arXiv subjects

Yonghong Tian

Publications and source records attributed to Yonghong Tian.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs. Compared with GPS-dependent or pre-programmed navigation, VLN supports intuitive human-machine interaction and stronger environmental adaptability, requiring tight integration of high-level semantic reasoning and low-latency flight control.Existing methods suffer from structural misalignment between global multimodal understanding and sequential action generation, causing jittery trajectories and severe decision latency for long-horizon aerial navigation. To solve this issue, we propose FSD-VLN, a fast-slow dual-system architecture disentangling semantic reasoning and low-latency flight command generation.The framework has two asynchronous branches: a slow stream extracting stable semantic priors from pre-trained vision-language models, and a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) fast stream modeling cross-temporal action distributions to produce consistent flight outputs. We further introduce a time-aware adaptive optimizer to stabilize long-sequence training and reduce gradient oscillation.Large-scale low-altitude simulation experiments show FSD-VLN achieves up to 2X higher navigation success rates on unseen scenes than SOTA methods, while cutting single-action inference delay and total task runtime by over 50%. Our work validates the benefit of decoupled semantic-control modeling and provides a practical paradigm for long-horizon aerial VLN.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Burst Spiking Neural Networks

A central goal of current Spiking Neural Network (SNN) research is to improve their accuracy toward becoming low-power alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). This work further argues that realizing this ambition requires improving not only accuracy but also robustness, defined as the ability to maintain correct predictions under input perturbations. We identify two key issues in existing SNN methods that undermine robustness. First, binary spiking activations can produce large activation-state changes under small perturbations. Second, the lack of effective weight constraints makes network outputs more sensitive to input variations. To this end, we propose Burst Spiking Neural Networks (BuSNNs), built upon Burst-enhanced Spiking Neurons (BSNs) and a Dynamic Weight Constraint (DWC) mechanism. BSNs incorporate burst firing to provide a graded spiking pattern. This spiking mechanism mitigates perturbation-induced transitions in activation states and thereby enhances robustness. DWC penalizes connection weights based on activation states, effectively reducing weight magnitudes and improving robustness while preserving accuracy. We provide theoretical analyses to support these robustness effects. Experimental results further show that, on smaller-scale benchmarks such as CIFAR-10, BuSNNs outperform both SNN and ANN counterparts in accuracy and robustness. On large-scale ImageNet, BuSNN with the MS ResNet-34 backbone further improves top-1 accuracy and corruption robustness over the corresponding SNN baseline by 3.18% and 2.66%, respectively. Despite using spike-based activations, BuSNNs surpass 4-bit activation-quantized ANN baselines and approach 8-bit ANN baselines on ImageNet. They also preserve SNNs' low-power advantage. This work studies the accuracy-robustness problem in SNNs, advancing their practical viability in robust and energy-efficient applications.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

QCA: Query- and Content-Aware Keyframe Selection for Long Video Understanding

Video understanding is often plagued by severe temporal redundancy, where processing dense frame sequences is both semantically inefficient and computationally expensive. This challenge is further amplified when only a small subset of frames is truly relevant to the given query. In this paper, we propose a Query- and Content-Aware (QCA) keyframe selection framework that can select a compact yet information-rich set of frames from long videos. QCA first partitions the video into temporal segments and estimates the information contribution of each segment by jointly modeling query relevance and content deviation, and dynamically allocates keyframe budget to each segment. Within each segment, QCA anchors on the most query-relevant frame and iteratively incorporates additional frames to maximize diversity while maintaining high semantic relevance to the query. Crucially, our method requires no additional training and can be seamlessly integrated into existing Video-LLMs. Extensive experiments across multiple long video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and has strong generalization ability. For instance, QCA achieves 67.8\% on LongVideoBench using 128 frames, while GPT-4o achieves 66.7\% using 256 frames. Our codes are available in \href{https://github.com/hktk07/QCA}{GitHub}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SyncCache: Exploiting Asymmetric Dynamics for Fast Audio-Driven Portrait Animation

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have significantly advanced audio-driven portrait animation, but their high computational cost leads to substantial inference latency. Although training-free diffusion caching accelerates inference significant, existing methods are primarily developed for text-conditioned generation and overlook the spatial and modality imbalances inherent in audio-driven portrait animation. In this paper, we propose SyncCache, a training-free caching acceleration method tailored for DiT-based portrait animation that explicitly exploits asymmetric dynamics. Specifically, high-frequency dynamics driven by audio conditions and concentrated in human regions are more challenging and critical to cache and reuse than the low-frequency visual background in portrait animation. First, we introduce Spatially-Asymmetric Probing to prioritize error sensitivity in dynamic human region. Second, through Modality-Decoupled Caching, we bypass heavy DiT block by reusing stable inter-block residuals, while continuously recomputing lightweight audio blocks to preserve precise lip synchronization. Furthermore, we introduce a cache ratio to control cache capacity and formulate memory-adaptive cache selection as an offline dynamic programming problem without online overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncCache achieves superior speed-quality trade-offs, delivering up to 4.12x acceleration on HunyuanVideo-Avatar and 3.75x on Wan-S2V with near-lossless visual fidelity and precise audio alignment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Dynamic Parsing and Updating Natural Language Specification using VLMs for Robust Vision-Language Tracking

Vision-language tracking guided by natural language specifications leverages high-level semantic cues of target objects to substantially boost tracking accuracy and robustness. Existing studies have verified that adaptively optimizing textual descriptions throughout the tracking process can effectively mitigate the semantic-visual mismatch induced by dynamic variations in target appearance, position, and other inherent attributes. Nevertheless, mainstream methods that directly generate textual information via sequence models or large language models inevitably suffer from inherent defects, including erroneous target updating, excessive background distraction, and pervasive hallucination artifacts. To address the aforementioned limitations, this paper proposes a novel language dependency parsing mechanism to precisely distill core tracking principal components, encompassing target objects, semantic concepts, and background contextual information. On this basis, we perform component-aware adaptive textual description updates by exploiting the powerful cross-modal understanding capability of the pre-trained vision-language model Qwen-VL. By integrating the proposed elaborately designed modules into the baseline framework, our method achieves consistent and superior tracking performance on multiple large-scale vision-language tracking benchmarks, including TNL2K, LaSOT, TNLLT, and OTB-LANG. The source code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/Open_VLTrack.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Active Adversarial Perturbation-driven Associative Memory Retrieval for RGB-Event Visual Object Tracking

RGB-Event tracking improves localization robustness by fusing RGB appearance textures and dense temporal motion cues from event sensors. While this multi-modal scheme broadens tracking applicability, real-world scenes suffer diverse structured signal degradations that hinder traditional multi-modal fusion. In harsh environments, either modality can lose reliability drastically, and targets frequently appear incomplete due to occlusion, edge truncation and foreground clutter.To tackle the above challenges, we present a hierarchical perturbation and retrieval framework tailored for RGB-Event tracking with robustness against partial target missing and modal degradation, termed APRTrack. To mimic real-world signal corruption, APRTrack constructs structured degradation via two adversarial perturbation branches at the modality and spatial levels, which separately simulate full-modal failure and localized target region absence. A hierarchical routing mechanism is designed to disentangle the training pipelines of the two perturbation types, effectively eliminating feature collapse induced by superimposed degradation constraints. Furthermore, we devise Footprint-guided Channel-calibrated Hopfield Retrieval (FCHR) for reliable historical information compensation. This module evaluates retrieval confidence based on association footprints between queries and memory banks, and calibrates the retrieval metric space prior to Hopfield matching, realizing controllable historical feature compensation bounded to target regions. Extensive experiments on FE108, COESOT, VisEvent, and FELT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies for the RGB-Event visual object tracking. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvTracking

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Chatlaw: A Multi-Agent Legal Assistant based on a Role-Aligned Mixture-of-Experts Architecture

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great potential in legal services, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) face two major challenges: limited knowledge of the Chinese legal system and vulnerability to hallucinations. To address these issues, we present Chatlaw, a multi-agent legal assistant. Chatlaw's framework is designed to emulate the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) of real law firms, where different roles (e.g., assistant, researcher, senior lawyer) collaborate on a case. To computationally mirror this collaborative structure, we developed a novel Role-Aligned Mixture-of-Experts (RA-MoE) architecture. In this system, the internal "experts" are specifically trained to align with the distinct tasks of each agent role (e.g., inquiry, analysis, drafting). These specialized agents (Legal Assistant, Researcher, etc.) then form the collaborative framework. When they interact with users, retrieve legal knowledge, analyze case details, or generate reliable consultations, the RA-MoE architecture intelligently routes their computations to the corresponding dedicated expert, ensuring each step is handled by the most qualified parameters. In evaluations, Chatlaw surpasses general-purpose AI models, including GPT-4, achieving a 7.73% improvement in accuracy on the LawBench benchmark and an 11-point higher score on the Unified Qualification Exam for Legal Professionals. Real-case studies and expert assessments further confirm its robustness. Chatlaw enhances the accessibility and reliability of legal services, advancing the provision of legal support to the public.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

WorldArena 2.0: Extending Embodied World Model Benchmarking on Modality, Functionality and Platform

World models have emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling agents to predict action-conditioned future and reason about environmental dynamics. However, existing embodied world model benchmarks are still largely confined to vision-only prediction, offline embodied applications, and simulator-based evaluation, making them insufficient for assessing increasingly comprehensive world models. In this work, we introduce WorldArena 2.0, an expanded benchmark that systematically broadens embodied world model evaluation along three dimensions: modality, functionality, and platform. Along the modality dimension, WorldArena 2.0 extends evaluation from vision-only to visuotactile modalities, enabling assessment of multimodal perception and prediction. Along the functionality dimension, it extends beyond policy evaluation and planning to assess world models as interactive RL environments for policy optimization. Along the platform dimension, it moves beyond simulator-only evaluation to a diverse suite of simulated and real-world robotic settings across multiple embodiments. Under a standardized protocol, WorldArena 2.0 comprehensively evaluates perceptual quality, interactive utility, and cross-platform performance, providing a comprehensive testbed for tracking progress toward embodied world models. The benchmark is available at: https://world-arena.ai.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Reasoning Portability: Guiding Continual Learning for MLLMs in the RLVR Era

Vision-Language Models in Continual Learning (VLM-CL) aim to continuously adapt to new multimodal tasks while retaining prior knowledge. The emerging paradigm that couples Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) calls for a new pattern to guide continual adaptation. Advances in reasoning capability now make it feasible to impose constraints at the reasoning level. We formalize portability, a sample-level measure of how reusable the previous policy's behavior is on a new task, and empirically show that reasoning-level signals remain reliable on out-of-distribution samples while answer-level signals do not. We instantiate this as Reasoning Portability (RP) and propose Reasoning-based Dynamic Balance Continual Learning (RDB-CL), which modulates the per-sample Kullback-Leibler regularization in RLVR according to RP: a tight anchor preserves reusable reasoning on high-RP samples, while a relaxed anchor on low-RP samples permits exploration of new reasoning pathways. Experiments show that RDB-CL consistently outperforms baselines, improving Last accuracy by +12.0% over the vanilla RLVR baseline.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

BioProAgent: Neuro-Symbolic Grounding for Constrained Scientific Planning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant reasoning capabilities in scientific discovery but struggle to bridge the gap to physical execution in wet-labs. In these irreversible environments, probabilistic hallucinations are not merely incorrect; they can cause equipment damage or experimental failure. We propose BioProAgent, a neuro-symbolic framework that anchors probabilistic planning in a deterministic Finite State Machine (FSM). We introduce a State-Augmented Planning mechanism that enforces a rigorous Design-Verify-Rectify workflow, ensuring hardware compliance before execution. Furthermore, we address the context bottleneck inherent in complex device schemas by Semantic Symbol Grounding, reducing token consumption by ~6* through symbolic abstraction. In the extended BioProBench benchmark, BioProAgent achieves 95.6% physical compliance (compared to 21.0% for ReAct), demonstrating that neuro-symbolic constraints are essential for reliable autonomy in irreversible physical environments. Code: https://github.com/YuyangSunshine/bioproagent | Website: https://yuyangsunshine.github.io/BioPro-Project.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Dynamic Pondering Sparsity-aware Mixture-of-Experts Transformer for Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking

Despite significant progress, RGB-based trackers remain vulnerable to challenging imaging conditions, such as low illumination and fast motion. Event cameras offer a promising alternative by asynchronously capturing pixel-wise brightness changes, providing high dynamic range and high temporal resolution. However, existing event-based trackers often neglect the intrinsic spatial sparsity and temporal density of event data, while relying on a single fixed temporal-window sampling strategy that is suboptimal under varying motion dynamics. In this paper, we propose an event sparsity-aware tracking framework that explicitly models event-density variations across multiple temporal scales. Specifically, the proposed framework progressively injects sparse, medium-density, and dense event search regions into a three-stage Vision Transformer backbone, enabling hierarchical multi-density feature learning. Furthermore, we introduce a sparsity-aware Mixture-of-Experts module to encourage expert specialization under different sparsity patterns, and design a dynamic pondering strategy to adaptively adjust the inference depth according to tracking difficulty. Extensive experiments on FE240hz, COESOT, and EventVOT demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a favorable trade-off between tracking accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvTracking.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AscendKernelGen: A Systematic Study of LLM-Based Kernel Generation for Neural Processing Units

To meet the ever-increasing demand for computational efficiency, Neural Processing Units (NPUs) have become critical in modern AI infrastructure. However, unlocking their full potential requires developing high-performance compute kernels using vendor-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), a task that demands deep hardware expertise and is labor-intensive. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in general code generation, they struggle with the strict constraints and scarcity of training data in the NPU domain. Our preliminary study reveals that state-of-the-art general-purpose LLMs fail to generate functional complex kernels for Ascend NPUs, yielding a near-zero success rate. To address these challenges, we propose AscendKernelGen, a generation-evaluation integrated framework for NPU kernel development. We introduce Ascend-CoT, a high-quality dataset incorporating chain-of-thought reasoning derived from real-world kernel implementations, and KernelGen-LM, a domain-adaptive model trained via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with execution feedback. Furthermore, we design NPUKernelBench, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing compilation, correctness, and performance across varying complexity levels. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly bridges the gap between general LLMs and hardware-specific coding. Specifically, the compilation success rate on complex Level-2 kernels improves from 0% to 95.5% (Pass@10), while functional correctness achieves 64.3% compared to the baseline's complete failure. These results highlight the critical role of domain-specific reasoning and rigorous evaluation in automating accelerator-aware code generation. AscendKernGen is available at https://huggingface.co/AscendKernelGen and https://github.com/weich97/NPUKernelBench.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Spiking Neurons for Vision and Language Modeling

Regarded as the third generation of neural networks, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered significant traction due to their biological plausibility and energy efficiency. Recent advancements in large models necessitate spiking neurons capable of high performance, adaptability, and training efficiency. In this work, we first propose a novel functional perspective that provides general guidance for designing the new generation of spiking neurons. Following the insightful guidelines, we propose the Adaptive Spiking Neuron (ASN), which incorporates trainable parameters to learn membrane potential dynamics and enable adaptive firing. ASN adopts an integer training and spike inference paradigm, facilitating efficient SNN training. To further enhance robustness, we propose a specialized variant of ASN, the Normalized Adaptive Spiking Neuron (NASN), which integrates normalization to stabilize training. We evaluate our neuron model on 19 datasets spanning five distinct tasks in both vision and language modalities, demonstrating the effectiveness and versatility of the ASN family. Our ASN family is expected to become the new generation of general-purpose spiking neurons.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Winner-Take-All Spiking Transformer for Language Modeling

Spiking Transformers, which combine the scalability of Transformers with the sparse, energy-efficient property of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), have achieved impressive results in neuromorphic and vision tasks and attracted increasing attention. However, existing directly trained spiking transformers primarily focus on vision tasks. For language modeling with spiking transformer, convergence relies heavily on softmax-based spiking self-attention, which incurs high energy costs and poses challenges for neuromorphic deployment. To address this issue, we introduce Winner-Take-All (WTA) mechanisms into spiking transformers and propose two novel softmax-free, spike-driven self-attention modules: WTA Spiking Self-Attention (WSSA) and Causal WTA Spiking Self-Attention (CWSSA). Based on them, we design WTA-based Encoder-only Spiking Transformer (WE-Spikingformer) for masked language modeling and WTA-based Decoder-only Spiking Transformer (WD-Spikingformer) for causal language modeling, systematically exploring softmax-free, spiking-driven Transformer architectures trained end-to-end for natural language processing tasks. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets spanning natural language understanding, question-answering tasks, and commonsense reasoning tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the promise of spiking transformers for general language modeling and energy-efficient artificial intelligence.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

SMC-AI: Scaling Monte Carlo Simulation to Four Trillion Atoms with AI Accelerators

The rapid advancement of deep learning is reshaping the hardware design landscape toward AI tasks, posing fundamental challenges for HPC workloads such as atomistic simulation. Here we present SMC-AI, a general algorithmic framework that extends the SMC-X method for efficient canonical Monte Carlo simulation on AI accelerators, including GPUs and NPUs, while maintaining extreme scalability. The implementation of SMC-AI on an NPU cluster reaches unprecedented performance, achieving MC simulation of 4 trillion atoms on 4096 NPU dies. This represents the largest ML-accelerated atomistic simulation reported, delivering 32X system size and 1.3X throughput than previous records, with a relatively small computational budget. Excellent strong and weak scaling efficiency are reached for both the NPU and GPU implementation. By decoupling ML models from simulation, SMC-AI creates an abstraction that facilitates integration and porting of diverse ML models, laying a foundation for the future development of scalable scientific software.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2026

Retina gap junctions support the robust perception by warping neural representational geometries along the visual hierarchy

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to elaborately designed adversarial noise, although they have achieved extraordinary success in many tasks. Compared with DNNs, the human visual system is highly robust. However, it is unclear how the human visual system defends against adversarial attacks, especially the role of the early visual system and its influence on the brain manifold. Due to retina gap junctions being crucial for the denoising function in the early visual system, we combine a retina gap junction-based filter, G-filter, with DNN as an abstract human visual system model called the biological hybrid model. We adopt this model to study the defense performance of retina gap junctions and their impact on the brain manifold. Compared with other defense methods, the biological hybrid model is more robust and can be further improved by introducing noise during training. Next, we analyze the manifold and its decision boundary of the biological hybrid model from a geometry perspective. The results show that the biological hybrid model has a unique 2D decision boundary with high nonlinearity and a lower curvature of the decision boundary of the manifold compared to other defense methods. The transforming manifold may account for the high robustness of the biological hybrid model. Finally, to dissect G-filter and clarify its internal mechanism, we borrow the Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) concept and rewrite G-filter into an equivalent recurrent neural network. The results show that the decision boundary of the model's manifold will gradually change with time and eventually reach a steady state, which is modulated by gap junction conductance, revealing the influence of retina gap junctions on the brain manifold is a gradually evolving process.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

EPRBench: A High-Quality Benchmark Dataset for Event Stream Based Visual Place Recognition

Event stream-based Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is an emerging research direction that offers a compelling solution to the instability of conventional visible-light cameras under challenging conditions such as low illumination, overexposure, and high-speed motion. Recognizing the current scarcity of dedicated datasets in this domain, we introduce EPRBench, a high-quality benchmark specifically designed for event stream-based VPR. EPRBench comprises 10K event sequences and 65K event frames, collected using both handheld and vehicle-mounted setups to comprehensively capture real-world challenges across diverse viewpoints, weather conditions, and lighting scenarios. To support semantic-aware and language-integrated VPR research, we provide LLM-generated scene descriptions, subsequently refined through human annotation, establishing a solid foundation for integrating LLMs into event-based perception pipelines. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we implement and benchmark 15 state-of-the-art VPR algorithms on EPRBench, offering a strong baseline for future algorithmic comparisons. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion paradigm for VPR: leveraging LLMs to generate textual scene descriptions from raw event streams, which then guide spatially attentive token selection, cross-modal feature fusion, and multi-scale representation learning. This framework not only achieves highly accurate place recognition but also produces interpretable reasoning processes alongside its predictions, significantly enhancing model transparency and explainability. The dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Neuromorphic_ReID

cs.CV↗