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Yuguang Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Yuguang Fang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Learning from Distributed Eyes: Leveraging Collaborative Perception for Automated Model Adaptation

In autonomous driving, perception models often struggle to generalize to new environments due to domain shifts. While unsupervised model adaptation offers a feasible solution without labor-intensive manual labeling, existing methods that rely solely on the ego-vehicle's data often lead to inferior pseudo-labeling performance. To address this critical issue, we propose LDE, Learning from Distributed ``Eyes", a novel framework that transforms collaborative perception (CP) into a source of high-quality supervision for model adaptation. This pseudo-labeling approach is hyperparameter-insensitive and relatively reliable, assuming CP often outperforms single-agent's perception. However, naively implementing this approach encounters (1) the communication bottleneck of sharing rich features under time and bandwidth constraints, (2) the view discrepancy between the CP view and the learner's Field of View (FoV), and (3) the unreliability even in CP-generated labels. To address these issues, we design an adaptation-oriented feature sharing mechanism that selectively transmits the most critical information for adaptation, an FoV filtering method that meticulously eliminates mismatched labels, and a curriculum learning strategy to progressively exploit pseudo labels. Extensive experiments on 3D object detection tasks demonstrate that LDE consistently outperforms both the pre-trained models and state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Multi-Agent Embodied Autonomous Driving (MAEAD): From V2X Information Exchange to Shared World Models

Autonomous driving is shifting from isolated vehicle intelligence toward multi-agent embodied systems that share perception, infer intent, and coordinate action under uncertainty. This survey examines this transition through the lens of Shared World Models (SWMs): predictive cross-agent representations maintained across vehicles, infrastructure, and other traffic participants. We review approximately 400 publications covering vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, collaborative perception, inter-agent cognition, cooperative planning, end-to-end cooperative driving, and simulation and data engines for closed-loop validation. The organizing question is how exchanged observations become aligned state, intent-aware interaction, and coordinated downstream action. Across the surveyed literature, evaluation remains concentrated in simulation, curated benchmarks, and offline protocols. Foundation-model-based coordination also lacks verifiable real-time safety guarantees in open traffic. These gaps motivate key research priorities for multi-agent embodied autonomous driving (MAEAD): verifiable shared-state maintenance, robust intent and plan alignment, and safe coordinated action under communication and computing constraints in real-world deployment. We maintain an open-source project to continuously track the latest developments at https://github.com/dl-m9/Multi-Agent-Embodied-Autonomous-Driving.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Bringing Environmental Enhancement Back to Its Physical Essence via Specular Reflecting Surfaces

Intelligent control of wireless propagation environments is crucial for future network capacity and reliability. Unlike circuit-controlled reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), mechanically actuated specular reflecting surfaces (SRS) offer a simpler and potentially more cost-effective alternative. In this paper, based on the tractable ray-based cascaded channel model with power-projection correction, we investigate the fundamental operational behaviors of an ideal SRS in free space. Specifically, in the angle-aligned near field, edge reflections cause non-constructive combining, resulting in a damped oscillatory convergence of the gain to an aperture-independent constant. We further obtain the far-field behavior, unbounded-aperture asymptotics, an optimal aperture size and reflection angle, and a gain-based near/far-field boundary. For misalignment, we provide accurate approximations for small and large apertures via center-point and stationary-point analyses. We also define the SRS beam pattern, derive analytical 3-dB beamwidths, and quantify the effective region where a main lobe exists. Finally, we derive a closed-form achievable-rate for an SRS-aided communication system. Numerical results validate the proposed expressions, reveal distinct near-/far-field behaviors of specular reflection, and show that SRS can outperform RIS in the far field due to continuous aperture and angular-resolution control and stronger power projection.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

V2VCrafter: Consistent Street-View Image Generation Across Vehicles

Connected and autonomous driving (CAD) systems leverage vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication for multi-agent collaborative perception, yet remain constrained by scarce annotated real-world V2V datasets and limited generalization across diverse driving conditions. While image generation offers a feasible solution for data augmentation, existing single-vehicle multi-view generation frameworks face two key challenges in multi-agent settings: (1) the expanded learning objective degrades generation quality, and (2) dynamic inter-agent variation hinders consistency modeling for physical attributes (e.g., color, category) of jointly observed objects. To bridge this gap, we propose V2VCrafter, the first framework for generating controllable and realistic multi-view driving images across vehicles. For effective learning, we develop a progressive multi-agent diffusion model based on a single-agent backbone, using neighboring agents' latent states to progressively guide single-to-multi-agent generation. To address cross-vehicle inconsistency, we further propose a cross-agent attention module that leverages a collaboration view graph and learnable jointly observed object representations to model dynamic cross-vehicle camera view relationships. Experiments on real-world V2X-Real dataset show that V2VCrafter generates high-fidelity, controllable, and consistent street views across vehicles, thereby effectively enhancing downstream collaborative 3D object detection tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

NWaaS: A Non-Intrusive and Privacy-Preserving Watermarking-as-a-Service System with Adaptive Resource Scheduling

Securing intellectual property (IP) in Machine Learning as a Service is critical yet challenging. While deep neural network watermarking serves as a standard defense against model extraction, existing Watermarking-as-a-Service paradigms face a triple challenge of intrusiveness, privacy risks, and inefficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Non-intrusive Watermarking as a Service (NWaaS), a holistic framework enabling trustworthy and efficient IP protection. We first introduce $\mathtt{ShadowMark}$, a novel watermarking algorithm that establishes a side-channel for ownership verification without modifying the model. It ensures zero performance degradation and eliminates the need for parameter-heavy fine-tuning as well as access to original training data, thereby addressing the intrusiveness and inefficiency inherent in existing approaches. Leveraging this non-intrusive property, we design a collaborative partitioning mechanism that allows model owners to offload self-defined partial layers, enabling a flexible trade-off between IP privacy and service cost. Furthermore, to mitigate latency from collaborative computing under high concurrency and enhance system resource utilization, we propose proportion disparity joint scheduling, a payload-balancing resource scheduling algorithm tailored to the heterogeneous constraints of edge-cloud environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NWaaS provides robust ownership verification across diverse continuous X-to-Image modalities, while ensuring secure owner privacy protection and superior system performance.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Correlation-Aware and Gaussianity-Preserving Robust Latent Angular Watermarking for Diffusion Models

Latent domain watermarking for diffusion models embeds watermarks directly into the latent prior, enjoying non-intrusiveness to model parameters and seamless integration with the generation process. However, due to the violation of latent Gaussianity or sensitivity to normal and malicious perturbations during latent inversion, existing methods are prone to watermark detection or removal attacks. A further overlooked problem is the violation of the i.i.d. latent condition after watermarking, which leads to latent correlation degradation and generation fidelity loss. Although this has been externally measured by FID, the internal correlation structure has yet to be rigorously characterized. To address the above issues, and motivated by the rotation-invariant property of isotropic Gaussian, we propose \textit{Latent Angular Watermarking (LAW)}, which encodes watermark bits as antipodal angles ($\pmπ/2$ relative to a reference pair) between disjoint pairs of latent elements while preserving the Gaussianity. The antipodal ($π$-separation) encoding maximizes geometric separation between bit values, and we prove that the decoding angular-error variance is proportional to the norm of the latent pair, i.e., $\operatorname{var}(Δϕ) \propto 1/ρ^2$. We further propose a magnitude-driven variant, LAW-M, which anchors watermark bits in the most geometrically stable latent dimensions, yielding additional robustness gains. Theoretically, we provide a rigorous characterization of the induced correlation degradation, deriving in closed form the autocorrelation structure of the watermarked latent and proving that correlations are confined to a sparse, structured set of off-diagonal elements with fixed $\pmπ/4$ values.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Update the Unseen Only: Minimizing AoI for Collaborative Perception through Online Learning

While collaborative perception (CP) enhances the safety of autonomous driving, limited bandwidth can cause severe shared data staleness in CP systems. Existing age-of-information (AoI) minimization policies are not well-suited for CP, as they overlook the fact that a vehicle's AoI decreases not only through updates from the source (i.e., a base station) but also through the vehicle's local sensing. To address this issue, we propose a mobility-aware AoI minimization framework for CP that explicitly accounts for vehicles' dynamic sensing ranges. We first derive a closed-form expression for the long-term time average sum AoI within a considered region, accommodating an ever-changing vehicle population and their dynamic sensed areas. Based on this characterization, we develop Local-sensing-aware Max-Weight Scheduling (LocMW), an online learning algorithm designed for sensor information broadcast from a source to vehicles under unknown environmental statistics and delayed observations. We provide performance guarantees demonstrating that LocMW achieves a sublinear cumulative excess AoI compared to the optimal stationary randomized benchmark. Extensive simulations using vehicular trajectory datasets and 3D perception tasks demonstrate that our LocMW policy substantially outperforms competing baselines, reducing the time-averaged sum AoI by up to 31.6% and improving mAP detection accuracy by up to 16.3%.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

FRUC: Feedforward Dynamic Scene Reconstruction from Uncalibrated Collaborative Driving Views

We present FRUC, a feed-forward 3D Gaussian splatting framework for dynamic scene reconstruction from uncalibrated collaborative driving views. Existing multi-agent reconstruction frameworks are often hindered by rigid prerequisites, demanding precise spatial calibration and slow per-scene optimization. In this paper, we rethink this task by conceptualizing a distributed multi-vehicle network as a spatio-temporally unstructured ego-centric multi-camera system, where the core challenge lies in enhancing ego-centric occluded geometry through collaboration without degrading the ego's accurately observed visible geometry, while preserving reconstruction efficiency. For efficient reconstruction, FRUC is built upon a visual grounded geometric Transformer backbone to enable one-shot, calibration-free inference from a flexible number of multi-vehicle views. To achieve non-destructive geometric supplementation under uncalibrated cross-agent misalignment, FRUC first introduces an ego-centric causal occlusion field that explicitly derives occlusion evolution as latent priors by modeling agent-wise spatio-temporal correlations. Guided by these occlusion priors, it further formulates cross-agent integration as a deterministic residual denoising process via zero-initialized injection, turning challenging cross-agent fusion into bounded residual learning for robust collaborative blind-spot completion. Through extensive evaluations on the real-world V2XReal and UrbanIng-V2X datasets, FRUC is shown to be a new state-of-the-art for the scene reconstruction of dynamic collaborative driving environments, significantly outperforming existing methods in both rendering quality and efficiency.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CA3D: Computing Accessibility-Aware Cooperative 3D Deployment of Multiple UAVs

This letter investigates computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment of multiple UAVs for task completion enhancement, termed CA3D. We first provide a theoretical analysis showing that computing accessibility is the key mechanism linking UAV deployment to delay-constrained task completion, and that UAV inter-spacing creates a fundamental tradeoff between computing-resource accessibility and task completion. We then develop a cooperative 3D deployment design that jointly balances accessible computing capacity, task completion probability, and redundant UAV overlap. Simulation results under heterogeneous computing node capacities show that CA3D consistently outperforms Random, Fixed, and Greedy deployment baselines under both hotspot and random ground user (GU) distributions. Under the hotspot GU distribution, CA3D achieves nearly full task completion, improving the task completion probability by about 3.3x over Random deployment when the number of UAVs is 8. Under a more challenging random GU distribution, CA3D still achieves about 35% higher task completion probability than the best baseline when the number of UAVs is 12. These results demonstrate that computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment improves not only task completion but also robustness to GU distribution changes.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Collaborative Air-Ground Sensing, Communication, Computing, Storage, and Intelligence for Low-Altitude Economy

Low-altitude economy (LAE) is transforming low-altitude airspace into a new cyber-physical infrastructure. Although air-ground communications have been widely studied, LAE is fundamentally different in the sense that it is mission-centric with diverse requirements, such as stringent safety and compliance constraints not be effectively addressed with a communication-centric design alone, which makes air-ground collaboration indispensable: Only through effectively coordinating air-ground infrastructure and resources can LAE missions be fulfilled. Consequently, LAE calls for task-driven, closed-loop, multi-resource orchestration of Sensing, Communication, Computing, Storage, and Intelligence (SCCSI), where key decisions must be co-designed under mobility and uncertainty. In this paper, we first present a novel framework that connects (i) LAE scenarios and a requirement--resource coupling matrix, (ii) an air--ground collaborative architecture, and (iii) methodological toolboxes for SCCSI co-optimization and online decision-making. We then systematically review enabling technologies for collaborative SCCSI resources and capabilities, emphasizing their coupling and end-to-end tradeoffs. Finally, we summarize testbeds, datasets, and evaluation metrics, and provide representative use cases to illustrate how the proposed framework translates application requirements into practical task-driven optimization designs, together with open challenges and a roadmap toward scalable and trustworthy LAE deployment.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Agent-Centric Observation Adaptation for Robust Visual Control under Dynamic Perturbations

Real-world visual systems face time-varying perturbations, including weather, sensor noise, compression artifacts, and background distractions. Existing image restoration methods are typically designed for fixed corruption types and optimized for pixel-level fidelity, leaving open two questions: how restoration behaves under non-stationary corruption switching, and whether pixel-level fidelity preserves the task-relevant information needed by downstream models. To study this setting, we introduce the Visual Degraded Control Suite (VDCS), a benchmark that injects Markov-switching physical degradations into rendered scenes. We further identify a fundamental failure mode of reconstruction-based representations: faithfully reconstructing corrupted observations forces the latent state to encode corruption-specific nuisance information, thereby contaminating downstream models. From an information-bottleneck perspective, anchoring the representation to the clean foreground eliminates this contamination. Motivated by this analysis, we propose \emph{Agent-Centric Observations with Mixture-of-Experts} (ACO-MoE), a frozen, plug-and-play observation adapter that combines a routed bank of restoration experts with a foreground-mask branch. ACO-MoE is pretrained entirely offline on synthetic rendered data with automatically generated degradation pairs and simulation-derived foreground masks, requiring no manual annotation. At inference time, it takes only corrupted RGB as input without corruption labels, clean reference frames, or foreground masks. Across VDCS, DMC-GB, and RoboSuite, ACO-MoE consistently improves downstream control with both model-free and model-based backbones, recovering 95.3\% of clean-input performance under challenging Markov-switching corruptions. It also generalizes zero-shot to unseen visual perturbations excluded from adapter pretraining.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Inference-Time Budget Control for LLM Search Agents

LLM search agents increasingly rely on tools at inference time, but their trajectories are often constrained by hard limits on both tool calls and generated tokens. Under such dual budgets, better answers require not only stronger models, but also explicit control over which search action should receive the next budget unit and when the accumulated evidence is sufficient to commit a final answer. We study this problem in multi-hop question answering (QA) and formulate it as two-stage inference-time budget control. At search time, our controller assigns each feasible action a task-level Value-of-Information (VOI) score, defined as an operational estimate of marginal task value per unit budget under the current search state and remaining dual budget, and uses this score to choose among retrieval, decomposition, and answer commitment. After search, a selective evidence-grounded finalizer compares the trajectory answer with a refined candidate and rewrites only when the residual error appears to be a low-risk answer-form error. Across four multi-hop QA benchmarks, three LLM backbones, and four budget levels, the method yields positive aggregate gains over four audited baselines under the same hard dual-budget protocol. Ablations show that search-time budget control, especially budget-dependent penalty, provides the main performance gain, while answer-time control helps mainly when the retrieval path is already adequate. These results suggest that inference-time budget control for LLM search agents should govern both how budget is spent during search and how the final answer is committed.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CXR-ContraBench: Benchmarking Negated-Option Attraction in Medical VLMs

When a chest X-ray shows consolidation but the question asks which finding is present, a medical vision-language model may answer "No consolidation." This is more than an incorrect choice: it is a polarity reversal that emits a clinical statement contradicting the image. We study this failure as negated-option attraction, where a model is drawn to a negated answer option even when it conflicts with both the visual evidence and the question. We introduce CXR-ContraBench (Chest X-Ray Contradiction Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark spanning internal ReXVQA slices and external OpenI and CheXpert protocols. The benchmark centers on present-finding questions, where selecting "No X" despite visible X creates the main clinical risk, and uses absent-finding questions as secondary tests of whether models copy negated wording. Across CheXpert protocols, the failure is substantial and persistent. On a strict direct presence probe, MedGemma and Qwen2.5-VL reach only 31.49% and 30.21% accuracy, respectively; on a matched 135,754-record CheXpert training-split protocol, both models select negated options on over 62% of presence questions. Chain-of-thought prompting reduces some presence-side reversals but does not eliminate them and can amplify absence-side contradictions. Finally, QCCV-Neg (Question-Conditioned Consistency Verifier for Negation) deterministically repairs the measured polarity-confused subset without retraining, raising MedGemma and Qwen2.5-VL to 96.60% and 95.32% accuracy on the direct presence probe. These results show that standard accuracy can hide a clinically meaningful inference-time polarity failure. Source code and benchmark construction scripts are available at https://github.com/fangzr/cxr-contrabench-code.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Self-Induced Outcome Potential: Turn-Level Credit Assignment for Agents without Verifiers

Long-horizon LLM agents depend on intermediate information-gathering turns, yet training feedback is usually observed only at the final answer, because process-level rewards require high-quality human annotation. Existing turn-level shaping methods reward turns that increase the likelihood of a gold answer, but they require answer supervision or stable task-specific verifiers. Conversely, label-free RL methods extract self-signals from output distributions, but mainly at the answer or trajectory level and therefore cannot assign credit to intermediate turns. We propose Self-Induced Outcome Potential (SIOP), which treats semantic clusters of final answers as latent future outcome states for potential-based turn-level credit assignment. For each query, SIOP samples multiple rollouts, clusters final answers into semantic outcome modes, and builds a reliability-aware target distribution over these states. It then rewards turns for increasing posterior support for reliable future states using a tractable cluster-level approximation. The objective generalizes information-potential shaping from gold-answer supervision to settings without task-specific gold verifiers while avoiding the broadcasted rollout-level advantages used by standard GRPO. We formalize the framework, characterize its supervised gold-answer limit, and show that SIOP improves average performance over verifier-free outcome-level baselines on seven search-augmented agentic reasoning benchmarks while approaching a gold-supervised outcome baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/SIOP.git.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

GCP: Guarded Collaborative Perception with Spatial-Temporal Aware Malicious Agent Detection

Collaborative perception significantly enhances autonomous driving safety by extending each vehicle's perception range through message sharing among connected and autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately, it is also vulnerable to adversarial message attacks from malicious agents, resulting in severe performance degradation. While existing defenses employ hypothesis-and-verification frameworks to detect malicious agents based on single-shot outliers, they overlook temporal message correlations, which can be circumvented by subtle yet harmful perturbations in model input and output spaces. This paper reveals a novel blind area confusion (BAC) attack that compromises existing single-shot outlier-based detection methods. As a countermeasure, we propose GCP, a Guarded Collaborative Perception framework based on spatial-temporal aware malicious agent detection, which maintains single-shot spatial consistency through a confidence-scaled spatial concordance loss, while simultaneously examining temporal anomalies by reconstructing historical bird's eye view motion flows in low-confidence regions. We also employ a joint spatial-temporal Benjamini-Hochberg test to synthesize dual-domain anomaly results for reliable malicious agent detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate GCP's superior performance under diverse attack scenarios, achieving up to 34.69% improvements in AP@0.5 compared to the state-of-the-art CP defense strategies under BAC attacks, while maintaining consistent 5-8% improvements under other typical attacks. Code will be released at https://github.com/yihangtao/GCP.git.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

TriDeliver: Cooperative Air-Ground Instant Delivery with UAVs, Couriers, and Crowdsourced Ground Vehicles

Instant delivery, shipping items before critical deadlines, is essential in daily life. While multiple delivery agents, such as couriers, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and crowdsourced agents, have been widely employed, each of them faces inherent limitations (e.g., low efficiency/labor shortages, flight control, and dynamic capabilities, respectively), preventing them from meeting the surging demands alone. This paper proposes TriDeliver, the first hierarchical cooperative framework, integrating human couriers, UAVs, and crowdsourced ground vehicles (GVs) for efficient instant delivery. To obtain the initial scheduling knowledge for GVs and UAVs as well as improve the cooperative delivery performance, we design a Transfer Learning (TL)-based algorithm to extract delivery knowledge from couriers' behavioral history and transfer their knowledge to UAVs and GVs with fine-tunings, which is then used to dispatch parcels for efficient delivery. Evaluated on one-month real-world trajectory and delivery datasets, it has been demonstrated that 1) by integrating couriers, UAVs, and crowdsourced GVs, TriDeliver reduces the delivery cost by $65.8\%$ versus state-of-the-art cooperative delivery by UAVs and couriers; 2) TriDeliver achieves further improvements in terms of delivery time ($-17.7\%$), delivery cost ($-9.8\%$), and impacts on original tasks of crowdsourced GVs ($-43.6\%$), even with the representation of the transferred knowledge by simple neural networks, respectively.

cs.RO↗