arXiv subjects

Yue Bai

Publications and source records attributed to Yue Bai.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Energetics of frontogenesis in simple balanced models

Submesoscale fronts have been proposed to act as conduits funneling kinetic energy from geostrophically constrained mesoscale eddies down to small scales, where the energy can be dissipated. Realistic primitive-equation simulations suggest that the downscale energy transfer at submesoscales is strongly concentrated in sharpening fronts, with convergence on the cyclonic side playing a dominant role. This study explores how much of this phenomenology can be captured by simple quasi-geostrophic (QG) and semi-geostrophic (SG) theories of frontogenesis. An analysis of the kinetic energy budget of classical strain-induced frontogenesis shows that there is downscale transfer in both QG and SG fronts. In QG frontogenesis, the narrowing jet along the sharpening front is powered by buoyancy production, but geostrophic downscale transfer due to the strain field plays an important role. In SG frontogenesis, where frontal sharpening is accelerated by the ageostrophic cross-frontal circulation, ageostrophic advection enhances this downscale transfer on the cyclonic side of the front, where the surface flow is convergent. On the anticyclonic side, where the ageostrophic circulation is divergent, the ageostrophic scale transfer of kinetic energy is upscale and partially offsets the geostrophic downscale transfer. While matching patterns in realistic primitive-equation simulations, the ageostrophic scale transfers remain important but not dominant in the adiabatic and frictionless theory considered here. This suggests that processes absent from these theories may play an important role. For example, mixed-layer turbulence may enhance the ageostrophic circulation and the associated dipole of scale transfers. The advection of ageostrophic momentum may also be important in some circumstances.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

Physically Inspired Gaussian Splatting for HDR Novel View Synthesis

High dynamic range novel view synthesis (HDR-NVS) reconstructs scenes with dynamic details by fusing multi-exposure low dynamic range (LDR) views, yet it struggles to capture ambient illumination-dependent appearance. Implicitly supervising HDR content by constraining tone-mapped results fails in correcting abnormal HDR values, and results in limited gradients for Gaussians in under/over-exposed regions. To this end, we introduce PhysHDR-GS, a physically inspired HDR-NVS framework that models scene appearance via intrinsic reflectance and adjustable ambient illumination. PhysHDR-GS employs a complementary image-exposure (IE) branch and Gaussian-illumination (GI) branch to faithfully reproduce standard camera observations and capture illumination-dependent appearance changes, respectively. During training, the proposed cross-branch HDR consistency loss provides explicit supervision for HDR content, while an illumination-guided gradient scaling strategy mitigates exposure-biased gradient starvation and reduces under-densified representations. Experimental results across realistic and synthetic datasets demonstrate our superiority in reconstructing HDR details (e.g., a PSNR gain of 2.04 dB over HDR-GS), while maintaining real-time rendering speed (up to 76 FPS). Code and models are available at https://huimin-zeng.github.io/PhysHDR-GS/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

The Rise of Large Language Models and the Direction and Impact of US Federal Research Funding

Federal research funding shapes the direction, diversity, and impact of the US scientific enterprise. Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly diffusing into scientific practice, holding substantial promise while raising widespread concerns. Despite growing attention to AI use in scientific writing and evaluation, little is known about how the rise of LLMs is reshaping the public funding landscape. Here, we examine LLM involvement at key stages of the federal funding pipeline by combining two complementary data sources: confidential National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposal submissions from two large US R1 universities, including funded, unfunded, and pending proposals, and the full population of publicly released NSF and NIH awards. We find that LLM use rises sharply beginning in 2023 and exhibits a bimodal distribution, indicating a clear split between minimal and substantive use. Across both private submissions and public awards, higher LLM involvement is consistently associated with lower semantic distinctiveness, positioning projects closer to recently funded work within the same agency. The consequences of this shift are agency-dependent. LLM use is positively associated with proposal success and higher early-stage publication output at NIH, whereas no comparable associations are observed at NSF. Notably, the productivity gains at NIH are concentrated in non-hit papers rather than the most highly cited work. Together, these findings provide large-scale evidence that the rise of LLMs is reshaping how scientific ideas are positioned, selected, and translated into publicly funded research, with implications for portfolio governance, research diversity, and the long-run impact of science.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Rethinking Fine-Tuning: Unlocking Hidden Capabilities in Vision-Language Models

Explorations in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), have made impressive progress. However, most approaches rely on explicit weight updates, overlooking the extensive representational structures already encoded in pre-trained models that remain underutilized. Recent works have demonstrated that Mask Fine-Tuning (MFT) can be a powerful and efficient post-training paradigm for language models. Instead of updating weights, MFT assigns learnable gating scores to each weight, allowing the model to reorganize its internal subnetworks for downstream task adaptation. In this paper, we rethink fine-tuning for VLMs from a structural reparameterization perspective grounded in MFT. We apply MFT to the language and projector components of VLMs with different language backbones and compare against strong PEFT baselines. Experiments show that MFT consistently surpasses LoRA variants and even full fine-tuning, achieving high performance without altering the frozen backbone. Our findings reveal that effective adaptation can emerge not only from updating weights but also from reestablishing connections among the model's existing knowledge. Code available at: https://github.com/Ming-K9/MFT-VLM

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

FALCON: Actively Decoupled Visuomotor Policies for Loco-Manipulation with Foundation-Model-Based Coordination

We present FoundAtion-model-guided decoupled LoCO-maNipulation visuomotor policies (FALCON), a framework for loco-manipulation that combines modular diffusion policies with a vision-language foundation model as the coordinator. Our approach explicitly decouples locomotion and manipulation into two specialized visuomotor policies, allowing each subsystem to rely on its own observations. This mitigates the performance degradation that arise when a single policy is forced to fuse heterogeneous, potentially mismatched observations from locomotion and manipulation. Our key innovation lies in restoring coordination between these two independent policies through a vision-language foundation model, which encodes global observations and language instructions into a shared latent embedding conditioning both diffusion policies. On top of this backbone, we introduce a phase-progress head that uses textual descriptions of task stages to infer discrete phase and continuous progress estimates without manual phase labels. To further structure the latent space, we incorporate a coordination-aware contrastive loss that explicitly encodes cross-subsystem compatibility between arm and base actions. We evaluate FALCON on two challenging loco-manipulation tasks requiring navigation, precise end-effector placement, and tight base-arm coordination. Results show that it surpasses centralized and decentralized baselines while exhibiting improved robustness and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Automating Complex Document Workflows via Stepwise and Rollback-Enabled Operation Orchestration

Workflow automation promises substantial productivity gains in everyday document-related tasks. While prior agentic systems can execute isolated instructions, they struggle with automating multi-step, session-level workflows due to limited control over the operational process. To this end, we introduce AutoDW, a novel execution framework that enables stepwise, rollback-enabled operation orchestration. AutoDW incrementally plans API actions conditioned on user instructions, intent-filtered API candidates, and the evolving states of the document. It further employs robust rollback mechanisms at both the argument and API levels, enabling dynamic correction and fault tolerance. These designs together ensure that the execution trajectory of AutoDW remains aligned with user intent and document context across long-horizon workflows. To assess its effectiveness, we construct a comprehensive benchmark of 250 sessions and 1,708 human-annotated instructions, reflecting realistic document processing scenarios with interdependent instructions. AutoDW achieves 90% and 62% completion rates on instruction- and session-level tasks, respectively, outperforming strong baselines by 40% and 76%. Moreover, AutoDW also remains robust for the decision of backbone LLMs and on tasks with varying difficulty. Code and data will be open-sourced. Code: https://github.com/YJett/AutoDW

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Arbitrary-Scale 3D Gaussian Super-Resolution

Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) super-resolution methods typically perform high-resolution (HR) rendering of fixed scale factors, making them impractical for resource-limited scenarios. Directly rendering arbitrary-scale HR views with vanilla 3DGS introduces aliasing artifacts due to the lack of scale-aware rendering ability, while adding a post-processing upsampler for 3DGS complicates the framework and reduces rendering efficiency. To tackle these issues, we build an integrated framework that incorporates scale-aware rendering, generative prior-guided optimization, and progressive super-resolving to enable 3D Gaussian super-resolution of arbitrary scale factors with a single 3D model. Notably, our approach supports both integer and non-integer scale rendering to provide more flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in rendering high-quality arbitrary-scale HR views (6.59 dB PSNR gain over 3DGS) with a single model. It preserves structural consistency with LR views and across different scales, while maintaining real-time rendering speed (85 FPS at 1080p).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Cautious Next Token Prediction

Next token prediction paradigm has been prevailing for autoregressive models in the era of LLMs. The current default sampling choice for popular LLMs is temperature scaling together with nucleus sampling to balance diversity and coherence. Nevertheless, such approach leads to inferior performance in various NLP tasks when the model is not certain about testing questions. To this end, we propose a brand new training-free decoding strategy, dubbed as Cautious Next Token Prediction (CNTP). In the decoding process, if the model has comparatively high prediction entropy at a certain step, we sample multiple trials starting from the step independently and stop when encountering any punctuation. Then we select the trial with the lowest perplexity score viewed as the most probable and reliable trial path given the model's capacity. The trial number is negatively correlated with the prediction confidence, i.e., the less confident the model is, the more trials it should sample. This is consistent with human beings' behaviour: when feeling uncertain or unconfident, one tends to think more creatively, exploring multiple thinking paths, to cautiously select the path one feels most confident about. Extensive experiments on both LLMs and MLLMs show that our proposed CNTP approach outperforms existing standard decoding strategies consistently by a clear margin. Moreover, the integration of CNTP with self consistency can further improve over vanilla self consistency. We believe our proposed CNTP has the potential to become one of the default choices for LLM decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/CNTP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Boosting Large Language Models with Mask Fine-Tuning

The large language model (LLM) is typically integrated into the mainstream optimization protocol. No work has questioned whether maintaining the model integrity is \textit{indispensable} for promising performance. In this work, we introduce Mask Fine-Tuning (MFT), a novel LLM fine-tuning paradigm demonstrating that carefully breaking the model's structural integrity can surprisingly improve performance without updating model weights. MFT learns and applies binary masks to well-optimized models, using the standard LLM fine-tuning objective as supervision. Based on fully fine-tuned models, MFT uses the same fine-tuning datasets to achieve consistent performance gains across domains and backbones (e.g., an average gain of \textbf{2.70 / 4.15} in IFEval with LLaMA2-7B / 3.1-8B). Detailed ablation studies and analyses examine the proposed MFT from different perspectives, such as sparse ratio and loss surface. Additionally, by deploying it on well-trained models, MFT is compatible with collaborating with other LLM optimization procedures to enhance the general model. Furthermore, this study extends the functionality of the masking operation beyond its conventional network-pruning context for model compression to a broader model capability scope.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Accessing Vision Foundation Models via ImageNet-1K

Vision foundation models are renowned for the generalization ability due to massive training data. Nevertheless, they demand tremendous training resources, and the training data is often inaccessible, e.g., CLIP, DINOv2, posing great challenges to developing derivatives that could facilitate the research. In this work, we offer a very simple and general solution, named \textit{Proteus}, to distill foundation models into smaller equivalents on ImageNet-1K without access to the original training data. Specifically, we remove the designs from conventional knowledge distillation settings that result in dataset bias and present three levels of training objectives, i.e., token, patch, and feature, to maximize the efficacy of knowledge transfer. In this manner, Proteus is trained at ImageNet-level costs with surprising ability, facilitating the accessibility of training foundation models for the broader research community. When leveraging DINOv2-g/14 as the teacher, Proteus-L/14 matches the performance of the Oracle method DINOv2-L/14 (142M training data) across 19 benchmarks and outperforms other vision foundation models including CLIP-L/14 (400M), OpenCLIP-L/14 (400M/2B) and SynCLR-L/14 (600M) with a significantly smaller training set of 1.2M images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SoupLM: Model Integration in Large Language and Multi-Modal Models

Training large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs necessitates significant computing resources, and existing publicly available LLMs are typically pre-trained on diverse, privately curated datasets spanning various tasks. For instance, LLaMA, Vicuna, and LLaVA are three LLM variants trained with LLaMA base models using very different training recipes, tasks, and data modalities. The training cost and complexity for such LLM variants grow rapidly. In this study, we propose to use a soup strategy to assemble these LLM variants into a single well-generalized multimodal LLM (SoupLM) in a cost-efficient manner. Assembling these LLM variants efficiently brings knowledge and specialities trained from different domains and data modalities into an integrated one (e.g., chatbot speciality from user-shared conversations for Vicuna, and visual capacity from vision-language data for LLaVA), therefore, to avoid computing costs of repetitive training on several different domains. We propose series of soup strategies to systematically benchmark performance gains across various configurations, and probe the soup behavior across base models in the interpolation space.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Rewrite the Stars

Recent studies have drawn attention to the untapped potential of the "star operation" (element-wise multiplication) in network design. While intuitive explanations abound, the foundational rationale behind its application remains largely unexplored. Our study attempts to reveal the star operation's ability to map inputs into high-dimensional, non-linear feature spaces -- akin to kernel tricks -- without widening the network. We further introduce StarNet, a simple yet powerful prototype, demonstrating impressive performance and low latency under compact network structure and efficient budget. Like stars in the sky, the star operation appears unremarkable but holds a vast universe of potential. Our work encourages further exploration across tasks, with codes available at https://github.com/ma-xu/Rewrite-the-Stars.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Don't Judge by the Look: Towards Motion Coherent Video Representation

Current training pipelines in object recognition neglect Hue Jittering when doing data augmentation as it not only brings appearance changes that are detrimental to classification, but also the implementation is inefficient in practice. In this study, we investigate the effect of hue variance in the context of video understanding and find this variance to be beneficial since static appearances are less important in videos that contain motion information. Based on this observation, we propose a data augmentation method for video understanding, named Motion Coherent Augmentation (MCA), that introduces appearance variation in videos and implicitly encourages the model to prioritize motion patterns, rather than static appearances. Concretely, we propose an operation SwapMix to efficiently modify the appearance of video samples, and introduce Variation Alignment (VA) to resolve the distribution shift caused by SwapMix, enforcing the model to learn appearance invariant representations. Comprehensive empirical evaluation across various architectures and different datasets solidly validates the effectiveness and generalization ability of MCA, and the application of VA in other augmentation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/BeSpontaneous/MCA-pytorch.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Latent Graph Inference with Limited Supervision

Latent graph inference (LGI) aims to jointly learn the underlying graph structure and node representations from data features. However, existing LGI methods commonly suffer from the issue of supervision starvation, where massive edge weights are learned without semantic supervision and do not contribute to the training loss. Consequently, these supervision-starved weights, which may determine the predictions of testing samples, cannot be semantically optimal, resulting in poor generalization. In this paper, we observe that this issue is actually caused by the graph sparsification operation, which severely destroys the important connections established between pivotal nodes and labeled ones. To address this, we propose to restore the corrupted affinities and replenish the missed supervision for better LGI. The key challenge then lies in identifying the critical nodes and recovering the corrupted affinities. We begin by defining the pivotal nodes as $k$-hop starved nodes, which can be identified based on a given adjacency matrix. Considering the high computational burden, we further present a more efficient alternative inspired by CUR matrix decomposition. Subsequently, we eliminate the starved nodes by reconstructing the destroyed connections. Extensive experiments on representative benchmarks demonstrate that reducing the starved nodes consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art LGI methods, especially under extremely limited supervision (6.12% improvement on Pubmed with a labeling rate of only 0.3%).

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Frame Flexible Network

Existing video recognition algorithms always conduct different training pipelines for inputs with different frame numbers, which requires repetitive training operations and multiplying storage costs. If we evaluate the model using other frames which are not used in training, we observe the performance will drop significantly (see Fig.1), which is summarized as Temporal Frequency Deviation phenomenon. To fix this issue, we propose a general framework, named Frame Flexible Network (FFN), which not only enables the model to be evaluated at different frames to adjust its computation, but also reduces the memory costs of storing multiple models significantly. Concretely, FFN integrates several sets of training sequences, involves Multi-Frequency Alignment (MFAL) to learn temporal frequency invariant representations, and leverages Multi-Frequency Adaptation (MFAD) to further strengthen the representation abilities. Comprehensive empirical validations using various architectures and popular benchmarks solidly demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of FFN (e.g., 7.08/5.15/2.17% performance gain at Frame 4/8/16 on Something-Something V1 dataset over Uniformer). Code is available at https://github.com/BeSpontaneous/FFN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Why is the State of Neural Network Pruning so Confusing? On the Fairness, Comparison Setup, and Trainability in Network Pruning

The state of neural network pruning has been noticed to be unclear and even confusing for a while, largely due to "a lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics" [3]. To standardize benchmarks, first, we need to answer: what kind of comparison setup is considered fair? This basic yet crucial question has barely been clarified in the community, unfortunately. Meanwhile, we observe several papers have used (severely) sub-optimal hyper-parameters in pruning experiments, while the reason behind them is also elusive. These sub-optimal hyper-parameters further exacerbate the distorted benchmarks, rendering the state of neural network pruning even more obscure. Two mysteries in pruning represent such a confusing status: the performance-boosting effect of a larger finetuning learning rate, and the no-value argument of inheriting pretrained weights in filter pruning. In this work, we attempt to explain the confusing state of network pruning by demystifying the two mysteries. Specifically, (1) we first clarify the fairness principle in pruning experiments and summarize the widely-used comparison setups; (2) then we unveil the two pruning mysteries and point out the central role of network trainability, which has not been well recognized so far; (3) finally, we conclude the paper and give some concrete suggestions regarding how to calibrate the pruning benchmarks in the future. Code: https://github.com/mingsun-tse/why-the-state-of-pruning-so-confusing.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Making Reconstruction-based Method Great Again for Video Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in videos is a significant yet challenging problem. Previous approaches based on deep neural networks employ either reconstruction-based or prediction-based approaches. Nevertheless, existing reconstruction-based methods 1) rely on old-fashioned convolutional autoencoders and are poor at modeling temporal dependency; 2) are prone to overfit the training samples, leading to indistinguishable reconstruction errors of normal and abnormal frames during the inference phase. To address such issues, firstly, we get inspiration from transformer and propose ${\textbf S}$patio-${\textbf T}$emporal ${\textbf A}$uto-${\textbf T}$rans-${\textbf E}$ncoder, dubbed as $\textbf{STATE}$, as a new autoencoder model for enhanced consecutive frame reconstruction. Our STATE is equipped with a specifically designed learnable convolutional attention module for efficient temporal learning and reasoning. Secondly, we put forward a novel reconstruction-based input perturbation technique during testing to further differentiate anomalous frames. With the same perturbation magnitude, the testing reconstruction error of the normal frames lowers more than that of the abnormal frames, which contributes to mitigating the overfitting problem of reconstruction. Owing to the high relevance of the frame abnormality and the objects in the frame, we conduct object-level reconstruction using both the raw frame and the corresponding optical flow patches. Finally, the anomaly score is designed based on the combination of the raw and motion reconstruction errors using perturbed inputs. Extensive experiments on benchmark video anomaly detection datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous reconstruction-based methods by a notable margin, and achieves state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/MRMGA4VAD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Look More but Care Less in Video Recognition

Existing action recognition methods typically sample a few frames to represent each video to avoid the enormous computation, which often limits the recognition performance. To tackle this problem, we propose Ample and Focal Network (AFNet), which is composed of two branches to utilize more frames but with less computation. Specifically, the Ample Branch takes all input frames to obtain abundant information with condensed computation and provides the guidance for Focal Branch by the proposed Navigation Module; the Focal Branch squeezes the temporal size to only focus on the salient frames at each convolution block; in the end, the results of two branches are adaptively fused to prevent the loss of information. With this design, we can introduce more frames to the network but cost less computation. Besides, we demonstrate AFNet can utilize fewer frames while achieving higher accuracy as the dynamic selection in intermediate features enforces implicit temporal modeling. Further, we show that our method can be extended to reduce spatial redundancy with even less cost. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

cs.CV↗