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Yunke Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yunke Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

RA-SOD: Reliability-Aware RGB-T Salient Object Detection under Modality Degradation

RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) salient object detection leverages complementary cues from visible and thermal modalities to improve robustness in challenging environments. However, in real-world scenarios, the reliability of each modality is inherently unstable: RGB images degrade under low illumination, motion blur, and noise, while thermal imagery often suffers from contrast compression and sensor artifacts. Such degradation introduces unreliable perceptual evidence that can mislead cross-modal fusion and significantly deteriorate detection performance. To address this challenge, we propose RA-SOD, a reliability-aware RGB-T salient object detection framework that explicitly models modality reliability and integrates it into feature learning and cross-modal fusion. First, we introduce a reliability-conditioned representation that adaptively compensates degraded modality features while preserving structural cues. Second, an uncertainty-guided dual-stream refinement strategy progressively corrects cross-modal representations while suppressing unreliable evidence. Finally, we propose a pixel-wise modality competition mechanism that dynamically selects modality cues according to spatial reliability for fine-grained fusion. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks (VT821, VT1000, VT5000, and VT-IMAG) demonstrate that RA-SOD achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong robustness under severe modality degradation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zaoxienian/RA-SOD.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

OccamView: Object-Conditioned View Selection for Frame-Budgeted Active 3D Gaussian Reconstruction

Active 3D Gaussian reconstruction fundamentally relies on selecting informative next-best views under limited sensing budgets. Existing active 3DGS methods primarily plan viewpoints according to geometric information gain, treating object-induced hidden regions in the same manner as general unexplored space. Under tight frame budgets, such geometry-driven strategies may prioritize global scene coverage while leaving partially observed objects incompletely reconstructed. To address this limitation, we propose OccamView, an object-conditioned view-selection framework for frame-budgeted active 3D Gaussian reconstruction. Rather than predicting unseen object geometry or performing shape completion, OccamView maintains an online object memory from open-vocabulary detections grounded in measured RGB-D observations and represents unresolved local occupancy around detected objects as conservative hidden-region proxies. Candidate viewpoints are then evaluated using an occlusion-aware proxy-coverage score. Furthermore, we introduce a Geo-Floor mechanism that restricts object-conditioned re-ranking to geometrically competitive candidates, allowing object-conditioned cues to guide complementary observations while preserving the geometry-driven exploration behavior of the underlying planner. Experiments on Replica and Matterport3D under a unified frame-budgeted protocol show that OccamView consistently reduces Completion and improves Completion Ratio across five frame budgets, with particularly pronounced gains under limited frame budgets. These results demonstrate that lightweight object-conditioned cues effectively complement geometry-driven active view planning.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

StellaVLA: In-Context Structured Demonstration for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can follow instructions and manipulate objects, but their performance often collapses out of distribution (OOD), when the scene, viewpoint, or object differs from training. Adapting to each new situation typically requires collecting more data and fine-tuning. We present StellaVLA, a framework that instead adapts at test time by conditioning on a single retrieved demonstration. The key idea is to move beyond imitating what an expert did and instead convey why: an automated offline pipeline converts each raw trajectory into a structured demonstration, e.g., a task plan, sub-goal descriptions, and verbalized 3D motion, at zero human-annotation cost. Provided as in-context guidance, this structured demonstration lets the policy reason about the task rather than mimic a pixel trajectory, which also makes it transferable across embodiments (real-robot, human-hand, or XR demonstrations). A parallel dual-training design internalizes this reasoning during training through a joint action-and-language objective, while inference uses the action expert alone, preserving real-time, high-frequency control with no added latency. On the VLA-Arena leaderboard(Aug 1, 2026), StellaVLA ranks first with an overall score of 0.63, versus 0.44 and 0.22 for the strong prior models ($π_{0.5}$ and LingBot-VLA), and it further leads on LIBERO with 98.8% average success rate and LIBERO-Plus with 85.1% success rate. Our real-robot benchmark demonstrates that StellaVLA can use both human/robot demos and human-to-robot (XR) demos as in-context structured demonstration to help VLA model adapt to OOD tasks.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

LoSA: Near-Lossless Sparse Attention for Training-Free Video Diffusion Acceleration

Video diffusion transformers are costly to sample: every denoising step applies self-attention over a long 3D token sequence, a quadratic cost that dominates as resolution and duration grow. Sparse attention reduces this cost without retraining, but existing methods pursue aggressive sparsity, where further speedup costs disproportionately more attention fidelity. We target the opposite end of this trade-off: fix near-lossless fidelity by construction, and remove as much computation as this constraint permits. Two observations make this regime practical: roughly 40% of block interactions can be removed while retaining 99% of the attention mass, and the high-mass support remains stable across denoising steps. We propose LoSA, a training-free sparse-attention method that fixes a retained-mass threshold of 99% rather than a sparsity ratio: it measures exact block attention masses at one early dense step, keeps, for each head and query block, the smallest key/value block set meeting the threshold, and reuses the frozen block indices for all remaining steps. On Wan2.1-1.3B, LoSA alone gives a $1.36\times$ speedup with a 0.06-point VBench Overall drop. The benefit is largest under composition: combined with feature caching, LoSA reaches a $3.2\times$ speedup on HunyuanVideo at a 0.02-point drop, versus 0.32 points for the strongest sparse baseline at comparable speed. Across three video diffusion transformers and speedups up to $3.2\times$, LoSA consistently achieves the best training-free speed-quality trade-off.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

NashPG: A Policy Gradient Method with Iteratively Refined Regularization for Finding Nash Equilibria

Finding Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games remains a central challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Recent multi-round regularization methods offer a promising direction, yet existing approaches either require full enumeration of the game tree or rely on non-policy-gradient inner solvers that underperform in practice, leaving a scalable policy-gradient-based solution open. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-round regularization procedure and show that it guarantees strictly monotonic reduction in Bregman divergence to Nash equilibria and eventual convergence to one in two-player zero-sum extensive-form games. Guided by this framework, we develop a practical algorithm, Nash Policy Gradient (NashPG), which places the regularization directly in the policy optimization objective and is implemented using standard policy gradient methods. Empirically, NashPG achieves comparable or lower exploitability than prior model-free methods on classic benchmark games and scales to large domains such as Battleship and No-Limit Texas Hold'em, where it attains higher average payoff in head-to-head play.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Diversifying Personalized Research Ideation against AI-Induced Homogenization

AI-assisted research ideation has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerating scientific discovery, with systems now capable of generating research directions conditioned on papers, topics, or lightweight researcher contexts. Yet current systems largely optimize individual suggestions in isolation. This leaves two blind spots. First, coarse researcher representations may elicit mainstream directions that appear broadly feasible, but lack sufficient researcher-specific grounding. Second, independent recommendations can concentrate a community's portfolio around recurring high-probability themes. To address these blind spots, we propose DivAlign, a four-stage pipeline for alignment-preserving de-homogenization. DivAlign extracts fine-grained researcher profiles, generates profile-conditioned candidate directions, scores them along three alignment dimensions (Executability, Comprehensibility, and Growth Potential), and surfaces researcher-local directions while reducing redundancy across the community portfolio. On a benchmark we construct from 95 AI researchers across five subfields, DivAlign reduces community-level redundancy while preserving researcher-direction fit. Compared with coarse single-shot ideation, it lowers average pairwise similarity from 0.331 to 0.294 and nearest-neighbor similarity from 0.704 to 0.608. Compared with the independent top-choice variant, DivAlign reduces nearest-neighbor similarity from 0.663 to 0.608 while retaining 99.9% of the researcher-direction fit score. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Ruixxxx/DivAlign.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

HiCI: Hierarchical Construction-Integration for Long-Context Attention

Long-context language modeling is commonly framed as a scalability challenge of token-level attention, yet local-to-global information structuring remains largely implicit in existing approaches. Drawing on cognitive theories of discourse comprehension, we propose HiCI (Hierarchical Construction--Integration), a hierarchical attention module that constructs segment-level representations, integrates them into a shared global context, and broadcasts both to condition segment-level attention. We validate HiCI through parameter-efficient adaptation of LLaMA-2 with only <5.5% additional parameters, extending context from 4K to 100K tokens (7B) and 64K tokens (13B). Across language modeling, retrieval, and instruction-following benchmarks, HiCI yields consistent improvements over strong baselines, including matching proprietary models on topic retrieval and surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo-16K on code comprehension. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit hierarchical structuring as an inductive bias for long-context modeling.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

SmoothTurn: Learning to Turn Smoothly for Agile Navigation with Quadrupedal Robots

Quadrupedal robots show great potential for valuable real-world applications such as fire rescue and industrial inspection. Such applications often require urgency and the ability to navigate agilely, which in turn demands the capability to change directions smoothly while running in high speed. Existing approaches for agile navigation typically learn a single-goal reaching policy by encouraging the robot to stay at the target position after reaching there. As a result, when the policy is used to reach sequential goals that require changing directions, it cannot anticipate upcoming maneuvers or maintain momentum across the switch of goals, thereby preventing the robot from fully exploiting its agility potential. In this work, we formulate the task as sequential local navigation, extending the single-goal-conditioned local navigation formulation in prior work. We then introduce SmoothTurn, a learning-based control framework that learns to turn smoothly while running rapidly for agile sequential local navigation. The framework adopts a novel sequential goal-reaching reward, an expanded observation space with a lookahead window for future goals, and an automatic goal curriculum that progressively expands the difficulty of sampled goal sequences based on the goal-reaching performance. The trained policy can be directly deployed on real quadrupedal robots with onboard sensors and computation. Both simulation and real-world empirical results show that SmoothTurn learns an agile locomotion policy that performs smooth turning across goals, with emergent behaviors such as controlling momentum when switching goals, facing towards the future goal in advance, and planning efficient paths.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

BEAT: Rhythm-Elastic Alignment for Agentic Music-guided Movie Trailer Generation

Automatic movie trailer generation must select shots from a full-length film and synchronize them with background music. Existing methods either relegate music alignment to post-processing or enforce rigid one-to-one shot-music mappings, overlooking that professional editing rhythm is elastic: rapid cuts accompany high-energy passages while sustained shots span quieter bars. We introduce BEAT, a framework that addresses this gap with two core components: MuVA, a compact music-visual alignment encoder trained with Sinkhorn-regularized two-stage learning, and Bar-DP, an energy-adaptive dynamic programming algorithm that produces elastic many-to-one alignments following musical dynamics. These components are integrated into a five-phase agentic pipeline that grounds the core alignment in learned cross-modal features while coordinating higher-level creative decisions through structured text signals. To support comprehensive evaluation, we also introduce TrailerArena, a benchmark with 20+ metrics across four complementary dimensions. On TrailerArena, BEAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across shot selection, ordering, and perceptual quality, while producing fully composed trailers end-to-end.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

PARE: Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient Video Generation

Video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) generate high-quality videos but demand substantial compute due to wide blocks, deep architectures, and iterative sampling. Recent methods reduce cost by compressing width, depth, or sampling steps, but typically commit to a fixed architecture that cannot adapt to individual inputs or denoising stages. We propose PARE (Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient video generation), which jointly compresses width and depth with structure-aware pruning and input-adaptive routing. For width, we observe that attention heads specialize into spatial and temporal roles, and design importance scoring that accounts for this distinction to prevent motion-critical temporal heads from being pruned prematurely. For depth, we train a lightweight router conditioned on denoising timestep and visual content to dynamically select which blocks to execute at each step, enabling per-input compute adaptation rather than static block removal. A progressive pipeline first recovers width-pruned quality via distillation, then jointly optimizes the student and router to decouple the two learning objectives. Experiments on Wan2.1-14B for both image-to-video and text-to-video generation show that PARE substantially reduces per-step computation while preserving quality across VBench dimensions, and composes with step distillation for further acceleration.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

See What Matters: Differentiable Grid Sample Pruning for Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable promise in robotics manipulation, yet their high computational cost hinders real-time deployment. Existing token pruning methods suffer from a fundamental trade-off: aggressive compression using pruning inevitably discards critical geometric details like contact points, leading to severe performance degradation. This forces a compromise, limiting the achievable compression rate and thus the potential speedup. We argue that breaking this trade-off requires rethinking compression as a geometry-aware, continuous token resampling in the vision encoder. To this end, we propose the Differentiable Grid Sampler (GridS), a plug-and-play module that performs task-aware, continuous resampling of visual tokens in VLA. By adaptively predicting a minimal set of salient coordinates and extracting features via differentiable interpolation, GridS preserves essential spatial information while achieving drastic compression (with fewer than 10% original visual tokens). Experiments on both LIBERO benchmark and a real robotic platform demonstrate that validating the lowest feasible visual token count reported to date, GridS achieves a 76% reduction in FLOPs with no degradation in the success rate. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/Grid-Sampler.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation

Instruction-based image editing (IIE) models have recently demonstrated strong capability in modifying specific image regions according to natural language instructions, which implicitly requires identifying where an edit should be applied. This indicates that such models inherently perform language-conditioned visual semantic grounding. In this work, we investigate whether this implicit grounding can be leveraged for zero-shot referring image segmentation (RIS), a task that requires pixel-level localization of objects described by natural language expressions. Through systematic analysis, we reveal that strong foreground-background separability emerges in the internal representations of these models at the earliest denoising timestep, well before any visible image transformation occurs. Building on this insight, we propose a training-free framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for RIS by exploiting their intermediate representations. Our approach decomposes localization into two complementary components: attention-based spatial priors that estimate where to focus, and feature-based semantic discrimination that determines what to segment. By leveraging feature-space separability, the framework produces accurate segmentation masks using only a single denoising step, without requiring full image synthesis. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over existing zero-shot baselines.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection

Underwater salient object detection (USOD) plays a vital role in marine vision tasks but remains fundamentally challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as selective absorption and medium scattering. Conventional pipelines typically adopt a sequential "enhance-then-detect" paradigm. However, isolating low-level visual restoration from high-level semantic perception often leads to semantic inconsistency, where the restored images may not be optimal for detection and can even introduce task-irrelevant noise. To break this sequential bottleneck, we propose UniV2D, a Unified Vision-to-Detection Network that jointly optimizes visual restoration and salient object detection within a mutually beneficial framework. Unlike traditional methods that rely on disjointed pipelines or rigid physical priors, UniV2D introduces a semantic-driven learning paradigm: high-level saliency semantics actively guide the restoration process, while the restored visual cues reciprocally enhance saliency perception. Specifically, UniV2D features a hierarchical dual-branch architecture. It first employs a self-calibrated decoder to predict initial saliency masks alongside a mask-aware restoration module to reconstruct image content. Subsequently, a saliency-guided refinement module equipped with cross-level modulation is utilized to align structural fidelity with semantic consistency. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniV2D significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, establishing a new standard for joint underwater perception.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Seeing Realism from Simulation: Efficient Video Transfer for Vision-Language-Action Data Augmentation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models typically rely on large-scale real-world videos, whereas simulated data, despite being inexpensive and highly parallelizable to collect, often suffers from a substantial visual domain gap and limited environmental diversity, resulting in weak real-world generalization. We present an efficient video augmentation framework that converts simulated VLA videos into realistic training videos while preserving task semantics and action trajectories. Our pipeline extracts structured conditions from simulation via video semantic segmentation and video captioning, rewrites captions to diversify environments, and uses a conditional video transfer model to synthesize realistic videos. To make augmentation practical at scale, we introduce a diffusion feature-reuse mechanism that reuses video tokens across adjacent timesteps to accelerate generation, and a coreset sampling strategy that identifies a compact, non-redundant subset for augmentation under limited computation. Extensive experiments on Robotwin 2.0, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and a real robotic platform demonstrate consistent improvements. For example, our method improves RDT-1B by 8% on Robotwin 2.0, and boosts $π_0$ by 5.1% on the more challenging LIBERO-Plus benchmark. Code is available at: https://github.com/nanfangxiansheng/Seeing-Realism-from-Simulation.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Where to Edit: Task-Aware Localization for Instruction-Based Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing (IIE) aims to modify images according to textual instructions while preserving irrelevant content. Despite recent advances in diffusion transformers, existing methods often suffer from over-editing, introducing unintended changes to regions unrelated to the desired edit. We identify that this limitation arises from the lack of an explicit mechanism for edit localization. In particular, different editing operations (e.g., addition, removal and replacement) induce distinct spatial patterns, yet current IIE models typically treat localization in a task-agnostic manner. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free, task-aware edit localization framework that exploits the intrinsic source and target image streams within IIE models. For each image stream, We first obtain attention-based edit cues, and then construct feature centroids based on these attentive cues to partition tokens into edit and non-edit regions. Based on the observation that optimal localization is inherently task-dependent, we further introduce a unified mask construction strategy that selectively leverages source and target image streams for different editing tasks. We provide a systematic analysis for our proposed insights and approaches. Extensive experiments on EdiVal-Bench demonstrate our framework consistently improves non-edit region consistency while maintaining strong instruction-following performance on top of powerful recent image editing backbones, including Step1X-Edit and Qwen-Image-Edit.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Visual Token Reduction in LVLMs Under Cross-Modal Misalignment

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) encode visual inputs as dense sequences of patch-level tokens to capture fine-grained semantics. These visual tokens often outnumber their textual counterparts by a large margin, leading to substantial computational overhead and limiting the scalability of LVLMs in practice. Previous efforts have explored visual token reduction either prior to or within the large language models (LLMs). However, most in-LLM reduction approaches rely on text-conditioned interactions, implicitly assuming that textual tokens can reliably capture the importance of visual tokens. In this work, we revisit this assumption and reveal causal, semantic, and spatial forms of cross-modal misalignment. These misalignments undermine the effectiveness of text-guided visual token reduction. To address this, we introduce VisionDrop, a training-free, visual-only pruning framework that selects informative visual tokens based on intra-modal (visual-to-visual) attention, without relying on textual signals. To further suppress redundancy throughout the model hierarchy, we treat the visual encoder and the LLM as a unified system and design a progressive pruning pipeline. Our method performs dominant token selection and lightweight contextual merging at multiple stages, enabling fine-grained visual information to be retained even under aggressive token budgets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that VisionDrop achieves consistent improvements over existing approaches, despite requiring no additional training or complex modifications. Notably, when integrated with LLaVA-NeXT-7B, VisionDrop achieves a 2.7x reduction in inference latency and 6x in FLOPs, while retaining 95.71% of the original performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Affordance Field Intervention: Enabling VLAs to Escape Memory Traps in Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great performance in robotic manipulation by mapping visual observations and language instructions directly to actions. However, they remain brittle under distribution shifts: when test scenarios change, VLAs often reproduce memorized trajectories instead of adapting to the updated scene, which is a failure mode we refer to as the "Memory Trap". This limitation stems from the end-to-end design, which lacks explicit 3D spatial reasoning and prevents reliable identification of actionable regions in unfamiliar environments. To compensate for this missing spatial understanding, 3D Spatial Affordance Fields (SAFs) can provide a geometric representation that highlights where interactions are physically feasible, offering explicit cues about regions the robot should approach or avoid. We therefore introduce Affordance Field Intervention (AFI), a lightweight hybrid framework that uses SAFs as an on-demand plug-in to guide VLA behavior. Our system detects memory traps through proprioception, repositions the robot to recent high-affordance regions, and proposes affordance-driven waypoints that anchor VLA-generated actions. A SAF-based scorer then selects trajectories with the highest cumulative affordance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an average improvement of 23.5% across different VLA backbones ($π_{0}$ and $π_{0.5}$) under out-of-distribution scenarios on real-world robotic platforms, and 20.2% on the LIBERO-Pro benchmark, validating its effectiveness in enhancing VLA robustness to distribution shifts.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2025

MambaScope: Coarse-to-Fine Scoping for Efficient Vision Mamba

Vision Mamba has emerged as a promising and efficient alternative to Vision Transformers, yet its efficiency remains fundamentally constrained by the number of input tokens. Existing token reduction approaches typically adopt token pruning or merging to reduce computation. However, they inherently lead to information loss as they discard or compress token representations. This problem is further exacerbated when the same fine-grained token processing is uniformly applied across all images regardless of visual complexity. We observe that not all inputs require fine-grained processing: simple images can be effectively handled at a coarse resolution, while only complex ones require refinement. Based on this insight, we propose MambaScope, an adaptive framework for efficient inference for Vision Mamba. MambaScope first performs coarse-grained inference by dividing the input image into large patches, significantly reducing token length and computation. When the model's prediction confidence is low, selected regions are re-processed at a finer resolution to recover essential visual details with minimal additional cost. This dynamic resolution assignment strategy allows MambaScope to allocate computation adaptively according to image complexity, achieving efficient processing without compromising accuracy. Experiments across various vision tasks demonstrate that MambaScope outperforms both the baseline Vision Mamba and state-of-the-art token reduction techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

cs.CV↗