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Zhi Han

Publications and source records attributed to Zhi Han.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Discrete Diffusion Bridges for Spatiotemporally Aligned Image Translation and Generation

We propose Discrete Diffusion Bridges (DDB), a novel framework designed to resolve the fundamental spatiotemporal misalignment of standard discrete diffusion in image translation and generation. By corrupting data into a pure mask state via a random schedule, the conventional forward process induces a twofold misalignment: spatially, this pure-mask destination entirely discards the rich structural priors of the source image; temporally, the random masking order inherently contradicts the ``easy-first, hard-last'' decoding mechanism used during inference. To address this, DDB constructs a direct and efficient trajectory between domains. Spatially, we introduce a hybrid absorption mechanism that redefines the absorbing state to a stochastic mixture of mask and source tokens, effectively injecting source prior as spatial anchors into the latent space. Temporally, we design an information-guided noise schedule that quantifies semantic variation to prioritize the corruption of high-information regions at earlier timesteps. This ensures the model learns to resolve difficult semantic changes using robust context from invariant regions. Extensive experiments validate the versatility and robustness of our framework across diverse generative paradigms. DDB effectively balances edit alignment with structural fidelity across both text-guided semantic manipulation and pure structural image translation, while inherently complementing text-to-image generation and guaranteeing robust high-quality decoding under extremely low sampling steps. Code and models are available at \href{https://github.com/HKU-HealthAI/DDB}{https://github.com/HKU-HealthAI/DDB}.

cs.CV

SkillTV-Bench: Benchmarking How Well Judges Perform on Skill-Augmented Agentic Execution

LLM agents increasingly execute long-horizon tasks through tool use and environment interaction, shifting evaluation from final-response scoring to verification of complete executions. For skill-augmented agents, verification additionally requires the procedural knowledge encoded in task-time skills, because this knowledge indicates what evidence to inspect and which failures are task-critical. However, existing judge benchmarks often expose final responses or static trajectories, and rarely combine task-time skills with directly inspectable artifacts and environments. We therefore introduce SkillTV-Bench, a 681-case benchmark of real agent trajectories from 50 tasks across eleven domains, designed to evaluate skill-aware trajectory verification for both LLM-as-a-Judge and Agent-as-a-Judge methods. Additionally, we propose SkillTV-Evolve, which externalizes verification knowledge as a reusable JudgeSkill that guides an agent judge to plan targeted inspections and issue evidence-grounded verdicts. On a disjoint development pool, an automated evolution loop further refines the JudgeSkill using misjudged cases. On SkillTV-Bench, the refined skill increases the same agent judge's accuracy by 14.8 percentage points. In offline rollout-pool selection, it increases selected-trajectory success from 22.9% with one rollout to 45.5% with ten rollouts. The code and data are available at https://github.com/HanZhi306/SkillTV-Bench

cs.AI

Dynamics-Aware Meta-Imitation for Generalization to Unseen Robotic Manipulation

Imitation Learning aims to learn skills from extensive observations and demonstrations for robots, so it suffers from data scarcity and environment generalization. The existing methods predominantly focus on imitation from in-domain tasks and consequently struggle with generalization to unseen tasks. To bridge this generalization gap, we propose the \textbf{D}ynamics-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}eta-\textbf{I}mitation (DAMI) framework. By integrating meta-learning to construct a shared skill space, DAMI equips agents for rapid adaptation to novel tasks. We introduce the Visual-Motor Trajectory (VMT) module to capture complex spatio-temporal dynamics within the task latent space. Furthermore, we propose the Unpaired Unified Task (U2T) block to fuse unstructured multimodal observations. To coordinate these representations, we integrate a Task-Conditioned Feature Modulation (TCFM) mechanism customized for modulating low-level 3D features. By capturing intrinsic dynamics from a random complete reference demonstration, our framework learns the underlying task logic rather than memorizing static cues, ensuring effective generalization. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines regarding direct inference on seen tasks and adaptation to unseen tasks via few-shot fine-tuning.

cs.RO

LEEVLA: Seeing What Matters in Latent Environment Evolution for Vision-Language-Action

Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to map multimodal inputs to robot actions. However, most existing approaches struggle to cover complex dynamic scenarios due to treating all visual tokens uniformly and reasoning with human-selected factors, which lack mechanisms to emphasize task-critical evidence and ignore underlying factors. To address this issue, we propose LEEVLA, a VLA architecture for seeing what matters in Latent Environment Evolution that explicitly guides the model toward informative regions while preserving the structured evolution of latent world representations. To identify salient and instruction-relevant regions, we introduce drift-guided dynamic prioritization (DGDP), which combines dynamic position prioritization (DPP) with semantic drift guidance (SDG) to guide the VLA agent where to attend during training. On top of this, we introduce structured feature flow generation (SFFG), which models how these prioritized features should evolve in latent space via prototype-to-periphery (P2P) prediction, and a mutual-neighborhood contrastive (MC) loss to maintain topological consistency among neighborhoods. Together, DGDP and SFFG form a task-aware "where-how" training framework. Extensive experiments on VLA benchmarks show that LEEVLA consistently outperforms prior methods, confirming that explicit task-evidence guidance and structured latent reasoning are both crucial for scalable VLA. Our code is available at https://github.com/LyuQi127/LEEVLA.

cs.CV

SAB-LVLM: Significance-Aware Binarization for Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, yet their enormous parameter scale and cross-modal computation incur substantial memory and latency overhead, severely limiting real-world deployment on resource-constrained devices. Binarization offers an attractive solution by drastically reducing storage and computational costs. However, existing binarization methods neglect the varying importance of weights across different layers and modalities. This causes parameters irrelevant to downstream tasks to be unnecessarily retained, whereas modality-critical weights may not be adequately optimized, resulting in significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we develop a novel \underline{S}ignificance-\underline{A}ware \underline{B}inarization for \underline{L}arge \underline{V}ision-\underline{L}anguage \underline{M}odels (SAB-LVLM). Specifically, after constructing Hessian matrices for textual and visual inputs, we propose a spatial significance map to distinguish full-precision weights activated under a single modality from those activated across modalities. We then devise a modality-guided integration strategy to obtain the significance-aware binarization map, which measures weight significance across layers and modalities. Subsequently, this binarization map is incorporated into the binarization objective as an error reweighting term, and binarization fitting is performed through an alternating significance-weighted update scheme. Extensive experiments illustrate the superiority of our SAB-LVLM over existing binary PTQ methods under an approximately 1-bit compression constraint. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/LyuQi127/SAB_LVLM.

cs.CV

Clarus: Coordinating Autonomous Research Agents toward Web-Scale Scientific Collaboration

Existing autonomous research agents can support parts of the research process, but most systems still treat research as either an isolated assistant task or a closed workflow. Therefore, autonomous science needs a collaboration infrastructure that coordinates projects, agents, and digital and physical resources. We identify this as a shift from code-centered execution loops to research-oriented collaboration processes, where questions, evidence, participants, and resources must be coordinated under uncertainty. In this framing, an agent may be an AI system, a human researcher, a team, a laboratory, or an organization-backed participant. To this end, we present Clarus, a collaboration infrastructure for coordinating autonomous research agents toward web-scale scientific collaboration. Clarus reformulates research as an open, auditable, attributable, and resource-aware multi-phase collaboration process. It defines a minimal project-agent-resource object model and organizes scientific collaboration through four layers including Research Application, Digital Collaboration, Physical Substrate, and Physical World. Core modules are implemented as pluggable mechanisms, allowing Clarus to adapt to task risk, collaboration structure, and resource constraints. Through a controlled paper-generation case study, we show that Clarus can organize a research goal into a traceable, reviewable, attributable, and accumulative collaboration network across phases, tasks, and participants. Together, the object model, collaboration protocol, trust mechanisms, and prototype validation provide an initial foundation for open research networks. Clarus is now available at clarus.holosai.io.

cs.AI

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.

cs.LG

SW-$A^2$-Bench: Benchmarking Autonomous Software Agent Generation for Agentic Web

The Agentic Web is emerging as a paradigm in which autonomous software agents interact with online resources and with each other to accomplish user goals. However, the capacity of Agentic Web is still limited by insufficient autonomous software agent population, which has become a crucial challenge for scaling Agentic Web. In order to alleviate this, we study the task of automatically converting existing code repositories into autonomous software agents via coding agents, decompose the process into critical stages, and identify key technical hurdles. To systematically evaluate this capability, we propose SoftWare Agent generation for Agentic Web Bench (SW-$A^2$-Bench), the first benchmark designed for software agent generation. SW-$A^2$-Bench evaluates not only whether software agents can be generated, but also whether generated software agents are faithful to the source repositories and interoperable with other agents in multi-agent workflows. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively activates the functional capabilities of code repositories and enables interoperable multi-agent collaboration in Agentic Web. We believe that this work will provide a standardized evaluation for software agent generation and will contribute to the future of scaling the capacity of Agentic Web.

cs.MA

T-800: An 800 Hz Data Glove for Precise Hand Gesture Tracking

Human dexterity relies on rapid, sub-second motor adjustments, yet capturing these high-frequency dynamics remains an enduring challenge in biomechanics and robotics. Existing motion capture paradigms are compromised by a trade-off between temporal resolution and visual occlusion, failing to record the fine-grained hand motion of fast, contact-rich manipulation. Here we introduce T-800, a high-bandwidth data glove system that achieves synchronized, full-hand motion tracking at 800 Hz. By integrating a novel broadcast-based synchronization mechanism with a mechanical stress isolation architecture, our system maintains sub-frame temporal alignment across 18 distributed inertial measurement units (IMUs) during extended, vigorous movements. We demonstrate that T-800 recovers fine-grained manipulation details previously lost to temporal undersampling. Our analysis reveals that human dexterity exhibits significantly high-frequency motion energy (>100 Hz) that was fundamentally inaccessible due to the Nyquist sampling limit imposed by previous hardware constraints. To validate the system's utility for robotic manipulation, we implement a kinematic retargeting algorithm that maps T-800's high-fidelity human gestures onto dexterous robotic hand models. This demonstrates that the high-frequency motion data can be accurately translated while respecting the kinematic constraints of robotic hands, providing the rich behavioral data necessary for training robust control policies in the future.

cs.RO

All-day Multi-scenes Lifelong Vision-and-Language Navigation with Tucker Adaptation

Deploying vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents requires adaptation across diverse scenes and environments, but fine-tuning on a specific scenario often causes catastrophic forgetting in others, which severely limits flexible long-term deployment. We formalize this challenge as the all-day multi-scenes lifelong VLN (AML-VLN) problem. Existing parameter-efficient adapters (e.g., LoRA and its variants) are limited by their two-dimensional matrix form, which fails to capture the multi-hierarchical navigation knowledge spanning multiple scenes and environments. To address this, we propose Tucker Adaptation (TuKA), which represents the multi-hierarchical navigation knowledge as a high-order tensor and leverages Tucker decomposition to decouple the knowledge into shared subspaces and scenario-specific experts. We further introduce a decoupled knowledge incremental learning strategy to consolidate shared subspaces while constraining specific experts for decoupled lifelong learning. Building on TuKA, we also develop a VLN agent named AlldayWalker, which continually learns across multiple navigation scenarios, achieving all-day multi-scenes navigation. Extensive experiments show that AlldayWalker consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.CV

Lifelong Embodied Navigation Learning

Embodied navigation agents powered by large language models have shown strong performance on individual tasks but struggle to continually acquire new navigation skills, which suffer from catastrophic forgetting. We formalize this challenge as lifelong embodied navigation learning (LENL), where an agent is required to adapt to a sequence of navigation tasks spanning multiple scenes and diverse user instruction styles, while retaining previously learned knowledge. To tackle this problem, we propose Uni-Walker, a lifelong embodied navigation framework that decouples navigation knowledge into task-shared and task-specific components with Decoder Extension LoRA (DE-LoRA). To learn the shared knowledge, we design a knowledge inheritance strategy and an experts co-activation strategy to facilitate shared knowledge transfer and refinement across multiple navigation tasks. To learn the specific knowledge, we propose an expert subspace orthogonality constraint together and a navigation-specific chain-of-thought reasoning mechanism to capture specific knowledge and enhance instruction-style understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Uni-Walker for building universal navigation agents with lifelong learning.

cs.RO

Lifelong Language-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Learning

Traditional language-conditioned manipulation agent sequential adaptation to new manipulation skills leads to catastrophic forgetting of old skills, limiting dynamic scene practical deployment. In this paper, we propose SkillsCrafter, a novel robotic manipulation framework designed to continually learn multiple skills while reducing catastrophic forgetting of old skills. Specifically, we propose a Manipulation Skills Adaptation to retain the old skills knowledge while inheriting the shared knowledge between new and old skills to facilitate learning of new skills. Meanwhile, we perform the singular value decomposition on the diverse skill instructions to obtain common skill semantic subspace projection matrices, thereby recording the essential semantic space of skills. To achieve forget-less and generalization manipulation, we propose a Skills Specialization Aggregation to compute inter-skills similarity in skill semantic subspaces, achieving aggregation of the previously learned skill knowledge for any new or unknown skill. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed SkillsCrafter.

cs.RO

The power of small initialization in noisy low-tubal-rank tensor recovery

We study the problem of recovering a low-tubal-rank tensor $\mathcal{X}\_\star\in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n \times k}$ from noisy linear measurements under the t-product framework. A widely adopted strategy involves factorizing the optimization variable as $\mathcal{U} * \mathcal{U}^\top$, where $\mathcal{U} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times R \times k}$, followed by applying factorized gradient descent (FGD) to solve the resulting optimization problem. Since the tubal-rank $r$ of the underlying tensor $\mathcal{X}_\star$ is typically unknown, this method often assumes $r < R \le n$, a regime known as over-parameterization. However, when the measurements are corrupted by some dense noise (e.g., Gaussian noise), FGD with the commonly used spectral initialization yields a recovery error that grows linearly with the over-estimated tubal-rank $R$. To address this issue, we show that using a small initialization enables FGD to achieve a nearly minimax optimal recovery error, even when the tubal-rank $R$ is significantly overestimated. Using a four-stage analytic framework, we analyze this phenomenon and establish the sharpest known error bound to date, which is independent of the overestimated tubal-rank $R$. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee showing that an easy-to-use early stopping strategy can achieve the best known result in practice. All these theoretical findings are validated through a series of simulations and real-data experiments.

cs.LG

Holos: A Web-Scale LLM-Based Multi-Agent System for the Agentic Web

As large language models (LLM)-driven agents transition from isolated task solvers to persistent digital entities, the emergence of the Agentic Web, an ecosystem where heterogeneous agents autonomously interact and co-evolve, marks a pivotal shift toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, LLM-based multi-agent systems (LaMAS) are hindered by open-world issues such as scaling friction, coordination breakdown, and value dissipation. To address these challenges, we introduce Holos, a web-scale LaMAS architected for long-term ecological persistence. Holos adopts a five-layer architecture, with core modules primarily featuring the Nuwa engine for high-efficiency agent generation and hosting, a market-driven Orchestrator for resilient coordination, and an endogenous value cycle to achieve incentive compatibility. By bridging the gap between micro-level collaboration and macro-scale emergence, Holos hopes to lay the foundation for the next generation of the self-organizing and continuously evolving Agentic Web. We have publicly released Holos (accessible at https://holosai.io), providing a resource for the community and a testbed for future research in large-scale agentic ecosystems.

cs.AI

SeqWalker: Sequential-Horizon Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Planning

Sequential-Horizon Vision-and-Language Navigation (SH-VLN) presents a challenging scenario where agents should sequentially execute multi-task navigation guided by complex, long-horizon language instructions. Current vision-and-language navigation models exhibit significant performance degradation with such multi-task instructions, as information overload impairs the agent's ability to attend to observationally relevant details. To address this problem, we propose SeqWalker, a navigation model built on a hierarchical planning framework. Our SeqWalker features: i) A High-Level Planner that dynamically selects global instructions into contextually relevant sub-instructions based on the agent's current visual observations, thus reducing cognitive load; ii) A Low-Level Planner incorporating an Exploration-Verification strategy that leverages the inherent logical structure of instructions for trajectory error correction. To evaluate SH-VLN performance, we also extend the IVLN dataset and establish a new benchmark. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SeqWalker.

cs.RO

Efficient Low-Tubal-Rank Tensor Estimation via Alternating Preconditioned Gradient Descent

The problem of low-tubal-rank tensor estimation is a fundamental task with wide applications across high-dimensional signal processing, machine learning, and image science. Traditional approaches tackle such a problem by performing tensor singular value decomposition, which is computationally expensive and becomes infeasible for large-scale tensors. Recent approaches address this issue by factorizing the tensor into two smaller factor tensors and solving the resulting problem using gradient descent. However, this kind of approach requires an accurate estimate of the tensor rank, and when the rank is overestimated, the convergence of gradient descent and its variants slows down significantly or even diverges. To address this problem, we propose an Alternating Preconditioned Gradient Descent (APGD) algorithm, which accelerates convergence in the over-parameterized setting by adding a preconditioning term to the original gradient and updating these two factors alternately. Based on certain geometric assumptions on the objective function, we establish linear convergence guarantees for more general low-tubal-rank tensor estimation problems. Then we further analyze the specific cases of low-tubal-rank tensor factorization and low-tubal-rank tensor recovery. Our theoretical results show that APGD achieves linear convergence even under over-parameterization, and the convergence rate is independent of the tensor condition number. Extensive simulations on synthetic data are carried out to validate our theoretical assertions.

cs.LG

Bring Your Dreams to Life: Continual Text-to-Video Customization

Customized text-to-video generation (CTVG) has recently witnessed great progress in generating tailored videos from user-specific text. However, most CTVG methods assume that personalized concepts remain static and do not expand incrementally over time. Additionally, they struggle with forgetting and concept neglect when continuously learning new concepts, including subjects and motions. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continual Customized Video Diffusion (CCVD) model, which can continuously learn new concepts to generate videos across various text-to-video generation tasks by tackling forgetting and concept neglect. To address catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a concept-specific attribute retention module and a task-aware concept aggregation strategy. They can capture the unique characteristics and identities of old concepts during training, while combining all subject and motion adapters of old concepts based on their relevance during testing. Besides, to tackle concept neglect, we develop a controllable conditional synthesis to enhance regional features and align video contexts with user conditions, by incorporating layer-specific region attention-guided noise estimation. Extensive experimental comparisons demonstrate that our CCVD outperforms existing CTVG baselines on both the DreamVideo and Wan 2.1 backbones. The code is available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/CCVD.

cs.CV

Vi-TacMan: Articulated Object Manipulation via Vision and Touch

Autonomous manipulation of articulated objects remains a fundamental challenge for robots in human environments. Vision-based methods can infer hidden kinematics but can yield imprecise estimates on unfamiliar objects. Tactile approaches achieve robust control through contact feedback but require accurate initialization. This suggests a natural synergy: vision for global guidance, touch for local precision. Yet no framework systematically exploits this complementarity for generalized articulated manipulation. Here we present Vi-TacMan, which uses vision to propose grasps and coarse directions that seed a tactile controller for precise execution. By incorporating surface normals as geometric priors and modeling directions via von Mises-Fisher distributions, our approach achieves significant gains over baselines (all p<0.0001). Critically, manipulation succeeds without explicit kinematic models -- the tactile controller refines coarse visual estimates through real-time contact regulation. Tests on more than 50,000 simulated and diverse real-world objects confirm robust cross-category generalization. This work establishes that coarse visual cues suffice for reliable manipulation when coupled with tactile feedback, offering a scalable paradigm for autonomous systems in unstructured environments.

cs.RO