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Yikai Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yikai Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

BoRP: Bootstrapped Regression Probing for Scalable and Human-Aligned LLM Evaluation

Accurate evaluation of user satisfaction is critical for iterative development of conversational AI. However, for open-ended assistants, traditional A/B testing lacks reliable metrics: explicit feedback is sparse, while implicit metrics are ambiguous. To bridge this gap, we introduce BoRP (Bootstrapped Regression Probing), a scalable framework for high-fidelity satisfaction evaluation. Unlike generative approaches, BoRP leverages the geometric properties of LLM latent space. It employs a polarization-index-based bootstrapping mechanism to automate rubric generation and utilizes Partial Least Squares (PLS) to map hidden states to continuous scores. Experiments on industrial datasets show that BoRP (Qwen3-8B/14B) significantly outperforms generative baselines (even Qwen3-Max) in alignment with human judgments. Furthermore, BoRP reduces inference costs by orders of magnitude, enabling full-scale monitoring and highly sensitive A/B testing via CUPED.

cs.CL↗

OpenOpt: An Open-Source SRAM Optimizer Based on Equivalent Circuit Model

This paper proposes a co-optimization framework that jointly optimizes SRAM architecture and transistor sizing using equivalent circuit models. The framework simplifies inactive SRAM cells into equivalent RC loads and static power models, achieving up to 61.4$\times$ simulation speedup while maintaining high fidelity (read/write delay error $<$0.22%, power error $<$1.68%). A joint search space encompassing architecture parameters and device sizing integrates seven algorithms including SA, PSO, Bayesian Optimization variants, and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. Based on FreePDK45, ablation experiments confirm complementary gains from architecture selection and transistor sizing. Among all algorithms, MOEA/D achieves the best Figure of Merit (8.2721), yielding 6.2% improvement in SNM, 73.6% reduction in area, and 42.3% reduction in peak power. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/W1Y1K1/OpenOpt.

cs.NE↗

OpenACMv2: An Accuracy-Constrained Co-Optimization Framework for Approximate DCiM

Digital Compute-in-Memory (DCiM) accelerates neural networks by reducing data movement. Approximate DCiM can further improve power-performance-area (PPA), but demands accuracy-constrained co-optimization across coupled architecture and transistor-level choices. Building on OpenYield, we introduce Accuracy-Constrained Co-Optimization (ACCO) and present OpenACMv2, an open framework that operationalizes ACCO via two-level optimization: (1) accuracy-constrained architecture search of compressor combinations and SRAM macro parameters, driven by a fast GNN-based surrogate for PPA and error; and (2) variation- and PVT-aware transistor sizing for standard cells and SRAM bitcells using Monte Carlo. By decoupling ACCO into architecture-level exploration and circuit-level sizing, OpenACMv2 integrates classic single- and multi-objective optimizers to deliver strong PPA-accuracy tradeoffs and robust convergence. The workflow is compatible with FreePDK45 and OpenROAD, supporting reproducible evaluation and easy adoption. Experiments show that the proposed two-level ACCO framework achieves most of its accuracy-constrained efficiency gain at Level-1 through architecture exploration, delivering roughly 50%+ PDP reduction, while Level-2 transistor-level optimization provides a further single-digit PDP improvement while preserving accuracy, enabling rapid "what-if" exploration for approximate DCiM. The framework is available on GitHub (https://github.com/ShenShan123/OpenACM).

cs.LG↗

Direct 3D-Aware Object Insertion via Decomposed Visual Proxies

Object insertion aims to seamlessly composite a reference object into a specified region of a background image. Recent diffusion-based methods achieve high visual quality but formulate insertion as a simple 2D inpainting task, providing no explicit control over the object's 3D pose and limiting their practical applicability. We propose DIRECT (Decomposed Injection for Reference Composition and Target-integration), a novel framework that integrates interactive pose manipulation with high-fidelity 2D image synthesis to enable pose-controllable object insertion. Our method decomposes the insertion conditions into three complementary components: appearance guidance capturing visual details from the reference object, geometry guidance derived from the user-adjusted 3D proxy, and context guidance from the target background. By injecting them through separate pathways, DIRECT avoids feature entanglement and simultaneously preserves reference appearance, follows the user-specified pose, and adapts the object to the target scene. We also introduce an automated data construction pipeline to improve the diversity and quality of training data. Experiments show that DIRECT outperforms previous methods in both geometric controllability and visual quality.

cs.CV↗

HALO: Learning Human-Robot Collaboration via Heterogeneous-Agent Lyapunov Policy Optimization

To improve generalization and resilience in human-robot collaboration (HRC), robots must contend with diverse combinations of human behaviors and contexts, motivating multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, inherent heterogeneity between robots and humans creates a rationality gap (RG), where decentralized policy updates deviate from cooperative joint optimization. The resulting learning problem is a general-sum differentiable game, so independent policy-gradient updates can oscillate or diverge without added structure. We propose heterogeneous-agent Lyapunov policy optimization (HALO), a framework that stabilizes decentralized MARL by enforcing Lyapunov-based contraction in policy-parameter space. Unlike Lyapunov-based safe RL, which targets state/trajectory constraints in constrained Markov decision processes, HALO uses Lyapunov certification to stabilize decentralized policy learning. HALO rectifies decentralized gradients via optimal quadratic projections, ensuring monotonic contraction of RG and enabling effective exploration of open-ended interaction spaces. Extensive simulations and real-world humanoid-robot experiments show that this certified stability improves generalization and robustness in collaborative corner cases. Our project website is available at https://HaoZhang-THU.github.io/HALO/.

cs.RO↗

Conformal Reliability: A New Evaluation Metric for Conditional Generation

Conditional generative models have recently achieved remarkable success in various applications. However, a suitable metric for evaluating the reliability of these models, which takes into account their inherent uncertainty, is still lacking. Existing metrics, which typically assess a single output, may fail to capture the variability or potential risks in generation. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation metric called reliability score based on conformal prediction, which measures the worst-case performance within the prediction set at a pre-specified confidence level. However, computing this score is challenging due to the high-dimensional nature of the output space and the nonconvexity of both the metric function and the prediction set. To efficiently compute this score, we introduce Conformal ReLiability (CReL), a framework that can (i) construct the prediction set with desired coverage; and (ii) accurately optimize the reliability score within the constructed prediction set. We provide theoretical results on coverage and demonstrate empirically that our method produces more informative prediction sets than existing approaches. Experiments on synthetic data and the image-to-text and text-to-image tasks further demonstrate the interpretability of our new metric, and the validity and effectiveness of our computational framework. Source code can be found at https://ggc29.github.io/CReL/.

cs.LG↗

Calibrating conditional risk

We introduce and study the problem of calibrating conditional risk, which involves estimating the expected loss of a prediction model conditional on input features. We analyze this problem in both classification and regression settings and show that it is fundamentally equivalent to a standard regression task. For classification settings, we further establish a connection between conditional risk calibration and individual/conditional probability calibration, and develop theoretical insights for the performance metric. This reveals that while conditional risk calibration is related to existing uncertainty quantification problems, it remains a distinct and standalone machine learning problem. Empirically, we validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the practical implications of conditional risk calibration in the learning to defer (L2D) framework. Our systematic experiments provide both qualitative and quantitative assessments, offering guidance for future research in uncertainty-aware decision-making.

cs.LG↗

CoRegOVCD: Consistency-Regularized Open-Vocabulary Change Detection

Remote sensing change detection (CD) aims to identify where land-cover semantics change across time, but most existing methods still assume a fixed label space and therefore cannot answer arbitrary user-defined queries. Open-vocabulary change detection (OVCD) instead asks for the change mask of a queried concept. In the fully training-free setting, however, dense concept responses are difficult to compare directly across dates: appearance variation, weak cross-concept competition, and the spatial continuity of many land-cover categories often produce noisy, fragmented, and semantically unreliable change evidence. We propose Consistency-Regularized Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (CoRegOVCD), a training-free dense inference framework that reformulates concept-specific change as calibrated posterior discrepancy. Competitive Posterior Calibration (CPC) and the Semantic Posterior Delta (SPD) convert raw concept responses into competition-aware queried-concept posteriors and quantify their cross-temporal discrepancy, making semantic change evidence more comparable without explicit instance matching. Geometry-Token Consistency Gate (GeoGate) and Regional Consensus Discrepancy (RCD) further suppress unsupported responses and improve spatial coherence through geometry-aware structural verification and regional consensus. Across four benchmarks spanning building-oriented and multi-class settings, CoRegOVCD consistently improves over the strongest previous training-free baseline by 2.24 to 4.98 F1$_C$ points and reaches a six-class average of 47.50% F1$_C$ on SECOND.

cs.CV↗

Thinking with Camera: A Unified Multimodal Model for Camera-Centric Understanding and Generation

Camera-centric understanding and generation are two cornerstones of spatial intelligence, yet they are typically studied in isolation. We present Puffin, a unified camera-centric multimodal model that extends spatial awareness along the camera dimension. Puffin integrates language regression and diffusion-based generation to interpret and create scenes from arbitrary viewpoints. To bridge the modality gap between cameras and vision-language, we introduce a novel paradigm that treats camera as language, enabling thinking with camera. This guides the model to align spatially grounded visual cues with photographic terminology while reasoning across geometric context. Puffin is trained on Puffin-4M, a large-scale dataset of 4 million vision-language-camera triplets. We incorporate both global camera parameters and pixel-wise camera maps, yielding flexible and reliable spatial generation. Experiments demonstrate Puffin superior performance over specialized models for camera-centric generation and understanding. With instruction tuning, Puffin generalizes to diverse cross-view tasks such as spatial imagination, world exploration, and photography guidance. We will release the code, models, dataset pipeline, and benchmark to advance multimodal spatial intelligence research.

cs.CV↗

NeAR: Coupled Neural Asset-Renderer Stack

Neural asset authoring and neural rendering have traditionally evolved as disjoint paradigms: one generates digital assets for fixed graphics pipelines, while the other maps conventional assets to images. However, treating them as independent entities limits the potential for end-to-end optimization in fidelity and consistency. In this paper, we bridge this gap with NeAR, a Coupled Neural Asset--Renderer Stack. We argue that co-designing the asset representation and the renderer creates a robust "contract" for superior generation. On the asset side, we introduce the Lighting-Homogenized SLAT (LH-SLAT). Leveraging a rectified-flow model, NeAR lifts casually lit single images into a canonical, illumination-invariant latent space, effectively suppressing baked-in shadows and highlights. On the renderer side, we design a lighting-aware neural decoder tailored to interpret these homogenized latents. Conditioned on HDR environment maps and camera views, it synthesizes relightable 3D Gaussian splats in real-time without per-object optimization. We validate NeAR on four tasks: (1) G-buffer-based forward rendering, (2) random-lit reconstruction, (3) unknown-lit relighting, and (4) novel-view relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our coupled stack outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both quantitative metrics and perceptual quality. We hope this coupled asset-renderer perspective inspires future graphics stacks that view neural assets and renderers as co-designed components instead of independent entities.

cs.CV↗

3D-IDE: 3D Implicit Depth Emergent

Leveraging 3D information within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has recently shown significant advantages for indoor scene understanding. However, existing methods, including those using explicit ground-truth 3D positional encoding and those grafting external 3D foundation models for implicit geometry, struggle with the trade-off in 2D-3D representation fusion, leading to suboptimal deployment. To this end, we propose 3D-Implicit Depth Emergence, a method that reframes 3D perception as an emergent property derived from geometric self-supervision rather than explicit encoding. Our core insight is the Implicit Geometric Emergence Principle: by strategically leveraging privileged geometric supervision through mechanisms like a fine-grained geometry validator and global representation constraints, we construct an information bottleneck. This bottleneck forces the model to maximize the mutual information between visual features and 3D structures, allowing 3D awareness to emerge naturally within a unified visual representation. Unlike existing approaches, our method enables 3D perception to emerge implicitly, disentangling features in dense regions and, crucially, eliminating depth and pose dependencies during inference with zero latency overhead. This paradigm shift from external grafting to implicit emergence represents a fundamental rethinking of 3D knowledge integration in visual-language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses SOTA on multiple 3D scene understanding benchmarks. Our approach achieves a 55% reduction in inference latency while maintaining strong performance across diverse downstream tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of meticulously designed auxiliary objectives for dependency-free 3D understanding. Source code can be found at github.com/ChushanZhang/3D-IDE.

cs.CV↗

PrecLLM: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Efficient Clinical Annotation Extraction from Unstructured EHRs using Small-Scale LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in automated text annotation within natural language processing. However, their deployment in clinical settings is severely constrained by strict privacy regulations and the prohibitive computational cost of processing voluminous unstructured Electronic Health Records (EHRs). In this study, we developed a resource-efficient preprocessing technique that can be adopted in existing LLM procedures. This approach is particularly useful for smaller LLMs, which are often more accuracy-challenged, and forms a compact LLM framework optimized for local deployment in computational environments with stringent privacy requirements and restricted access to high-performance GPUs (PrecLLM). The preprocessing step includes both regular expressions (regex) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract and highlight key information from unstructured clinical notes. Pre-filtering long and unstructured texts enhanced the performance of smaller LLMs on EHR-related tasks. Evaluation was performed on two distinct cohorts: a locally curated private EHR dataset from the EPIC system for a Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) cohort, and the publicly available EHR dataset (MIMIC-IV). Using MIMIC-IV, we further compared PrecLLM against fine-tuned LLMs. Results demonstrated that PrecLLM substantially enhanced the performance of the original smaller LLMs in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and F1 scores, making it well-suited for privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained applications. This study offers optimized LLM performance for local, secure, and efficient healthcare applications, and provides practical guidance for clinical LLM deployment while addressing challenges related to privacy, computational feasibility, and clinical applicability.

cs.AI↗

GaussianPile: A Unified Sparse Gaussian Splatting Framework for Slice-based Volumetric Reconstruction

Slice-based volumetric imaging is widely applied and it demands representations that compress aggressively while preserving internal structure for analysis. We introduce GaussianPile, unifying 3D Gaussian splatting with an imaging system-aware focus model to address this challenge. Our proposed method introduces three key innovations: (i) a slice-aware piling strategy that positions anisotropic 3D Gaussians to model through-slice contributions, (ii) a differentiable projection operator that encodes the finite-thickness point spread function of the imaging acquisition system, and (iii) a compact encoding and joint optimization pipeline that simultaneously reconstructs and compresses the Gaussian sets. Our CUDA-based design retains the compression and real-time rendering efficiency of Gaussian primitives while preserving high-frequency internal volumetric detail. Experiments on microscopy and ultrasound datasets demonstrate that our method reduces storage and reconstruction cost, sustains diagnostic fidelity, and enables fast 2D visualization, along with 3D voxelization. In practice, it delivers high-quality results in as few as 3 minutes, up to 11x faster than NeRF-based approaches, and achieves consistent 16x compression over voxel grids, offering a practical path to deployable compression and exploration of slice-based volumetric datasets.

cs.CV↗

FlowScene: Style-Consistent Indoor Scene Generation with Multimodal Graph Rectified Flow

Scene generation has extensive industrial applications, demanding both high realism and precise control over geometry and appearance. Language-driven retrieval methods compose plausible scenes from a large object database, but overlook object-level control and often fail to enforce scene-level style coherence. Graph-based formulations offer higher controllability over objects and inform holistic consistency by explicitly modeling relations, yet existing methods struggle to produce high-fidelity textured results, thereby limiting their practical utility. We present FlowScene, a tri-branch scene generative model conditioned on multimodal graphs that collaboratively generates scene layouts, object shapes, and object textures. At its core lies a tight-coupled rectified flow model that exchanges object information during generation, enabling collaborative reasoning across the graph. This enables fine-grained control of objects' shapes, textures, and relations while enforcing scene-level style coherence across structure and appearance. Extensive experiments show that FlowScene outperforms both language-conditioned and graph-conditioned baselines in terms of generation realism, style consistency, and alignment with human preferences.

cs.CV↗

Light of Normals: Unified Feature Representation for Universal Photometric Stereo

Universal photometric stereo (PS) is defined by two factors: it must (i) operate under arbitrary, unknown lighting conditions and (ii) avoid reliance on specific illumination models. Despite progress (e.g., SDM UniPS), two challenges remain. First, current encoders cannot guarantee that illumination and normal information are decoupled. To enforce decoupling, we introduce LINO UniPS with two key components: (i) Light Register Tokens with light alignment supervision to aggregate point, direction, and environment lights; (ii) Interleaved Attention Block featuring global cross-image attention that takes all lighting conditions together so the encoder can factor out lighting while retaining normal-related evidence. Second, high-frequency geometric details are easily lost. We address this with (i) a Wavelet-based Dual-branch Architecture and (ii) a Normal-gradient Perception Loss. These techniques yield a unified feature space in which lighting is explicitly represented by register tokens, while normal details are preserved via wavelet branch. We further introduce PS-Verse, a large-scale synthetic dataset graded by geometric complexity and lighting diversity, and adopt curriculum training from simple to complex scenes. Extensive experiments show new state-of-the-art results on public benchmarks (e.g., DiLiGenT, Luces), stronger generalization to real materials, and improved efficiency; ablations confirm that Light Register Tokens + Interleaved Attention Block drive better feature decoupling, while Wavelet-based Dual-branch Architecture + Normal-gradient Perception Loss recover finer details.

cs.CV↗

Yo'City: Personalized and Boundless 3D Realistic City Scene Generation via Self-Critic Expansion

Realistic 3D city generation is fundamental to a wide range of applications, including virtual reality and digital twins. However, most existing methods rely on training a single diffusion model, which limits their ability to generate personalized and boundless city-scale scenes. In this paper, we present Yo'City, a novel agentic framework that enables user-customized and infinitely expandable 3D city generation by leveraging the reasoning and compositional capabilities of off-the-shelf large models. Specifically, Yo'City first conceptualizes the city through a top-down planning strategy that defines a hierarchical "City-District-Grid" structure. The Global Planner determines the overall layout and potential functional districts, while the Local Designer further refines each district with detailed grid-level descriptions. Subsequently, the grid-level 3D generation is achieved through a "produce-refine-evaluate" isometric image synthesis loop, followed by image-to-3D generation. To simulate continuous city evolution, Yo'City further introduces a user-interactive, relationship-guided expansion mechanism, which performs scene graph-based distance- and semantics-aware layout optimization, ensuring spatially coherent city growth. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a diverse benchmark dataset and design six multi-dimensional metrics that assess generation quality from the perspectives of semantics, geometry, texture, and layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Yo'City consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation aspects.

cs.CV↗

Next Visual Granularity Generation

We propose a novel approach to image generation by decomposing an image into a structured sequence, where each element in the sequence shares the same spatial resolution but differs in the number of unique tokens used, capturing different level of visual granularity. Image generation is carried out through our newly introduced Next Visual Granularity (NVG) generation framework, which generates a visual granularity sequence beginning from an empty image and progressively refines it, from global layout to fine details, in a structured manner. This iterative process encodes a hierarchical, layered representation that offers fine-grained control over the generation process across multiple granularity levels. We train a series of NVG models for class-conditional image generation on the ImageNet dataset and observe clear scaling behavior. Compared to the VAR series, NVG consistently outperforms it in terms of FID scores (3.30 $\rightarrow$ 3.03, 2.57 $\rightarrow$ 2.44, 2.09 $\rightarrow$ 2.06). We also conduct extensive analysis to showcase the capability and potential of the NVG framework. Our code and models are released at https://yikai-wang.github.io/nvg.

cs.CV↗

SceneTransporter: Optimal Transport-Guided Compositional Latent Diffusion for Single-Image Structured 3D Scene Generation

We introduce SceneTransporter, an end-to-end framework for structured 3D scene generation from a single image. While existing methods generate part-level 3D objects, they often fail to organize these parts into distinct instances in open-world scenes. Through a debiased clustering probe, we reveal a critical insight: this failure stems from the lack of structural constraints within the model's internal assignment mechanism. Based on this finding, we reframe the task of structured 3D scene generation as a global correlation assignment problem. To solve this, SceneTransporter formulates and solves an entropic Optimal Transport (OT) objective within the denoising loop of the compositional DiT model. This formulation imposes two powerful structural constraints. First, the resulting transport plan gates cross-attention to enforce an exclusive, one-to-one routing of image patches to part-level 3D latents, preventing entanglement. Second, the competitive nature of the transport encourages the grouping of similar patches, a process that is further regularized by an edge-based cost, to form coherent objects and prevent fragmentation. Extensive experiments show that SceneTransporter outperforms existing methods on open-world scene generation, significantly improving instance-level coherence and geometric fidelity. Code and models will be publicly available at https://2019epwl.github.io/SceneTransporter/.

cs.CV↗