, there is still a demand for an easy-to-use and modularized open-source library that offers customized and efficient development for DM-based decision-making algorithms. In this work, we introduce CleanDiffuser, the first DM library specifically designed for decision-making algorithms. By revisiting the roles of DMs in the decision-making domain, we identify a set of essential sub-modules that constitute the core of CleanDiffuser, allowing for the implementation of various DM algorithms with simple and flexible building blocks. To demonstrate the reliability and flexibility of CleanDiffuser, we conduct comprehensive evaluations of various DM algorithms implemented with CleanDiffuser across an extensive range of tasks. The analytical experiments provide a wealth of valuable design choices and insights, reveal opportunities and challenges, and lay a solid groundwork for future research. CleanDiffuser will provide long-term support to the decision-making community, enhancing reproducibility and fostering the development of more robust solutions. The code and documentation of CleanDiffuser are open-sourced on the https://github.com/CleanDiffuserTeam/CleanDiffuser.

cs.AI↗

DiffuserLite: Towards Real-time Diffusion Planning

Diffusion planning has been recognized as an effective decision-making paradigm in various domains. The capability of generating high-quality long-horizon trajectories makes it a promising research direction. However, existing diffusion planning methods suffer from low decision-making frequencies due to the expensive iterative sampling cost. To alleviate this, we introduce DiffuserLite, a super fast and lightweight diffusion planning framework, which employs a planning refinement process (PRP) to generate coarse-to-fine-grained trajectories, significantly reducing the modeling of redundant information and leading to notable increases in decision-making frequency. Our experimental results demonstrate that DiffuserLite achieves a decision-making frequency of 122.2Hz (112.7x faster than predominant frameworks) and reaches state-of-the-art performance on D4RL, Robomimic, and FinRL benchmarks. In addition, DiffuserLite can also serve as a flexible plugin to increase the decision-making frequency of other diffusion planning algorithms, providing a structural design reference for future works. More details and visualizations are available at https://diffuserlite.github.io/.

cs.AI↗

MFE-ETP: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multi-modal Foundation Models on Embodied Task Planning

In recent years, Multi-modal Foundation Models (MFMs) and Embodied Artificial Intelligence (EAI) have been advancing side by side at an unprecedented pace. The integration of the two has garnered significant attention from the AI research community. In this work, we attempt to provide an in-depth and comprehensive evaluation of the performance of MFM s on embodied task planning, aiming to shed light on their capabilities and limitations in this domain. To this end, based on the characteristics of embodied task planning, we first develop a systematic evaluation framework, which encapsulates four crucial capabilities of MFMs: object understanding, spatio-temporal perception, task understanding, and embodied reasoning. Following this, we propose a new benchmark, named MFE-ETP, characterized its complex and variable task scenarios, typical yet diverse task types, task instances of varying difficulties, and rich test case types ranging from multiple embodied question answering to embodied task reasoning. Finally, we offer a simple and easy-to-use automatic evaluation platform that enables the automated testing of multiple MFMs on the proposed benchmark. Using the benchmark and evaluation platform, we evaluated several state-of-the-art MFMs and found that they significantly lag behind human-level performance. The MFE-ETP is a high-quality, large-scale, and challenging benchmark relevant to real-world tasks.

cs.AI↗

InverseMeetInsert: Robust Real Image Editing via Geometric Accumulation Inversion in Guided Diffusion Models

In this paper, we introduce Geometry-Inverse-Meet-Pixel-Insert, short for GEO, an exceptionally versatile image editing technique designed to cater to customized user requirements at both local and global scales. Our approach seamlessly integrates text prompts and image prompts to yield diverse and precise editing outcomes. Notably, our method operates without the need for training and is driven by two key contributions: (i) a novel geometric accumulation loss that enhances DDIM inversion to faithfully preserve pixel space geometry and layout, and (ii) an innovative boosted image prompt technique that combines pixel-level editing for text-only inversion with latent space geometry guidance for standard classifier-free reversion. Leveraging the publicly available Stable Diffusion model, our approach undergoes extensive evaluation across various image types and challenging prompt editing scenarios, consistently delivering high-fidelity editing results for real images.

cs.CV↗