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Zhiming Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiming Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

ReMATF: Recurrent Motion-Adaptive Multi-scale Turbulence Mitigation for Dynamic Scenes

Atmospheric turbulence severely degrades video quality by introducing distortions such as geometric warping, blur, and temporal flickering, posing significant challenges to both visual clarity and temporal consistency. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on 3D architectures and require multi-frame input, but their large computational cost and memory usage limit real-time deployment. Here, we propose ReMATF, a lightweight recurrent framework that restores videos using only two frames at a time while preserving spatial detail and temporal stability. ReMATF combines a multi-scale encoder-decoder with temporal warping and a motion-adaptive temporal fusion module that performs per-pixel fusion between the warped previous output and the current prediction to enhance coherence without enlarging the temporal window. This design reduces flicker, sharpens details, and remains efficient. Experiments on synthetic and real turbulence datasets show consistent improvements in PSNR(+2.83 dB), SSIM(+0.05) and LPIPS(-0.048), along with substantially faster inference, making ReMATF suitable for turbulence mitigation in resource-constrained scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Understanding Python Linters through a Comprehensive and Systematic Empirical Study

Code linters, tools that automatically detect code issues, help developers accelerate development and improve code quality by identifying errors early. Unlike previous studies that focused mainly on single linters or informal comparisons, this paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of five widely used Python linters: Ruff, Pylint, Flake8, Mypy and Black, through four key user concerns: linting rule checks, speed, configuration methods, and linter preferences. We analyze 1,551 linting rules, categorize them into five types, and construct rule mappings, finding that more than 40% are shared between multiple linters, with Ruff and Pylint together covering over 80% of all rules. Pylint has the most rules in the first two categories, and Ruff leads in the last three. Next, we measure their running times on 1,000 GitHub projects under three setups (single-rule, default, all-rules), finding a consistent speed ranking from fastest to slowest: Ruff, Mypy, Flake8, Black, and Pylint. Ruff is extremely fast, with runtimes typically within one second. Then, we summarize four configuration methods and four types of configuration options from 443 available options across the five linters. While all linters support the four configuration methods, they differ in project configuration formats and flexibility in their configuration options. Finally, an analysis of 3,094 GitHub projects using the five linters reveals that over 50% use multiple linters, share strong consensus on option selections and rule suppressions, but exhibit project-specific variations in enabled-rule configurations. Our findings provide actionable insights for linter users and establish a benchmark dataset and taxonomy to support future research, such as cross-linter rule mapping, performance modeling, and automated configuration.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

CRISP: Progressive Illumination Curriculum for Recurrent Low-Light Video Enhancement with Semantic Priors

Low-light video enhancement requires the recovery of brightness, color, and fine spatial structures while preserving temporal coherence in the presence of noise and motion. Existing methods often struggle to balance these objectives, particularly in severely degraded regions. This paper presents CRISP, a recurrent framework trained using a progressive illumination curriculum. Its two-frame recurrent architecture propagates information across successive frames to exploit temporal context beyond the immediate input pair. During training, supervision progressively transitions from intermediate targets interpolated between the low-light input and the reference to the full reference, gradually increasing the required brightness and color correction. This curriculum stabilizes recurrent training without introducing additional inference cost and yields the largest performance improvement among the components evaluated in the ablation study. To further support structural reconstruction, the framework optionally incorporates frozen DINOv3 semantic features through adaptive layer normalization (AdaLN)-style modulation, without fine-tuning the foundation model. Experiments on DID and BVI-RLV demonstrate that CRISP achieves the highest PSNR on DID and the highest SSIM on BVI-RLV among the evaluated methods, while maintaining computational efficiency.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research. Benchmark and codes are available at https://github.com/walawalagoose/TTABC.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

World Action Learning via Interaction-Centric Spectral Latent Guidance

Learning general-purpose robot policies requires large-scale real-world interaction data, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric videos offer abundant human interaction experience with task-relevant semantics for robotic manipulation, but direct transfer is challenging for two reasons: latent actions inferred from frame reconstruction can be dominated by nuisance variation such as ego-camera motion, and human and robot behaviors often exhibit different temporal dynamics. We propose WING (World Action Learning via INteraction-Centric Spectral Latent Guidance), a framework for transferring interaction knowledge from egocentric videos to robot policies. WING first separates observer-induced motion from hand-object interaction and distills the interaction-centric component into latent actions. It then exploits the observation that cross-embodiment task semantics are concentrated in slowly varying temporal structures, identifying shared low-frequency components between egocentric latent actions and robot behaviors in the spectral domain and using them to guide action generation. WING achieves average success rates of 99.20% on LIBERO, 93.80% on RoboTwin 2.0, and 57.7% on RoboCasa-GR1, and also performs strongly across four real-world manipulation tasks under diverse generalization settings. These results show that interaction-centric spectral guidance provides an effective and scalable way to transfer physical interaction knowledge from human egocentric video to robot control. Project page: https://mikuz12.github.io/wing/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination

World-action models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video models to improve generalization in robot control by jointly predicting future visual states and actions. This capability comes at a substantial inference cost, as dense future-frame tokens are repeatedly processed during denoising. Prior methods address this by token pruning that prioritizes visual fidelity to reduce denoising costs in video diffusion models. However, these methods do not use action relevance to determine which future-frame tokens to retain during joint denoising in WAMs. In this paper, we propose Sparse-WAM, a training-free framework for action-guided sparse imagination that selectively processes future-frame tokens to accelerate WAM inference. We observe substantial overlap in the spatial distribution of attention from action tokens to future-frame tokens (action-to-future attention) between consecutive denoising steps, despite continued updates to the future representations. Motivated by this, we develop Action-Guided Token Selection to retain frame-specific action-relevant regions together with cross-frame context. However, a naive implementation can incur attention-scoring and token-packing overhead that offsets the computational savings from pruning. We therefore introduce Pilot, an efficient engine that reduces sparse inference overhead through lightweight scoring and cross-step reuse of token selections. On LIBERO with FastWAM-Joint and RoboLab-120 with Cosmos 3 Edge, Sparse-WAM achieves inference speedups of approximately $2.0\times$ and $1.8\times$, respectively, over dense eager inference on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, while largely preserving task performance.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

SteerQuant: Steering Quantization Error with Action-Guided Scaling in World-Action Models

World-action models (WAMs) jointly generate future world states and actions through iterative denoising, using shared weights to process heterogeneous semantic streams of video, proprioceptive, and action tokens. Quantization reduces inference cost, but comparable numerical errors in different streams can have markedly different effects on final actions, making numerical accuracy alone insufficient for reliable control. We introduce SteerQuant, a 4-bit quantization framework for WAMs that steers errors toward computations with less influence on final actions. It maps how each stream's quantization errors affect final actions and uses this map to guide shared channel scaling. Activation scaling is further calibrated for each stream and denoising step to accommodate changes in activation ranges and action impact. This adapts quantization to different stream requirements without duplicating weights or increasing bit-widths for selected streams. To reduce the extra kernel launches and memory traffic introduced by scaling, we develop Rudder, a 4-bit inference engine for WAMs that fuses scaling and output compensation into low-bit kernels. Under W4A8 and W4A4, SteerQuant maintains mean LIBERO success within 0.8 percentage points of full precision, while delivering up to $2.23\times$ denoising speedup over BF16 across three WAMs with reduced peak GPU memory usage. On a real dual-arm robot, W4A8 deployment achieves a $1.35\times$ end-to-end inference speedup while maintaining average task success relative to BF16.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

A Forward Simulation-Based Hierarchy of Linearizable Concurrent Objects

In this paper, we systematically investigate the connection between linearizable objects and forward simulation. We prove that the sets of linearizable objects satisfying wait-freedom (resp., lock-freedom or obstruction-freedom) form a bounded join-semilattice under the forward simulation relation, and that the sets of linearizable objects without liveness constraints form a bounded lattice under the same relation. Thus, forward simulation is not only a proof technique for linearizability but also induces an algebraic hierarchy of linearizable objects. As part of our lattice result, we propose an equivalent characterization of linearizability by reducing checking linearizability w.r.t. sequential specification $Spec$ into checking forward simulation w.r.t. an object $\mathcal{U}_{Spec}$.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

A New Branching Bisimulation for Probabilistic Processes

We introduce a new branching bisimulation for probabilistic processes, which induces a more refined equivalence relation than any known equivalence that abstracts from unobservable actions, with a rooted version that is a congruence for a language of probabilistic process with the usual static as well as dynamic constructs including recursion.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2026

Von Mises-Fisher Mixture Model with Dynamic Shrinkage for Realistic Test-Time Transduction

A range of methods aim to enhance the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) at test time. Among them, transduction has emerged as a promising paradigm due to its strong compatibility and efficiency. However, realistic evaluations often involve highly imbalanced class distributions, which cause performance degradation or even collapse. In this work, we systematically revisit transduction from the perspective of penalized likelihood estimation (PLE), showing that PLE with a KL-divergence anchor term naturally yields an adaptive shrinkage behavior between prior anchors and empirical estimates. From this viewpoint, the brittleness of transductive methods can be attributed to the absence of anchoring mechanism and static modeling of the shrinkage strength. Therefore, we propose Mixture of Von Mises-Fisher Models with Dynamic Shrinkage (MOON). MOON is built upon a mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions to model feature representations on the unit hypersphere. To handle imbalance, MOON dynamically adjusts the shrinkage strength using zero-shot priors at both instance and class levels. Thus, it suppresses unreliable assignments and prevents harmful updates from outlier classes, thereby mitigating negative transfer. MOON is model-agnostic, training-free, and requires no task-specific hyperparameter tuning. Extensive experiments further validate the advantage of MOON in both performance and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/walawalagoose/MOON

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Correcting Visual Blur Induced by Attention Distraction to Reduce Hallucinations: Algorithm and Theory

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from object hallucinations, yet the visual perceptual mechanism underlying this failure remains poorly understood. In this work, we reveal that hallucinations are strongly associated with a human-like attention distraction phenomenon, where humans under divided focus experience degraded visual clarity and produce inaccurate descriptions, while in models the same mechanism manifests as spatial inconsistency in multi-head attention and temporal fading of attention to image tokens during decoding. We further provide theoretical insights that attention dispersion increases model complexity and degrades classification generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose an Attention-Focused Approach for Improved Image Perception (AFIP), which corrects attention distraction via cross-head attention enrichment and reinforces visual grounding through dynamic historical attention enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and models validate the effectiveness of AFIP without additional training. Code is available at: https://github.com/MIKUZ12/AFIP.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

TibetCPR: A Multimodal Tactile Feedback System to Enhance Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Training in High-Altitude Regions of Tibet

High-quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) requires stable control of compression rhythm and depth, yet most training systems presuppose instructor mediation, repeated practice, and explanatory guidance-assumptions that do not hold in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where instruction is fragmented and learners' linguistic and educational backgrounds are heterogeneous. We present TibetCPR, a low-cost, self-guided CPR training system that pairs depth-driven electrotactile feedback with rhythm-driven visual cues within a Tibetan-language narrative. In a randomised study with 40 lay community members aged 19--56, the experimental group showed progressive minute-by-minute stabilisation of rhythm and depth across a 10-minute intervention, substantially exceeding an unguided-practice control, with gains transferring to an unscaffolded one-minute post-test. Qualitative accounts described the feedback as legible through participants' bodily action, and usability was high (SUS = 84.3). We synthesise three transferable design principles for self-guided embodied training: feedback as a calibration reference, not an immediate corrector; modality temporal granularity matched to behaviour's temporal structure; and autonomous interpretability as a deployment prerequisite, not an after-effect of usability.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

Test-Time Distillation for Continual Model Adaptation

Deep neural networks often suffer performance degradation upon deployment due to distribution shifts. Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to address this issue in an unsupervised manner. However, existing methods that rely on self-supervision are prone to an inherent self-referential feedback loop that amplifies initial prediction errors, leading to model drift. We revisit this limitation and propose Test-Time Distillation (TTD), which reframes adaptation as a distillation process guided by a frozen Vision-Language Model (VLM) as an external signal. While promising, we find that direct distillation is fraught with two pitfalls: (1) the Generalist Trap, where the VLM's broad but non-specialized knowledge leads to suboptimal performance on specific tasks and shifts; and (2) the Entropy Bias, where naive model fusion techniques based on entropy fail due to the disparate calibration of heterogeneous models. These pitfalls highlight the need to build a robust supervisory signal and leverage it to guide the target model toward stable adaptation. Hence, we present CoDiRe, a Continual Distillation and Rectification framework for TTD. CoDiRe first constructs a robust blended teacher by dynamically fusing the predictions of the VLM and the target model. Critically, it circumvents the Entropy Bias by leveraging Maximum Softmax Probability (MSP) as a more reliable confidence metric for weighting each model's expertise. Then it applies an Optimal Transport-based rectification to further align predictions with the blended teacher, enabling continuous and stable adaptation. Extensive experiments show that CoDiRe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, exceeding CoTTA by 10.55% with only 48% of its time cost on ImageNet-C. Project page is publicly available at https://github.com/walawalagoose/TTD.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Do All Individual Layers Help? An Empirical Study of Task-Interfering Layers in Vision-Language Models

Current VLMs have demonstrated capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks. Typically, in a pretrained VLM, all layers are engaged by default to make predictions on downstream tasks. We find that intervening on a single layer, such as by zeroing its parameters, can improve the performance on certain tasks, indicating that some layers hinder rather than help downstream tasks. We systematically investigate how individual layers influence different tasks via layer intervention. Specifically, we measure the change in performance relative to the base model after intervening on each layer and observe improvements when bypassing specific layers. This improvement can be generalizable across models and datasets, indicating the presence of Task-Interfering Layers that harm downstream tasks' performance. We introduce Task-Layer Interaction Vector, which quantifies the effect of intervening on each layer of a VLM given a task. These task-interfering layers exhibit task-specific sensitivity patterns: tasks requiring similar capabilities show consistent response trends under layer interventions, as evidenced by the high similarity in their task-layer interaction vectors. Inspired by these findings, we propose TaLo (Task-Adaptive Layer Knockout), a training-free, test-time adaptation method that dynamically identifies and bypasses the most interfering layer for a given task. Without parameter updates, TaLo improves performance across various models and datasets, including boosting Qwen-VL's accuracy on the Maps task in ScienceQA by up to 16.6%. Our work reveals an unexpected form of modularity in pretrained VLMs and provides a plug-and-play, training-free mechanism to unlock hidden capabilities at inference time. The source code will be publicly available.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Adaptive Disentangled Representation Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification

Multi-view multi-label learning frequently suffers from simultaneous feature absence and incomplete annotations, due to challenges in data acquisition and cost-intensive supervision. To tackle the complex yet highly practical problem while overcoming the existing limitations of feature recovery, representation disentanglement, and label semantics modeling, we propose an Adaptive Disentangled Representation Learning method (ADRL). ADRL achieves robust view completion by propagating feature-level affinity across modalities with neighborhood awareness, and reinforces reconstruction effectiveness by leveraging a stochastic masking strategy. Through disseminating category-level association across label distributions, ADRL refines distribution parameters for capturing interdependent label prototypes. Besides, we formulate a mutual-information-based objective to promote consistency among shared representations and suppress information overlap between view-specific representation and other modalities. Theoretically, we derive the tractable bounds to train the dual-channel network. Moreover, ADRL performs prototype-specific feature selection by enabling independent interactions between label embeddings and view representations, accompanied by the generation of pseudo-labels for each category. The structural characteristics of the pseudo-label space are then exploited to guide a discriminative trade-off during view fusion. Finally, extensive experiments on public datasets and real-world applications demonstrate the superior performance of ADRL.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

A Longitudinal Study on the Attitudes of Gay Men in Beijing Towards Gay Social Media Platforms: Lonely Souls in the Digital Concrete Jungle

Over the past decade, specialized social networking applications have become a cornerstone of life for many gay men in China. This paper employs a longitudinal mixed-methods approach to investigate how Chinese men who have sex with men (MSM) have shifted their attitudes toward these platforms between approximately 2013 and 2023. Drawing on archival analysis of online discourses, a quantitative survey of 412 participants, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, we trace the complex trajectory of this evolution. Our findings reveal a clear pattern: from the initial embrace of these applications as revolutionary tools for community building and identity affirmation (2014--2017), to a period of growing ambivalence and critique centered on commercialization, ``hookup culture,'' and multiple forms of discrimination (2017--2020), and finally to the present era (2020--2023), characterized by pragmatic, fragmented, yet simultaneously critical and reconstructive uses. Today, users strategically employ a repertoire of applications -- including global platforms (e.g., Grindr and Tinder), domestic mainstream platforms (e.g., Blued), and niche alternatives (e.g., Aloha) -- to fulfill differentiated needs. We develop a detailed temporal framework to capture this attitudinal evolution and discuss its design implications for creating more supportive, secure, and community-oriented digital environments for marginalized groups.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

Can Intelligent User Interfaces Engage in Philosophical Discussions? A Longitudinal Study of Philosophers' Evolving Perceptions

This study investigates the evolving attitudes of philosophy scholars towards the participation of generative AI based Intelligent User Interfaces (IUIs) in philosophical discourse. We conducted a three year (2023--2025) mixed methods longitudinal study with 16 philosophy scholars and students. Qualitative data from annual interviews reveal a three stage evolution in attitude: from initial resistance and unfamiliarity, to instrumental acceptance of the IUI as a tool, and finally to a deep principled questioning of the IUI's fundamental capacity for genuine philosophical thought. Quantitative data from blind assessments, where participants rated anonymized philosophical answers from both humans and an IUI, complement these findings. While participants acknowledged the IUI's proficiency in tasks requiring formal logic and knowledge reproduction, they consistently identified significant shortcomings in areas demanding dialectical reasoning, originality and embodied understanding. The study concludes that participants do not see the IUI as a peer but rather as a sophisticated mirror whose capabilities and limitations provoke a deeper reflection on the unique and irreplaceable human dimensions of philosophical inquiry, such as intuition, value laden commitment and the courage to question fundamental premises.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

Final Happiness: What Intelligent User Interfaces Can Do for The Lonely Dying

This study explores the design of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUIs) to address the profound existential loneliness of terminally ill individuals. While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has made inroads in "Thanatechnology," current research often focuses on practical aspects like digital legacy management, overlooking the subjective, existential needs of those facing death in isolation. To address this gap, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 lonely, terminally ill individuals. Our core contributions are: (1) An empirically-grounded model articulating the complex psychological, practical, social, and spiritual needs of this group; (2) The "Three Pillars, Twelve Principles" framework for designing IUIs as "Existential Companions"; and (3) A critical design directive derived from user evaluations: technology in this context should aim for transcendence over simulation. The findings suggest that IUIs should create experiences that augment or surpass human capabilities, rather than attempting to simulate basic human connections, which can paradoxically deepen loneliness. This research provides a clear, user-centered path for designing technology that serves not as a "tool for dying," but as a "partner for living fully until the end".

cs.HC↗