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Yizhou Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yizhou Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

MINT: A Unified Model for World-Space Camera and Hand Motion Estimation from Scalable Egocentric Pipeline Supervision

Recovering camera and hand motion in world coordinates from egocentric video is a key capability for activity understanding, robot learning, and augmented reality. Existing systems typically decompose this problem into separate stages for camera motion, depth estimation, hand reconstruction, and trajectory refinement, resulting in substantial computational overhead and preventing the joint modeling of camera and hand motion. We introduce MINT (Minting IN-the-Wild Trajectories), a foundation model for world-space hand motion reconstruction from ego-centric RGB video. From a single shared spatiotemporal video representation, MINT jointly predicts the camera trajectory, field of view (FoV), camera-frame hand states, and per-frame hand observability, and then produces world-space hand motion via explicit coordinate transformations. Training such a model at scale is challenging, since paired world-space camera and hand annotations are scarce. We therefore develop an open-source labeling EGOPIPELINE that converts large collections of public egocentric videos into structured camera-and-hand trajectory supervision. MINT is first pretrained on these large-scale pseudo-labels and then fine-tuned on a small set of high-quality camera-and-hand annotations. Across public benchmarks MINT approaches state-of-the-art accuracy without seeing either benchmark in training, reaching 0.945 frame accuracy, 13.646 mm PA-MPJPE-p and 55.058 px EPE-p for camera-frame bimanual reconstruction on HOT3D, 4.690 mm RPE-T and 0.284 degrees RPE-R for camera trajectory, and a 3.67x end-to-end speedup over the labeling pipeline that supervises it. We release the model, training and inference code, labeling pipeline, and a curated 1,021-hour egocentric trajectory dataset.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Atomic Layouts: Compositional Design Understanding with Vision-Language Models

Layout understanding, or the interpretation of element organization, is essential for document analysis, user interface (UI) creation, and graphic design. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at interpreting atomic layouts composed of independent elements, they struggle with compositional layouts that require reasoning over visually entangled elements within hierarchical multi-layer structures. In this paper, we introduce a new task, compositional layout understanding, and present CoDeLayout, a VQA dataset of ~20K real-world multi-layer layouts annotated with compositional element pairs and design intent. Through empirical analysis on CoDeLayout, we identify two key challenges for existing VLMs: semantic drift between textual metadata and visual content, and structural ambiguity in hierarchical inter-element relationships. To address these challenges, we propose MASON, a post-training paradigm that integrates multimodal alignment (MA) and structural perception (SP). MA enhances element interpretation by grounding metadata-defined elements to their visual counterparts, mitigating semantic drift, while SP models layer-aware inter-element spatial relationships to improve hierarchical understanding and reduce structural ambiguity. Experiments reveal substantial gaps in existing VLMs: even the strongest baseline, GPT-o3, achieves only 79.68% accuracy, whereas Qwen2.5-VL 7B with MASON reaches 91.66%. Notably, MASON surpasses full-data Direct Finetune using only 30% of the training data and scales better with additional data.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

An Approach to Study the Structural Consistency of Triangle Badness Functions and Distance Metrics

Triangle-based measures, commonly referred to as badness functions, are widely employed to quantify the extent to which a distance matrix deviates from an ideal geometric configuration. Different formulations of these functions may capture distinct facets of local non-uniformity, and their behavior is often influenced by the underlying distance metric chosen for evaluation. In practical settings, although a canonical badness function may be conceptually preferred, factors such as computational cost, algorithmic constraints, or data-specific characteristics frequently necessitate the adoption of modified versions-for instance, approximate forms or alternatives defined under different distance metrics. This gives rise to a central question: to what degree do these variants retain the structural consistency properties of their original counterparts? To address this issue, we develop a systematic correlation-based framework for evaluating structural consistency. As an illustrative instantiation of this framework, we compute badness sequences from a set of representative distance matrices alongside randomly generated triangle configurations, which are designed to cover variants that may arise under diverse practical scenarios. We then assess pairwise similarities among these sequences using four correlation coefficients. The experimental outcomes indicate that certain badness variants exhibit a notably high degree of structural consistency, whereas others reveal complementary behavioral patterns; moreover, the choice of distance metric exerts a considerable influence on the observed trends. These findings offer practical insights for the informed selection of distance metrics and triangle badness function variants in tasks including geometric reconstruction, triangulation, and structural analysis of pairwise distance data.

math.MG↗
arXiv2026

HarnessEval-W: Agentifying the Evaluation of Visual Worlds

A benchmark should deliver more than a scalar score: what makes an evaluation trustworthy is the reasoning that justifies the score. This is especially critical for world models, where judging a rollout requires understanding whether physics, causality, and world state evolve correctly. Humans spot such violations naturally, yet no existing benchmark automates this capability: metrics are computed brute-force, leaving no reasoning chain that can be examined or verified. We introduce HarnessEval-W, an agentified evaluation pipeline that brings the harness paradigm from the LLM ecosystem to world model benchmarking. Rather than applying a fixed rubric, HarnessEval-W interprets the context of each evaluation case, decomposes the evaluation question into measurable subproblems, and spawns specialized sub-agents, each equipped with tailored context and diagnostic tools to reason over its own subproblem. The parent agent then validates the gathered evidence and summarizes it into the final verdict. This hierarchical workflow turns every evaluation into a transparent evidence tree whose complete reasoning chain justifies the result. We apply HarnessEval-W to 18 representative world models over 330 evaluation cases. Its judgments closely align with human preferences while providing verifiable, fine-grained diagnoses of every generated rollout. We open-source the full pipeline as a live benchmark and invite the broad community to contribute to grow new skills and evaluation cases as world models evolve.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

The 10th AI City Challenge

The 10th AI City Challenge, held with ECCV 2026, marks a decade of community benchmarking for intelligent transportation, smart cities, and physical AI. Since its 2017 start with vehicle detection, classification, and tracking, the challenge has grown into a broad benchmark suite for multi-camera perception, multimodal reasoning, synthetic-to-real learning, generative forecasting, and privacy-preserving evaluation. The 2026 edition continued this growth with 325 registered teams, up from 245 in 2025, and participation from 26 countries and regions, up from 15. Its six primary tracks cover multi-camera 3D perception, transportation safety captioning and VQA, traffic anomaly reasoning, text-based person anomaly search, generative traffic video forecasting, and cross-city object detection. Track 3 further includes two out-of-domain leaderboards, submitted as Tracks 7 and 8, for fisheye traffic-violation understanding and pedestrian situated-intent VQA. This paper summarizes the challenge setup, datasets, evaluation protocols, leaderboard results, and workshop papers. Across tracks, successful systems combine foundation models with geometric grounding, retrieval or reranking, synthetic-data design, domain adaptation, and controlled inference.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

From the SIR/SEIR/SVEIR Model to a Chemotactic System: Analysis of Spatiotemporal Mechanisms of Infection Spread within the Einstein Paradigm

This work investigates the class of SIR/SEIR models and their extension to an ODE-based SVEIR system, whose parameters are calibrated and validated using real influenza outbreak data. The theoretical part establishes existence and uniqueness of solutions for the SVEIR model via the Picard-Lindelof theorem and analyzes invariance of the admissible region. To describe spatiotemporal infection spread in an urban setting, a diffusion-chemotaxis extension of the SIR framework is formulated as a PDE system; an additional term is introduced to represent fear/avoidance effects in the system dynamics. A numerical workflow is proposed, including grid discretization, Neumann boundary conditions enforced by mirror extension, a semi-implicit IMEX time-stepping scheme, and sparse linear solves; computational correctness is monitored, in particular, by checking conservation of the total population.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

DAPD: Dual-Anchored Policy Distillation

On-policy (self) distillation (OPSD) is increasingly adopted for language-model post-training. It strengthens the teacher with privileged information but can induce a privilege illusion: the student learns privilege-dependent behavior it cannot reproduce from its inference-time context, yet behaves as if the training-time privileged information remained available, ultimately degrading performance. In this paper, we identify information asymmetry between the privileged teacher and the student at inference as the root cause of this failure in OPSD. To resolve this asymmetry, we propose Dual-Anchored Policy Distillation (DAPD), a unified framework with two levels of anchoring. Dual-Path Anchoring (DPA) introduces a self-conditioned bridge and aligns reference and rollout behavior along two matched-information paths, preventing privilege-dependent behavior from being transferred to the inference-time student. Dual-Source Anchoring (DSA) applies these paths in both reference-to-rollout and rollout-to-reference directions, reducing reliance on privileged reference guidance while preserving correctness supervision. Extensive experiments show that DAPD significantly alleviates privilege illusion, outperforming OPSD on Qwen3-4B by +2.00 points on average across tasks. Notably, its gains persist across scales, reaching +2.69 at 4B and +2.78 at 32B.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Semantic Anchoring for Robotic Action Representations

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich semantic representations from pretrained Vision-Language Models, yet fine-tuning on limited robot demonstrations degrades this structure and undermines generalization. A fundamental question therefore arises: what constitutes a good action representation? Inspired by the mirror neuron theory's insight that observation and execution share an intention-level encoding, we examine whether a robot's action representations preserve the semantic structure captured by pretrained encoders. Systematic probing confirms that this structure erodes during finetuning, and that its quality synchronizes with both task success and out-of-distribution generalization. We further introduce a plug-and-play method that anchors action representations to a semantic manifold while decomposing representations into a shared semantic channel and a private channel, all discarded at inference, leaving the deployed model unchanged. Validated on different VLA backbones across simulation and real-world benchmarks, our method yields up to +18.7% on real-world in-distribution tasks and +21.5% on out-of-distribution generalization.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

WAM-TTT: Steering World-Action Models by Watching Human Play at Test Time

Steering robot foundation models (RFMs) toward new task variants or user-preferred behaviors remains challenging, often requiring additional robot demonstrations, task-specific fine-tuning, or long-context conditioning. We present WAM-TTT, a test-time training framework for steering world action models from raw human videos. Rather than treating human videos as trajectories to imitate, WAM-TTT absorbs them into a lightweight adaptive memory inside a frozen WAM through self-supervised video prediction. To make this memory useful for control, we introduce a meta-training stage that aligns human demonstrations with robot behaviors using paired human-robot data and a key--value memory reconstruction objective. At test time, only unlabeled human videos are required to adapt the memory, while the pretrained WAM remains frozen. This enables efficient and reusable steering without robot actions, human-side annotations, or task-specific fine-tuning, while preserving the generalization ability of the foundation model. Extensive experiments show that WAM-TTT consistently outperforms in-context human-video conditioning baselines across diverse manipulation tasks and generalization settings.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Accurate, Interdisciplinary and Transparent Structure-property Understanding with Deep Native Structural Reasoning

Structure-property relationships are foundational to biology, chemistry and materials science, where function, reactivity and physical response emerge from spatial, chemical and periodic organization. Mechanistically explaining these relationships requires interpreting structural evidence through scientific principles and physical constraints, from stereochemistry and bonding to symmetry, energetics and periodic order. However, applying artificial intelligence to this process presents a joint challenge of representation and reasoning: models must preserve domain-native structural information while showing how specific evidence supports predictions under these constraints. Here we introduce SciReasoner, a multimodal scientific foundation model for native structural reasoning across proteins, small molecules and inorganic crystals. SciReasoner discretizes coordinates, topologies and periodic connectivities into a unified structure-aware vocabulary, treating structural tokens as addressable evidence units during reasoning. In homology-controlled Gene Ontology prediction, SciReasoner improves Cellular Component annotation for low-homology and orphan-like proteins, increasing $F_{\max}$ from 0.42 to 0.55. In chemistry, it raises single-step retrosynthesis accuracy from 0.63 to 0.72 while generating fragment-level disconnection and precursor-verification traces. In materials science, its representations separate elemental and compound phases and resolve high- and low-band-gap regimes. Across 86 benchmarks, SciReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on 67 tasks. Double-blind expert evaluation rates its reasoning traces as preferred or at least comparable to those of a frontier large language model in 98% of cases. By making structure an inspectable substrate for reasoning under scientific constraints, SciReasoner connects accurate prediction with interpretable scientific inference.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Resonant Minds: Closed-Loop Social Avatars with Theory of Mind

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable videos that jointly synthesize speaker speech and facial expressions with listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We further construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access. Project page: https://resonantminds.github.io/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MUSE: A Unified Agentic Harness for MLLMs

Despite rapid progress, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still fail on tasks that humans solve effortlessly, such as navigating a grid maze from a screenshot or selecting the correct puzzle piece. Rather than retraining the model, we ask a complementary question: how much capability can be elicited from a frozen MLLM purely by improving the execution scaffold around it? We introduce MUSE, a multimodal unified structured execution harness that wraps any off-the-shelf MLLM with composable modules for task representation, visual processing, perception tool use, structured parsing, deterministic verification, and verifier-guided repair, without any model retraining. We evaluate MUSE across diverse benchmarks spanning visual spatial planning, visual perception, multimodal reasoning, and fine-grained visual discrimination, using multiple state-of-the-art MLLMs. MUSE delivers consistent gains over the bare model in all settings, with the largest jumps on challenging instances. Further analysis reveals that many MLLM failures arise from harness-level shortcomings rather than fundamental model deficits, and can be addressed through verifier-guided repair without touching the model. These findings highlight the agentic multimodal harness as a critical yet underexplored design dimension, offering an orthogonal avenue for improving MLLMs beyond model-centric optimization.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

RescueBench: Can Embodied Agents Save Lives in the Wild ?

Search-and-rescue (SAR) requires embodied agents to explore unfamiliar environments under multimodal uncertainty, perform multi-stage interactions, and retrieve spatial memory over long horizons. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate these capabilities in isolation, leaving unclear how failures compound when they must be composed in realistic workflows. We introduce RescueBench, a photo-realistic diagnostic benchmark that instantiates SAR as a four-stage pipeline: multimodal exploration, target rescue, memory-guided return, and final handoff. By combining sequential task composition with stage-level evaluation, RescueBench enables analysis of how exploration and memory failures propagate through embodied rescue workflows. It contains five progressive difficulty levels that vary in environmental complexity, clue ambiguity, and spatial hierarchy, along with an automatic episode generation and annotation pipeline for scalable evaluation and training. We evaluate seven baselines, an oracle reference, and human players, showing that no baselines complete the full task at the greatest difficulty. Stage-level diagnosis identifies autonomous exploration as the dominant failure mode and spatial memory as a second, independent bottleneck, suggesting that these limitations are not resolved by current topological visual-language navigation or map-based methods. Code is available in https://github.com/wukui-muc/RescueBench

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Clinically-Grounded Counterfactual Reasoning for Medical Video Diagnosis

Medical video diagnosis involves inferring clinical decisions from dynamic tissue responses throughout examination processes. Existing methods rely on an end-to-end learning paradigm that i) focuses on appearance rather than pathology, ii) lacks clinical priors, and iii) reasons solely from observations without counterfactual comparison. This work introduces MedVCR, a counterfactual reasoning framework that mimics clinical diagnostic thinking. MedVCR comprises three components: a Counterfactual Generator that synthesizes tissue evolution under specified pathological states via a diffusion-based manner; a Counterfactual Representation Learning module that encodes diagnostic knowledge through clinical rules (i.e., temporal consistency, pathological separability, and counterfactual alignment); and a Dual Diagnostic Prediction strategy that integrates video-level assessment with frame-level counterfactual analysis. MedVCR is evaluated under both fully supervised (e.g., colposcopy) and weakly supervised (e.g., colonoscopy) video diagnosis settings, yielding 2.6%-10.2% performance gains compared with leading baselines. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component. The code will be released.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LECTOR: Joint Optimization of Scientific Reasoning Graphs and Introduction Generation

AI Scientists have shown promising progress across multiple stages of the research pipeline, among which automatic scientific paper writing remains a formidable challenge. The Introduction writing is especially challenging, which demands not only linguistic fluency, but logical soundness and verifiable faithfulness. Most AI-assisted methods treat the task as text generation instead of reasoning and structuring, leading to severe drawbacks, e.g., hallucinating citations. To address this, we first formulate the Content-Conditional Introduction Generation (CCIG) task, which requires grounding the Introduction in the paper's core evidence. We then propose LECTOR, a novel Logic-Expression Co-Reinforcement Learning framework that can strictly follow the scientist's logic, add high-quality citations and keep structured expressions. LECTOR first constructs a logic-reasoning graph from the paper's main body to serve as a verifiable logical blueprint. Subsequently, it employs a Logic-Expression Co-Rewarding mechanism to jointly optimize for both the graph's structural fidelity and the final narrative's quality. We conduct a dataset from Nature Communications papers to assess our method. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements in both logic fidelity and Introduction generation quality metrics, e.g., Graph Quality (+26.7%), Citation Quality (+8.6%), and Paper Consistency (+3.3%). Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xiao-Youth/LECTOR.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework

Building humanoid robots capable of generalizable whole-body loco-manipulation in the real world remains a fundamental challenge. Existing methods either rely on laborious task-specific reward engineering, rigidly replay reference motions that fail to generalize, or depend on costly teleoperation that limits scalability. While human videos capture diverse human behaviors, motion priors inferred from them are inherently imperfect, suffering from occlusion, contact artifacts, and retargeting errors that render them unsuitable for direct policy learning. To address this, we present SUGAR, a scalable data-driven framework that converts diverse human videos into deployable humanoid loco-manipulation skills, without any task-specific reward engineering or reference-motion conditioning at inference. SUGAR proceeds in three stages. First, a fully automated pipeline extracts kinematic interaction priors including human-object motion trajectories and contact labels from unstructured human videos. Second, a privileged physics-based refiner uses a unified mimic reward and progressive state pool to transform imperfect priors into physically feasible, high-fidelity skills. Third, refined skills are distilled into a hierarchical autonomous policy consisting of a command generator and a command tracker. We evaluate SUGAR on six representative loco-manipulation tasks in simulation and real-world humanoid hardware. Our method substantially outperforms reference-tracking baselines, and performance scales clearly with the amount of human video data. It also achieves zero-shot real-world transfer with reliable closed-loop execution, autonomous failure recovery, and stable long-horizon performance under external perturbations. Project Page: https://tianshuwu.github.io/sugar-humanoid/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Inline Critic Steers Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing exhibits heterogeneous difficulty not only across cases but also across regions of an image, motivating refinement approaches that allocate correction to where the model struggles. Existing refinement signals arrive late, after a fully generated image or a completed denoising step. We ask whether such a signal can act within an ongoing forward pass. To investigate this, we probe a frozen image-editing model and find that although generation capability emerges only in the last few layers, the error pattern is already set in early layers (rank correlation \r{ho} = 0.83 with the final-layer error map). Based on this, we introduce Inline Critic, a learnable token that critiques a frozen model's predictions at its intermediate layers and steers its hidden states to refine generation during the forward pass. A three-stage recipe is proposed to stabilize the training from learning how to critique to steering generation. As a result, we achieve state of the art on GEdit-Bench (7.89), a +9.4 gain on RISEBench over the same backbone, and the strongest open-source result on KRIS-Bench (81.92, surpassing GPT-4o). We further provide analyses showing that the critic genuinely shapes the model's attention and prediction updates at subsequent layers.

cs.CV↗