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Yong Li

Publications and source records attributed to Yong Li.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

Inferring Network Evolutionary History via Structure-State Coupled Learning

Inferring a network's evolutionary history from a single final snapshot with limited temporal annotations is fundamental yet challenging. Existing approaches predominantly rely on topology alone, which often provides insufficient and noisy cues. This paper leverages network steady-state dynamics -- converged node states under a given dynamical process -- as an additional and widely accessible observation for network evolution history inference. We propose CS$^2$, which explicitly models structure-state coupling to capture how topology modulates steady states and how the two signals jointly improve edge discrimination for formation-order recovery. Experiments on six real temporal networks, evaluated under multiple dynamical processes, show that CS$^2$ consistently outperforms strong baselines, improving pairwise edge precedence accuracy by 4.0% on average and global ordering consistency (Spearman-$ρ$) by 7.7% on average. CS$^2$ also more faithfully recovers macroscopic evolution trajectories such as clustering formation, degree heterogeneity, and hub growth. Moreover, a steady-state-only variant remains competitive when reliable topology is limited, highlighting steady states as an independent signal for evolution inference.

cs.SI↗

Aerial World Model for Long-horizon Visual Generation and Navigation in 3D Space

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as powerful embodied agents. One of the core abilities is autonomous navigation in large-scale three-dimensional environments. Existing navigation policies, however, are typically optimized for low-level objectives such as obstacle avoidance and trajectory smoothness, lacking the ability to incorporate high-level semantics into planning. To bridge this gap, we propose ANWM, an aerial navigation world model that predicts future visual observations conditioned on past frames and actions, thereby enabling agents to rank candidate trajectories by their semantic plausibility and navigational utility. ANWM is trained on 4-DoF UAV trajectories and introduces a physics-inspired module: Future Frame Projection (FFP), which projects past frames into future viewpoints to provide coarse geometric priors. This module mitigates representational uncertainty in long-distance visual generation and captures the mapping between 3D trajectories and egocentric observations. Empirical results demonstrate that ANWM significantly outperforms existing world models in long-distance visual forecasting and improves UAV navigation success rates in large-scale environments.

cs.RO↗

Breaking Data Silos: Towards Open and Scalable Mobility Foundation Models via Generative Continual Learning

Human mobility is a fundamental pillar of urban science and sustainability, providing critical insights into energy consumption, carbon emissions, and public health. However, the discovery of universal mobility laws is currently hindered by the ``data silo'' problem, where institutional boundaries and privacy regulations fragment the necessary large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose MoveGCL, a transformative framework that facilitates collaborative and decentralized mobility science via generative continual learning. MoveGCL enables a distributed ecosystem of data holders to jointly evolve a foundation model without compromising individual privacy. The core of MoveGCL lies in its ability to replay synthetic trajectories derived from a generative teacher and utilize a mobility-pattern-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. This allows the model to encapsulate the unique characteristics of diverse urban structures while mitigating the risk of knowledge erosion (catastrophic forgetting). With a specialized layer-wise progressive adaptation strategy, MoveGCL ensures stable convergence during the continuous integration of new urban domains. Our experiments on six global urban datasets demonstrate that MoveGCL achieves performance parity with joint training, a previously unattainable feat under siloed conditions. This work provides a scalable, privacy-preserving pathway toward Open Mobility Science, empowering researchers to address global sustainability challenges through cross-institutional AI collaboration. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, we have released the code and models at \color{blue}{https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/MoveGCL}.

cs.LG↗

Weighted multiple ergodic averages via analytic observables over $ \mathbb{T}^\infty $: Is exponential pointwise convergence universal?

By employing an accelerated weighting method, we establish arbitrary polynomial and exponential pointwise convergence for multiple ergodic averages under general balancing conditions in both discrete and continuous settings, including quasi-periodic and almost periodic cases. We also present joint Diophantine rotations as explicit applications. Specifically, for the first time, by excluding nearly rational rotations with zero measure, we address the fundamental question of whether exponential pointwise convergence via analytic observables is universal, even when multiplicatively averaging over the infinite-dimensional torus $ \mathbb{T}^\infty $. We achieve this by introducing an innovative approach that effectively overcomes the previous difficulties. Moreover, by constructing counterexamples concerning multiple ergodicity, we highlight the indispensability of the joint nonresonance and establish the optimality of our weighting method in preserving rapid convergence. We also provide numerical simulations and analysis to further illustrate and validate our results.

math.DS↗

AI Urban Scientist: Multi-Agent Collaborative Automation for Urban Research

Urban research aims to understand how cities operate and evolve as complex adaptive systems. With the rapid growth of urban data and analytical methodologies, the central challenge of the field has shifted from data availability to the integration of heterogeneous data into coherent, verifiable urban knowledge through multidisciplinary approaches. Recent advances in AI, particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have enabled the development of AI scientists capable of autonomous reasoning, hypothesis generation, and data-driven experimentation, demonstrating substantial potential for autonomous urban research. However, most general-purpose AI systems remain misaligned with the domain-specific knowledge, methodological conventions, and inferential standards required in urban studies. Here, we introduce the AI Urban Scientist, a knowledge-driven multi-agent framework designed to support autonomous urban research. Grounded in hypotheses, peer-review feedback, datasets, and research methodologies distilled from large-scale prior studies, the system constructs structured domain knowledge that guides LLM-based agents to automatically generate hypotheses, identify and integrate multi-source urban datasets, conduct empirical analyses and simulations, and iteratively refine analytical methods. Through this process, the framework synthesizes new insights in urban science and accelerates the urban research lifecycle.

cs.CY↗

Physics-informed Diffusion Models for Multi-scale Prediction of Reference Signal Received Power in Wireless Networks

The Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) is a crucial factor that determines communication performance in mobile networks. Accurately predicting the RSRP can help network operators perceive user experiences and maximize throughput by optimizing wireless resources. However, existing research into RSRP prediction has limitations in accuracy and verisimilitude. Theoretical derivations and existing data-driven methods consider only easily quantifiable Large-Scale (LS) information, and struggle to effectively capture the intertwined LS and Small-Scale (SS) signal attenuation characteristics of the wireless channel. Moreover, the lack of prior physical knowledge leads to weak accuracy, interpretability, and transferability. In this paper, we propose a novel RSRP prediction framework, Channel-Diff. This framework physically models LS and SS attenuation using multimodal conditions and employs physics-informed conditional diffusion models as the prediction network. Channel-Diff extracts prior physical information that characterises the signal propagation process from network parameters and multi-attribute maps of the urban spatial environment. It provides LS physical priors through large-scale propagation modelling and shadow-occlusion modelling, and SS physical priors through multipath propagation modelling and urban microenvironment feature extraction. We design a physical-prior-guided two-stage training scheme with a noise prior guidance mechanism, enabling effective fusion of multi-scale physical knowledge with the diffusion models. Evaluations demonstrate Channel-Diff exhibits excellent performance on RSRP prediction, achieving at least 25.15%-37.19% improvement in accuracy relative to baseline methods. Additionally, the model also demonstrated outstanding performance in terms of transferability and training efficiency.

cs.NI↗

TrafficSimAgent: A Hierarchical Agent Framework for Autonomous Traffic Simulation with MCP Control

Traffic simulation is important for transportation optimization and policy making. While existing simulators such as SUMO and MATSim offer fully-featured platforms and utilities, users without too much knowledge about these platforms often face significant challenges when conducting experiments from scratch and applying them to their daily work. To solve this challenge, we propose TrafficSimAgent, an LLM-based agent framework that serves as an expert in experiment design and decision optimization for general-purpose traffic simulation tasks. The framework facilitates execution through cross-level collaboration among expert agents: high-level expert agents comprehend natural language instructions with high flexibility, plan the overall experiment workflow, and invoke corresponding MCP-compatible tools on demand; meanwhile, low-level expert agents select optimal action plans for fundamental elements based on real-time traffic conditions. Extensive experiments across multiple scenarios show that TrafficSimAgent effectively executes simulations under various conditions and consistently produces reasonable outcomes even when user instructions are ambiguous. Besides, the carefully designed expert-level autonomous decision-driven optimization in TrafficSimAgent yields superior performance when compared with other systems and SOTA LLM based methods.

cs.AI↗

PhysFire-WM: A Physics-Informed World Model for Emulating Fire Spread Dynamics

Fine-grained fire prediction plays a crucial role in emergency response. Infrared images and fire masks provide complementary thermal and boundary information, yet current methods are predominantly limited to binary mask modeling with inherent signal sparsity, failing to capture the complex dynamics of fire. While world models show promise in video generation, their physical inconsistencies pose significant challenges for fire forecasting. This paper introduces PhysFire-WM, a Physics-informed World Model for emulating Fire spread dynamics. Our approach internalizes combustion dynamics by encoding structured priors from a Physical Simulator to rectify physical discrepancies, coupled with a Cross-task Collaborative Training strategy (CC-Train) that alleviates the issue of limited information in mask-based modeling. Through parameter sharing and gradient coordination, CC-Train effectively integrates thermal radiation dynamics and spatial boundary delineation, enhancing both physical realism and geometric accuracy. Extensive experiments on a fine-grained multimodal fire dataset demonstrate the superior accuracy of PhysFire-WM in fire spread prediction. Validation underscores the importance of physical priors and cross-task collaboration, providing new insights for applying physics-informed world models to disaster prediction.

cs.CV↗

WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility

High-quality human mobility data is crucial for applications such as urban planning, transportation management, and public health, yet its collection is often hindered by privacy concerns and data scarcity-particularly in less-developed regions. To address this challenge, we introduce WorldMove, a large-scale synthetic mobility dataset covering over 1,600 cities across 179 countries and 6 continents. Our method leverages publicly available multi-source data, including gridded population distribution, point-of-interest (POI) maps, and commuting origin-destination (OD) flows-to generate realistic city-scale mobility trajectories using a diffusion-based generative model. The generation process involves defining city boundaries, collecting multi-source input features, and simulating individual-level movements that reflect plausible daily mobility behavior. Comprehensive validation demonstrates that the generated data closely aligns with real-world observations, both in terms of fine-grained individual mobility behavior and city-scale population flows. Alongside the pre-generated datasets, we release the trained model and a complete open-source pipeline, enabling researchers and practitioners to generate custom synthetic mobility data for any city worldwide. This work not only fills critical data gaps, but also lays a global foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving, and inclusive mobility research-empowering data-scarce regions and enabling universal access to human mobility insights.

cs.SI↗

HybridQuestion: Human-AI Collaboration for Identifying High-Impact Research Questions

The "AI Scientist" paradigm is transforming scientific research by automating key stages of the research process, from idea generation to scholarly writing. This shift is expected to accelerate discovery and expand the scope of scientific inquiry. However, a key question remains unclear: can AI scientists identify meaningful research questions? While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied successfully to task-specific ideation, their potential to conduct strategic, long-term assessments of past breakthroughs and future questions remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we explore a human-AI hybrid solution that integrates the scalable data processing capabilities of AI with the value judgment of human experts. Our methodology is structured in three phases. The first phase, AI-Accelerated Information Gathering, leverages AI's advantage in processing vast amounts of literature to generate a hybrid information base. The second phase, Candidate Question Proposing, utilizes this synthesized data to prompt an ensemble of six diverse LLMs to propose an initial candidate pool, filtered via a cross-model voting mechanism. The third phase, Hybrid Question Selection, refines this pool through a multi-stage filtering process that progressively increases human oversight. To validate this system, we conducted an experiment aiming to identify the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2025 and the Top 10 Scientific Questions for 2026 across five major disciplines. Our analysis reveals that while AI agents demonstrate high alignment with human experts in recognizing established breakthroughs, they exhibit greater divergence in forecasting prospective questions, suggesting that human judgment remains crucial for evaluating subjective, forward-looking challenges.

cs.HC↗

Skrull: Towards Efficient Long Context Fine-tuning through Dynamic Data Scheduling

Long-context supervised fine-tuning (Long-SFT) plays a vital role in enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on long-context tasks. To smoothly adapt LLMs to long-context scenarios, this process typically entails training on mixed datasets containing both long and short sequences. However, this heterogeneous sequence length distribution poses significant challenges for existing training systems, as they fail to simultaneously achieve high training efficiency for both long and short sequences, resulting in sub-optimal end-to-end system performance in Long-SFT. In this paper, we present a novel perspective on data scheduling to address the challenges posed by the heterogeneous data distributions in Long-SFT. We propose Skrull, a dynamic data scheduler specifically designed for efficient long-SFT. Through dynamic data scheduling, Skrull balances the computation requirements of long and short sequences, improving overall training efficiency. Furthermore, we formulate the scheduling process as a joint optimization problem and thoroughly analyze the trade-offs involved. Based on those analysis, Skrull employs a lightweight scheduling algorithm to achieve near-zero cost online scheduling in Long-SFT. Finally, we implement Skrull upon DeepSpeed, a state-of-the-art distributed training system for LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that Skrull outperforms DeepSpeed by 3.76x on average (up to 7.54x) in real-world long-SFT scenarios.

cs.LG↗

OmniScientist: Toward a Co-evolving Ecosystem of Human and AI Scientists

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI agents have demonstrated increasing proficiency in scientific tasks, ranging from hypothesis generation and experimental design to manuscript writing. Such agent systems are commonly referred to as "AI Scientists." However, existing AI Scientists predominantly formulate scientific discovery as a standalone search or optimization problem, overlooking the fact that scientific research is inherently a social and collaborative endeavor. Real-world science relies on a complex scientific infrastructure composed of collaborative mechanisms, contribution attribution, peer review, and structured scientific knowledge networks. Due to the lack of modeling for these critical dimensions, current systems struggle to establish a genuine research ecosystem or interact deeply with the human scientific community. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniScientist, a framework that explicitly encodes the underlying mechanisms of human research into the AI scientific workflow. OmniScientist not only achieves end-to-end automation across data foundation, literature review, research ideation, experiment automation, scientific writing, and peer review, but also provides comprehensive infrastructural support by simulating the human scientific system, comprising: (1) a structured knowledge system built upon citation networks and conceptual correlations; (2) a collaborative research protocol (OSP), which enables seamless multi-agent collaboration and human researcher participation; and (3) an open evaluation platform (ScienceArena) based on blind pairwise user voting and Elo rankings. This infrastructure empowers agents to not only comprehend and leverage human knowledge systems but also to collaborate and co-evolve, fostering a sustainable and scalable innovation ecosystem.

cs.CY↗

Physics-Informed Cross-Learning for Seismic Acoustic Impedance Inversion and Wavelet Extraction

Seismic acoustic impedance inversion is one of the most challenging tasks in geophysical exploration. Many studies have proposed the use of deep learning for processing; however, most of them are limited by factors such as seismic wavelets and low-frequency initial models. Furthermore, self-supervised frameworks constructed entirely using deep learning models struggle to form direct and effective physical constraints to unlabeled outputs during the multi-model concatenation, which leads to instability in inversion. In this work, we introduced innovations in both the deep learning framework and training strategy. First, we designed a deep learning framework to perform acoustic impedance inversion and seismic wavelet extraction simultaneously. Building on this foundation, considering the scarcity of well data, we proposed a physics-informed cross-learning strategy to impose effective constraints on the framework. We conducted comparative experiments and ablation experiments on both synthetic datasets and field datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a significant improvement compared with semi-supervised learning methods and can extract seismic wavelets with relatively high accuracy. Finally, to ensure the reproducibility of this work, we have made the code open-source.

physics.geo-ph↗

Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models

The concept of world models has garnered significant attention due to advancements in multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 and video generation models such as Sora, which are central to the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the literature on world models. Generally, world models are regarded as tools for either understanding the present state of the world or predicting its future dynamics. This review presents a systematic categorization of world models, emphasizing two primary functions: (1) constructing internal representations to understand the mechanisms of the world, and (2) predicting future states to simulate and guide decision-making. Initially, we examine the current progress in these two categories. We then explore the application of world models in key domains, including generative games, autonomous driving, robotics, and social simulacra, with a focus on how each domain utilizes these aspects. Finally, we outline key challenges and provide insights into potential future research directions. We summarize the representative papers along with their code repositories in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/World-Model.

cs.CL↗

Route-and-Reason: Scaling Large Language Model Reasoning with Reinforced Model Router

Chain-of-thought has been proven essential for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it also leads to high computational costs. Recent advances have explored the method to route queries among multiple models and proved it as a promising approach. However, previous works directly operate at the task level, i.e., assigning user queries to suitable LLMs, which does not allow hybrid LLMs to truly collaborate on finer-grained sub-tasks. Collaboration at the level of intermediate reasoning steps (thoughts) could enable more efficient coordination, but it also poses significant challenges for router scheduling, placing immense demands on the quality of task decomposition and the precision of the router. To address this, we propose R2-Reasoner, a novel framework centered around a Reinforced Model Router designed to efficiently scale LLM reasoning. This router orchestrates collaboration across nine heterogeneous models, whose parameter scales range from less than 1B to hundreds of billions, by first breaking down a complex query into subtasks with a decomposer, and then assigning each subtask to the optimal model with a subtask allocator, balancing performance with cost. Training this router involves a two-stage alternating process for the decomposer and the allocator, integrating supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning to enable effective self-supervised refinement. Extensive experiments across six challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that R2-Reasoner reduces API costs by 84.46% compared with state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining competitive reasoning accuracy. Our framework paves the way for the development of more scalable and efficient reasoning systems. Our code is open-source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/R2_Reasoner.

cs.CL↗

STeP-Diff: Spatio-Temporal Physics-Informed Diffusion Models for Mobile Fine-Grained Pollution Forecasting

Fine-grained air pollution forecasting is crucial for urban management and the development of healthy buildings. Deploying portable sensors on mobile platforms such as cars and buses offers a low-cost, easy-to-maintain, and wide-coverage data collection solution. However, due to the random and uncontrollable movement patterns of these non-dedicated mobile platforms, the resulting sensor data are often incomplete and temporally inconsistent. By exploring potential training patterns in the reverse process of diffusion models, we propose Spatio-Temporal Physics-Informed Diffusion Models (STeP-Diff). STeP-Diff leverages DeepONet to model the spatial sequence of measurements along with a PDE-informed diffusion model to forecast the spatio-temporal field from incomplete and time-varying data. Through a PDE-constrained regularization framework, the denoising process asymptotically converges to the convection-diffusion dynamics, ensuring that predictions are both grounded in real-world measurements and aligned with the fundamental physics governing pollution dispersion. To assess the performance of the system, we deployed 59 self-designed portable sensing devices in two cities, operating for 14 days to collect air pollution data. Compared to the second-best performing algorithm, our model achieved improvements of up to 89.12% in MAE, 82.30% in RMSE, and 25.00% in MAPE, with extensive evaluations demonstrating that STeP-Diff effectively captures the spatio-temporal dependencies in air pollution fields.

cs.LG↗

FireSentry: A Multi-Modal Spatio-temporal Benchmark Dataset for Fine-Grained Wildfire Spread Forecasting

Fine-grained wildfire spread prediction is crucial for enhancing emergency response efficacy and decision-making precision. However, existing research predominantly focuses on coarse spatiotemporal scales and relies on low-resolution satellite data, capturing only macroscopic fire states while fundamentally constraining high-precision localized fire dynamics modeling capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present FireSentry, a provincial-scale multi-modal wildfire dataset characterized by sub-meter spatial and sub-second temporal resolution. Collected using synchronized UAV platforms, FireSentry provides visible and infrared video streams, in-situ environmental measurements, and manually validated fire masks. Building on FireSentry, we establish a comprehensive benchmark encompassing physics-based, data-driven, and generative models, revealing the limitations of existing mask-only approaches. Our analysis proposes FiReDiff, a novel dual-modality paradigm that first predicts future video sequences in the infrared modality, and then precisely segments fire masks in the mask modality based on the generated dynamics. FiReDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance, with video quality gains of 39.2% in PSNR, 36.1% in SSIM, 50.0% in LPIPS, 29.4% in FVD, and mask accuracy gains of 3.3% in AUPRC, 59.1% in F1 score, 42.9% in IoU, and 62.5% in MSE when applied to generative models. The FireSentry benchmark dataset and FiReDiff paradigm collectively advance fine-grained wildfire forecasting and dynamic disaster simulation. The processed benchmark dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/Munan222/FireSentry-Benchmark-Dataset.

cs.CV↗

RoboScape-R: Unified Reward-Observation World Models for Generalizable Robotics Training via RL

Achieving generalizable embodied policies remains a key challenge. Traditional policy learning paradigms, including both Imitation Learning (IL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), struggle to cultivate generalizability across diverse scenarios. While IL policies often overfit to specific expert trajectories, RL suffers from the inherent lack of a unified and general reward signal necessary for effective multi-scene generalization. We posit that the world model is uniquely capable of serving as a universal environment proxy to address this limitation. However, current world models primarily focus on their ability to predict observations and still rely on task-specific, handcrafted reward functions, thereby failing to provide a truly general training environment. Toward this problem, we propose RoboScape-R, a framework leveraging the world model to serve as a versatile, general-purpose proxy for the embodied environment within the RL paradigm. We introduce a novel world model-based general reward mechanism that generates ''endogenous'' rewards derived from the model's intrinsic understanding of real-world state transition dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboScape-R effectively addresses the limitations of traditional RL methods by providing an efficient and general training environment that substantially enhances the generalization capability of embodied policies. Our approach offers critical insights into utilizing the world model as an online training strategy and achieves an average 37.5% performance improvement over baselines under out-of-domain scenarios.

cs.RO↗