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Yang Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Zhou.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

ConServe: Fine-Grained GPU Harvesting for LLM Online and Offline Co-Serving

Large language model (LLM) serving demands low latency and high throughput, but high load variability makes it challenging to achieve high GPU utilization. In this paper, we identify a synergetic but overlooked opportunity to co-serve latency-critical online requests alongside latency-tolerant offline tasks such as model benchmarking. While promising, existing serving systems fail to co-serve them efficiently, as their coarse-grained resource management at the request or iteration level cannot harvest millisecond-level GPU idle cycles without introducing interference that violates online latency objectives. ConServe is a new LLM co-serving system that achieves high throughput and strong online latency guarantees by managing resources at finer granularities. ConServe introduces three techniques: (1) a latency-aware token-level scheduler that precisely sizes offline batches and tokens to fit within online latency objectives; (2) sub-iteration, layer-wise preemption that allows offline tasks to yield to online load spikes; and (3) incremental KV cache management that enables preempting and resuming offline requests at near-zero cost. Evaluations with Llama-3.1 and Qwen-2.5 models on real-world workloads show that ConServe delivers an average of 2.2$\times$ higher throughput and reduces online serving tail latency by 2.9$\times$ on average compared to state-of-the-art systems.

cs.DC↗

VIKSER: Visual Knowledge-Driven Self-Reinforcing Reasoning Framework

Visual reasoning refers to the task of solving questions about visual information. Current visual reasoning methods typically employ pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) strategies or deep neural network approaches. However, existing efforts are constrained by limited reasoning interpretability, while hindering by the phenomenon of underspecification in the question text. Additionally, the absence of fine-grained visual knowledge limits the precise understanding of subject behavior in visual reasoning tasks. To address these issues, we propose VIKSER (Visual Knowledge-Driven Self-Reinforcing Reasoning Framework). Specifically, VIKSER, trained using knowledge distilled from large language models, extracts fine-grained visual knowledge with the assistance of visual relationship detection techniques. Subsequently, VIKSER utilizes fine-grained visual knowledge to paraphrase the question with underspecification. Additionally, we design a novel prompting method called Chain-of-Evidence (CoE), which leverages the power of "evidence for reasoning" to endow VIKSER with interpretable reasoning capabilities. Meanwhile, the integration of self-reflection technology empowers VIKSER with the ability to learn and improve from its mistakes. Experiments conducted on widely used datasets demonstrate that VIKSER achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in relevant tasks. Moreover, VIKSER achieves performance on par with leading proprietary models, such as the latest ChatGPT-5.

cs.CV↗

A Survey on Explainable Reinforcement Learning: Concepts, Algorithms, Challenges

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular machine learning paradigm where intelligent agents interact with the environment to fulfill a long-term goal. Driven by the resurgence of deep learning, Deep RL (DRL) has witnessed great success over a wide spectrum of complex control tasks. Despite the encouraging results achieved, the deep neural network-based backbone is widely deemed as a black box that impedes practitioners to trust and employ trained agents in realistic scenarios where high security and reliability are essential. To alleviate this issue, a large volume of literature devoted to shedding light on the inner workings of the intelligent agents has been proposed, by constructing intrinsic interpretability or post-hoc explainability. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing works on eXplainable RL (XRL) and introduce a new taxonomy where prior works are clearly categorized into model-explaining, reward-explaining, state-explaining, and task-explaining methods. We also review and highlight RL methods that conversely leverage human knowledge to promote learning efficiency and performance of agents while this kind of method is often ignored in XRL field. Some challenges and opportunities in XRL are discussed. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization of XRL and to motivate future research on more effective XRL solutions. Corresponding open source codes are collected and categorized at https://github.com/Plankson/awesome-explainable-reinforcement-learning.

cs.LG↗

Introducing Unbiased Depth into 2D Gaussian Splatting for High-accuracy Surface Reconstruction

Recently, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) has demonstrated superior geometry reconstruction quality than the popular 3DGS by using 2D surfels to approximate thin surfaces. However, it falls short when dealing with glossy surfaces, resulting in visible holes in these areas. We find that the reflection discontinuity causes the issue. To fit the jump from diffuse to specular reflection at different viewing angles, depth bias is introduced in the optimized Gaussian primitives. To address that, we first replace the depth distortion loss in 2DGS with a novel depth convergence loss, which imposes a strong constraint on depth continuity. Then, we rectify the depth criterion in determining the actual surface, which fully accounts for all the intersecting Gaussians along the ray. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations across various datasets reveal that our method significantly improves reconstruction quality, with more complete and accurate surfaces than 2DGS. Code is available at https://github.com/XiaoXinyyx/Unbiased_Surfel.

cs.CV↗

SPG: Style-Prompting Guidance for Style-Specific Content Creation

Although recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models excel at aligning generated images with textual prompts, controlling the visual style of the output remains a challenging task. In this work, we propose Style-Prompting Guidance (SPG), a novel sampling strategy for style-specific image generation. SPG constructs a style noise vector and leverages its directional deviation from unconditional noise to guide the diffusion process toward the target style distribution. By integrating SPG with Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), our method achieves both semantic fidelity and style consistency. SPG is simple, robust, and compatible with controllable frameworks like ControlNet and IPAdapter, making it practical and widely applicable. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Rumbling281441/SPG.

cs.GR↗

Hypergraph-based Motion Generation with Multi-modal Interaction Relational Reasoning

The intricate nature of real-world driving environments, characterized by dynamic and diverse interactions among multiple vehicles and their possible future states, presents considerable challenges in accurately predicting the motion states of vehicles and handling the uncertainty inherent in the predictions. Addressing these challenges requires comprehensive modeling and reasoning to capture the implicit relations among vehicles and the corresponding diverse behaviors. This research introduces an integrated framework for autonomous vehicles (AVs) motion prediction to address these complexities, utilizing a novel Relational Hypergraph Interaction-informed Neural mOtion generator (RHINO). RHINO leverages hypergraph-based relational reasoning by integrating a multi-scale hypergraph neural network to model group-wise interactions among multiple vehicles and their multi-modal driving behaviors, thereby enhancing motion prediction accuracy and reliability. Experimental validation using real-world datasets demonstrates the superior performance of this framework in improving predictive accuracy and fostering socially aware automated driving in dynamic traffic scenarios. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/keshuw95/RHINO-Hypergraph-Motion-Generation.

cs.RO↗

Edge-Based Multimodal Sensor Data Fusion with Vision Language Models (VLMs) for Real-time Autonomous Vehicle Accident Avoidance

Autonomous driving (AD) systems relying solely on onboard sensors may fail to detect distant or obstacle hazards, potentially causing preventable collisions; however, existing transformer-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) approaches, which mitigate AD sensing limitations, either lack effective multimodal fusion and reasoning or struggle to meet real-time performance requirements under complex, high-dimensional traffic conditions. This paper proposes the Real-time Edge-based Autonomous Co-pilot Trajectory planner (REACT), a V2X-integrated trajectory optimization framework for AD based on a fine-tuned lightweight Vision-Language Model (VLM). REACT integrates infrastructure-provided hazard alerts with onboard sensor data, capturing intricate surrounding traffic dynamics and vehicle intents through visual embeddings, interpreting precise numerical data from symbolic inputs, and employing contextual reasoning to generate optimized, safety-oriented trajectories. To ensure robust real-time deployment on edge devices, REACT innovatively employs Residual Trajectory Fusion (RTF) design and specialized edge-adaptation strategies to reduce model complexity and improve inference efficiency. Evaluated on the DeepAccident benchmark, REACT achieves state-of-the-art performance, a 77% collision rate reduction, a 48.2% Video Panoptic Quality (VPQ), and a 0.57-second inference latency on the Jetson AGX Orin. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each input, module, and edge adaptation strategy. These results highlight the effectiveness of lightweight VLMs in enabling real-time cooperative planning on edge platforms and underscore the potential of language-guided contextual reasoning for improving traffic safety and responsiveness.

cs.AI↗

Towards Efficient and Practical GPU Multitasking in the Era of LLM

GPU singletasking is becoming increasingly inefficient and unsustainable as hardware capabilities grow and workloads diversify. We are now at an inflection point where GPUs must embrace multitasking, much like CPUs did decades ago, to meet the demands of modern AI workloads. In this work, we highlight the key requirements for GPU multitasking, examine prior efforts, and discuss why they fall short. To advance toward efficient and practical GPU multitasking, we envision a resource management layer, analogous to a CPU operating system, to handle various aspects of GPU resource management and sharing. We outline the challenges and potential solutions, and hope this paper inspires broader community efforts to build the next-generation GPU compute paradigm grounded in multitasking.

cs.OS↗

Uncertainty-aware Medical Diagnostic Phrase Identification and Grounding

Medical phrase grounding is crucial for identifying relevant regions in medical images based on phrase queries, facilitating accurate image analysis and diagnosis. However, current methods rely on manual extraction of key phrases from medical reports, reducing efficiency and increasing the workload for clinicians. Additionally, the lack of model confidence estimation limits clinical trust and usability. In this paper, we introduce a novel task called Medical Report Grounding (MRG), which aims to directly identify diagnostic phrases and their corresponding grounding boxes from medical reports in an end-to-end manner. To address this challenge, we propose uMedGround, a robust and reliable framework that leverages a multimodal large language model to predict diagnostic phrases by embedding a unique token, , into the vocabulary to enhance detection capabilities. A vision encoder-decoder processes the embedded token and input image to generate grounding boxes. Critically, uMedGround incorporates an uncertainty-aware prediction model, significantly improving the robustness and reliability of grounding predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that uMedGround outperforms state-of-the-art medical phrase grounding methods and fine-tuned large visual-language models, validating its effectiveness and reliability. This study represents a pioneering exploration of the MRG task, marking the first-ever endeavor in this domain. Additionally, we demonstrate the applicability of uMedGround in medical visual question answering and class-based localization tasks, where it highlights visual evidence aligned with key diagnostic phrases, supporting clinicians in interpreting various types of textual inputs, including free-text reports, visual question answering queries, and class labels.

cs.CV↗

An Extensible Software Transport Layer for GPU Networking

Fast-evolving machine learning (ML) workloads have increasing requirements for networking. However, host network transport on RDMA NICs is hard to evolve, causing problems for ML workloads. For example, single-path RDMA traffic is prone to flow collisions that severely degrade collective communication performance. We present UCCL, an extensible software transport layer to evolve GPU networking. UCCL decouples the data path and control path of existing RDMA NICs and efficiently runs the control-path transport on host CPUs. This software extensibility brings in transport innovations that cannot be achieved in hardware for ML workloads, e.g., a multipath transport to resolve flow collisions. ML collectives atop UCCL achieve up to 4.5x higher performance compared to existing RDMA NICs.

cs.NI↗

Describe, Adapt and Combine: Empowering CLIP Encoders for Open-set 3D Object Retrieval

Open-set 3D object retrieval (3DOR) is an emerging task aiming to retrieve 3D objects of unseen categories beyond the training set. Existing methods typically utilize all modalities (i.e., voxels, point clouds, multi-view images) and train specific backbones before fusion. However, they still struggle to produce generalized representations due to insufficient 3D training data. Being contrastively pre-trained on web-scale image-text pairs, CLIP inherently produces generalized representations for a wide range of downstream tasks. Building upon it, we present a simple yet effective framework named Describe, Adapt and Combine (DAC) by taking only multi-view images for open-set 3DOR. DAC innovatively synergizes a CLIP model with a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to learn generalized 3D representations, where the MLLM is used for dual purposes. First, it describes the seen category information to align with CLIP's training objective for adaptation during training. Second, it provides external hints about unknown objects complementary to visual cues during inference. To improve the synergy, we introduce an Additive-Bias Low-Rank adaptation (AB-LoRA), which alleviates overfitting and further enhances the generalization to unseen categories. With only multi-view images, DAC significantly surpasses prior arts by an average of +10.01\% mAP on four open-set 3DOR datasets. Moreover, its generalization is also validated on image-based and cross-dataset setups. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzhichuan123/DAC.

cs.CV↗

Solution for Meta KDD Cup'25: A Comprehensive Three-Step Framework for Vision Question Answering

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have improved multi-modal understanding and visual question answering (VQA), but still suffer from hallucinated answers. Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps address these issues by incorporating external information, yet challenges remain in visual context comprehension, multi-source retrieval, and multi-turn interactions. To address these challenges, Meta constructed the CRAG-MM benchmark and launched the CRAG-MM Challenge at KDD Cup 2025, which consists of three tasks. This paper describes the solutions of all tasks in Meta KDD Cup'25 from BlackPearl team. We use a single model for each task, with key methods including data augmentation, RAG, reranking, and multi-task fine-tuning. Our solution achieve automatic evaluation rankings of 3rd, 3rd, and 1st on the three tasks, and win second place in Task3 after human evaluation.

cs.IR↗

Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling

The integration of geometric reconstruction and generative modeling remains a critical challenge in developing AI systems capable of human-like spatial reasoning. This paper proposes Aether, a unified framework that enables geometry-aware reasoning in world models by jointly optimizing three core capabilities: (1) 4D dynamic reconstruction, (2) action-conditioned video prediction, and (3) goal-conditioned visual planning. Through task-interleaved feature learning, Aether achieves synergistic knowledge sharing across reconstruction, prediction, and planning objectives. Building upon video generation models, our framework demonstrates zero-shot synthetic-to-real generalization despite never observing real-world data during training. Furthermore, our approach achieves zero-shot generalization in both action following and reconstruction tasks, thanks to its intrinsic geometric modeling. Notably, even without real-world data, its reconstruction performance is comparable with or even better than that of domain-specific models. Additionally, Aether employs camera trajectories as geometry-informed action spaces, enabling effective action-conditioned prediction and visual planning. We hope our work inspires the community to explore new frontiers in physically-reasonable world modeling and its applications.

cs.CV↗

Configurational Entropy and Adam-Gibbs Relation for Quantum Liquids

As a liquid approaches the glass state, its dynamics slows down rapidly, by a few orders of magnitude in a very small temperature range. In the case of light elements and small molecules containing hydrogen (e.g., water), such a process can be affected by nuclear quantum effects (due to quantum fluctuations/atoms delocalization). In this work, we apply the potential energy landscape (PEL) formalism and path-integral computer simulations to study the low-temperature behavior of a Lennard-Jones binary mixture (LJBM) that obeys quantum mechanics. We show that, as for the case of classical liquids, (i) a configurational entropy $S_{IS}$ can be defined, and (ii) the Adam-Gibbs equation, which relates the diffusion coefficient of a liquid and its $S_{IS}$, holds for the studied quantum LJBM. Overall, our work shows that one theoretical approach, the PEL formalism, can be used to describe low-temperature liquids close to their glass transition, independently of whether the system obeys classical or quantum mechanics.

cond-mat.soft↗

U.S. Port Disruptions under Tropical Cyclones: Resilience Analysis by Harnessing Multiple-Source Dataset

This study introduces the CyPort Dataset, recording disruptions to 145 U.S. principal ports and freight network from 90 tropical cyclones (2015-2023). It addresses limitations of event specific resilience studies and provides a comprehensive dataset for broader analysis. To account for excess zeros and unobserved heterogeneity in disruption outcomes, the Random Parameter Negative Binomial Lindley (RPNB Lindley) model is employed to produce more reliable resilience insights. The model demonstrates improved fit over traditional methods and uncovers variation in how features such as wind speed, storm surge height, rainfall, and distance to cyclone influence disruption outcomes across ports. This analysis reveals a tipping point at Saffir Simpson Hurricane Category 4, where disruptions escalate sharply, causing greater impacts and prolonged recovery. Regionally, ports along the Gulf of America show greatest vulnerability. Within the freight network, ports with high betweenness centrality are more resilient, while transshipment and local hubs are more fragile.

stat.AP↗

EH-Benchmark Ophthalmic Hallucination Benchmark and Agent-Driven Top-Down Traceable Reasoning Workflow

Medical Large Language Models (MLLMs) play a crucial role in ophthalmic diagnosis, holding significant potential to address vision-threatening diseases. However, their accuracy is constrained by hallucinations stemming from limited ophthalmic knowledge, insufficient visual localization and reasoning capabilities, and a scarcity of multimodal ophthalmic data, which collectively impede precise lesion detection and disease diagnosis. Furthermore, existing medical benchmarks fail to effectively evaluate various types of hallucinations or provide actionable solutions to mitigate them. To address the above challenges, we introduce EH-Benchmark, a novel ophthalmology benchmark designed to evaluate hallucinations in MLLMs. We categorize MLLMs' hallucinations based on specific tasks and error types into two primary classes: Visual Understanding and Logical Composition, each comprising multiple subclasses. Given that MLLMs predominantly rely on language-based reasoning rather than visual processing, we propose an agent-centric, three-phase framework, including the Knowledge-Level Retrieval stage, the Task-Level Case Studies stage, and the Result-Level Validation stage. Experimental results show that our multi-agent framework significantly mitigates both types of hallucinations, enhancing accuracy, interpretability, and reliability. Our project is available at https://github.com/ppxy1/EH-Benchmark.

cs.CL↗

RadAlign: Advancing Radiology Report Generation with Vision-Language Concept Alignment

Automated chest radiographs interpretation requires both accurate disease classification and detailed radiology report generation, presenting a significant challenge in the clinical workflow. Current approaches either focus on classification accuracy at the expense of interpretability or generate detailed but potentially unreliable reports through image captioning techniques. In this study, we present RadAlign, a novel framework that combines the predictive accuracy of vision-language models (VLMs) with the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the radiologist's workflow, RadAlign first employs a specialized VLM to align visual features with key medical concepts, achieving superior disease classification with an average AUC of 0.885 across multiple diseases. These recognized medical conditions, represented as text-based concepts in the aligned visual-language space, are then used to prompt LLM-based report generation. Enhanced by a retrieval-augmented generation mechanism that grounds outputs in similar historical cases, RadAlign delivers superior report quality with a GREEN score of 0.678, outperforming state-of-the-art methods' 0.634. Our framework maintains strong clinical interpretability while reducing hallucinations, advancing automated medical imaging and report analysis through integrated predictive and generative AI. Code is available at https://github.com/difeigu/RadAlign.

cs.CV↗

StreamME: Simplify 3D Gaussian Avatar within Live Stream

We propose StreamME, a method focuses on fast 3D avatar reconstruction. The StreamME synchronously records and reconstructs a head avatar from live video streams without any pre-cached data, enabling seamless integration of the reconstructed appearance into downstream applications. This exceptionally fast training strategy, which we refer to as on-the-fly training, is central to our approach. Our method is built upon 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), eliminating the reliance on MLPs in deformable 3DGS and relying solely on geometry, which significantly improves the adaptation speed to facial expression. To further ensure high efficiency in on-the-fly training, we introduced a simplification strategy based on primary points, which distributes the point clouds more sparsely across the facial surface, optimizing points number while maintaining rendering quality. Leveraging the on-the-fly training capabilities, our method protects the facial privacy and reduces communication bandwidth in VR system or online conference. Additionally, it can be directly applied to downstream application such as animation, toonify, and relighting. Please refer to our project page for more details: https://songluchuan.github.io/StreamME/.

cs.GR↗