arXiv subjects

Zhiyuan Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiyuan Huang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Evaluating MLLMs with Multimodal Multi-image Reasoning Benchmark

With enhanced capabilities and widespread applications, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly required to process and reason over multiple images simultaneously. However, existing MLLM benchmarks focus either on single-image visual reasoning or on multi-image understanding tasks with only final-answer evaluation, leaving the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs over multi-image inputs largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the $\textbf{Multimodal Multi-image Reasoning Benchmark (MMRB)}$, the first benchmark designed to evaluate structured visual reasoning across multiple images. MMRB comprises $\textbf{92 sub-tasks}$ covering spatial, temporal, and semantic reasoning, with multi-solution, CoT-style annotations generated by GPT-4o and refined by human experts. A derivative subset is designed to evaluate multimodal reward models in multi-image scenarios. To support fast and scalable evaluation, we propose a sentence-level matching framework using open-source LLMs. Extensive baseline experiments on $\textbf{40 MLLMs}$, including 9 reasoning-specific models and 8 reward models, demonstrate that open-source MLLMs still lag significantly behind commercial MLLMs in multi-image reasoning tasks. Furthermore, current multimodal reward models are nearly incapable of handling multi-image reward ranking tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SpiritSight Agent: Advanced GUI Agent with One Look

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show amazing abilities in assisting human-computer interaction, automating human user's navigation on digital devices. An ideal GUI agent is expected to achieve high accuracy, low latency, and compatibility for different GUI platforms. Recent vision-based approaches have shown promise by leveraging advanced Vision Language Models (VLMs). While they generally meet the requirements of compatibility and low latency, these vision-based GUI agents tend to have low accuracy due to their limitations in element grounding. To address this issue, we propose $\textbf{SpiritSight}$, a vision-based, end-to-end GUI agent that excels in GUI navigation tasks across various GUI platforms. First, we create a multi-level, large-scale, high-quality GUI dataset called $\textbf{GUI-Lasagne}$ using scalable methods, empowering SpiritSight with robust GUI understanding and grounding capabilities. Second, we introduce the $\textbf{Universal Block Parsing (UBP)}$ method to resolve the ambiguity problem in dynamic high-resolution of visual inputs, further enhancing SpiritSight's ability to ground GUI objects. Through these efforts, SpiritSight agent outperforms other advanced methods on diverse GUI benchmarks, demonstrating its superior capability and compatibility in GUI navigation tasks. Models and datasets are available at https://hzhiyuan.github.io/SpiritSight-Agent.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Exploring a Principled Framework for Deep Subspace Clustering

Subspace clustering is a classical unsupervised learning task, built on a basic assumption that high-dimensional data can be approximated by a union of subspaces (UoS). Nevertheless, the real-world data are often deviating from the UoS assumption. To address this challenge, state-of-the-art deep subspace clustering algorithms attempt to jointly learn UoS representations and self-expressive coefficients. However, the general framework of the existing algorithms suffers from a catastrophic feature collapse and lacks a theoretical guarantee to learn desired UoS representation. In this paper, we present a Principled fRamewOrk for Deep Subspace Clustering (PRO-DSC), which is designed to learn structured representations and self-expressive coefficients in a unified manner. Specifically, in PRO-DSC, we incorporate an effective regularization on the learned representations into the self-expressive model, prove that the regularized self-expressive model is able to prevent feature space collapse, and demonstrate that the learned optimal representations under certain condition lie on a union of orthogonal subspaces. Moreover, we provide a scalable and efficient approach to implement our PRO-DSC and conduct extensive experiments to verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed deep subspace clustering approach. The code is available at https://github.com/mengxianghan123/PRO-DSC.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AgentStudio: A Toolkit for Building General Virtual Agents

General virtual agents need to handle multimodal observations, master complex action spaces, and self-improve in dynamic, open-domain environments. However, existing environments are often domain-specific and require complex setups, which limits agent development and evaluation in real-world settings. As a result, current evaluations lack in-depth analyses that decompose fundamental agent capabilities. We introduce AgentStudio, a trinity of environments, tools, and benchmarks to address these issues. AgentStudio provides a lightweight, interactive environment with highly generic observation and action spaces, e.g., video observations and GUI/API actions. It integrates tools for creating online benchmark tasks, annotating GUI elements, and labeling actions in videos. Based on our environment and tools, we curate an online task suite that benchmarks both GUI interactions and function calling with efficient auto-evaluation. We also reorganize existing datasets and collect new ones using our tools to establish three datasets: GroundUI, IDMBench, and CriticBench. These datasets evaluate fundamental agent abilities, including GUI grounding, learning from videos, and success detection, pointing to the desiderata for robust, general, and open-ended virtual agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Isolated attosecond free-electron laser based on a sub-cycle driver from hollow capillary fibers

The attosecond light source provides an advanced tool for investigating electron motion using time-resolved-spectroscopy techniques. Isolated attosecond pulses, especially, will significantly advance the study of electron dynamics. However, achieving high-intensity isolated attosecond pulses is still challenging at the present stage. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for generating high-intensity, isolated attosecond soft X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) using a mid-infrared (MIR) sub-cycle modulation laser from gas-filled hollow capillary fibers (HCFs). The multi-cycle MIR pulses are first compressed to sub-cycle using a helium-filled HCF with decreasing pressure gradient due to soliton self-compression effect. By utilizing such sub-cycle MIR laser pulse to modulate the electron beam, we can obtain a quasi-isolated current peak, which can then produce an isolated FEL pulse with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), naturally synchronizing with the sub-cycle MIR laser pulse. Numerical simulations have been carried out, including the sub-cycle pulse generation, electron beam modulation and FEL radiation processes. The simulation results indicate that an isolated attosecond pulse with wavelength of 1 nm, peak power of ~28 GW, pulse duration of ~600 attoseconds and SNR of ~96.4% can be generated by our proposed method. The numerical results demonstrated here pave a new way for generating the high-intensity isolated attosecond soft X-ray pulse, which may have many applications in nonlinear spectroscopy and atomic-site electronic process.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Flexible delivery of high-power picosecond laser in purely-single optical mode of anti-resonant hollow-core fiber for micromachining

We present the flexible delivery of picosecond laser pulses with up to 20 W average power over a 3-m-long sample of anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (AR-HCF) for laser micromachining applications. Our experiments highlight the importance of optical mode purity of the AR-HCF for the manufacturing precision. We demonstrate that compared with an AR-HCF sample with a capillary to core (d/D) ratio of ~0.5, the AR-HCF with a d/D ratio of ~0.68 exhibits better capability of high-order-mode suppression, giving rise to improved micromachining quality. Moreover, the AR-HCF delivery system exhibits better pointing stability and set-up flexibility than the free-space beam delivery system. These results pave the way to practical applications of AR-HCF in developing advanced equipment for ultrafast laser micromachining.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Three-stage dynamics of nonlinear pulse amplification in ultrafast mid-infrared fiber amplifier with anomalous dispersion

Nonlinear pulse amplification in optical fiber, with capability of breaking the gain-bandwidth limitation, is a key technique for high-energy, ultrafast pulse generation. In the longer wavelength region (including 1.55 μm, 2 μm and 2.8 μm) where the gain fiber has normally strong anomalous dispersion, the nonlinear amplification process over fiber exhibits more complicated dynamics than that of its 1-μm counterpart, and the underlying mechanism of the nonlinear pulse propagation process in high-gain anomalous fiber is still elusive so far. Here, we demonstrate an in-depth study on the nonlinear amplification process in high-gain ultrafast mid-infrared fiber, providing clear physical understanding on the debate of adiabatic soliton compression. We unveil that under the high-gain condition, the ultrafast pulse launched into the anomalous gain fiber experiences successively three distinct stages, named as the balance between linear and nonlinear chirp, high-order-soliton-like pulse compression and pulse splitting due to high-order effects. While a relatively-clean ultrafast pulse can be obtained immediately after the high-order-soliton-like compression stage, excessive gain fiber length could hardly enhance further the pulse peak power due to soliton splitting. Our findings can provide several critical guidelines for designing high-power ultrafast fiber amplifiers at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Tunable ultraviolet dispersive-wave emission driven directly by 40-fs Ti: sapphire laser pulses in hollow capillary fiber

We demonstrate that by using 1-m-long gas-filled hollow capillary fiber (HCF) with a core diameter of 100 μm, tunable ultraviolet (UV) dispersive-wave (DW) pulses can be generated in a compact, single-stage set-up driven directly by 40-fs Ti: sapphire laser pulses. By adjusting the gas type and pressure inside the HCF, the central wavelength of the UV DW can be continuously tuned from 185 nm to ~450 nm. In the experiment, we found that for longer-wavelength (from ~320 to ~450 nm) DW generation, Raman-active gas filled in the HCF can efficiently suppress the pulse splitting effect of the high-order soliton due to the Raman-induced pulse energy dissipation, leading to the high-quality DW generation at these wavelengths with smooth, single-peak spectra. These results provide some useful insights for designing compact, wavelength-tunable ultrafast UV light sources with microjoule-level pulse energies.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

TeacherLM: Teaching to Fish Rather Than Giving the Fish, Language Modeling Likewise

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning and data augmentation capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, what about small models? In this work, we propose TeacherLM-7.1B, capable of annotating relevant fundamentals, chain of thought, and common mistakes for most NLP samples, which makes annotation more than just an answer, thus allowing other models to learn "why" instead of just "what". The TeacherLM-7.1B model achieved a zero-shot score of 52.3 on MMLU, surpassing most models with over 100B parameters. Even more remarkable is its data augmentation ability. Based on TeacherLM-7.1B, we augmented 58 NLP datasets and taught various student models with different parameters from OPT and BLOOM series in a multi-task setting. The experimental results indicate that the data augmentation provided by TeacherLM has brought significant benefits. We will release the TeacherLM series of models and augmented datasets as open-source.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Retiming dynamics of harmonically modelocked laser solitons in a self-driven optomechanical lattice

Harmonic mode-locking, realized actively or passively, is an effective technique for increasing the repetition rate of lasers, with important applications in optical sampling, laser micro-machining and frequency metrology. It is critically important to understand how a harmonically mode-locked pulse train responds to external perturbations and noise, so as to make sure that it is stable and resistant to noise. Here, in a series of carefully designed experiments, we elucidate the retiming dynamics of laser pulses generated in a soliton fiber laser harmonically mode-locked at ~2 GHz to the acoustic resonance in a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) core. We characterize the self-driven optomechanical lattice along the PCF using a homodyne set-up, and reveal that each soliton undergoes damped oscillatory retiming within its trapping potential after an abrupt perturbation. In addition we show, through statistical analysis of the intra-cavity pulse spacing, how the trapping potentials are effective for suppressing timing jitter. The experimental results are well described using a dynamic model including dissipation, which provides valuable insight into the stability and noise performance of optomechanically mode-locked laser systems, and may also be useful for studying complex inter-soliton interactions.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Octave-wide broadening of ultraviolet dispersive wave driven by soliton-splitting dynamics

Coherent dispersive wave emission, as an important phenomenon of soliton dynamics, manifests itself in multiple platforms of nonlinear optics from fibre waveguides to integrated photonics. Limited by its resonance nature, efficient generation of coherent dispersive wave with ultra-broad bandwidth has, however, proved difficult to realize. Here, we unveil a new regime of soliton dynamics in which the dispersive wave emission process strongly couples with the splitting dynamics of the driving pulse. High-order dispersion and self-steepening effects, accumulated over soliton self-compression, break the system symmetry, giving rise to high-efficiency generation of coherent dispersive wave in the ultraviolet region. Simultaneously, asymmetric soliton splitting results in the appearance of a temporally-delayed ultrashort pulse with high intensity, overlapping and copropagating with the dispersive wave pulse. Intense cross-phase modulations lead to octave-wide broadening of the dispersive wave spectrum, covering 200 to 400 nm wavelengths. The highly-coherent, octave-wide ultraviolet spectrum, generated from the simple capillary fibre set-up, is in great demand for time-resolved spectroscopy, ultrafast electron microscopy and frequency metrology applications, and the critical role of the secondary pulse in this process reveals some new opportunities for all-optical control of versatile soliton dynamics.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

Propagation of Input Tail Uncertainty in Rare-Event Estimation: A Light versus Heavy Tail Dichotomy

We consider the estimation of small probabilities or other risk quantities associated with rare but catastrophic events. In the model-based literature, much of the focus has been devoted to efficient Monte Carlo computation or analytical approximation assuming the model is accurately specified. In this paper, we study a distinct direction on the propagation of model uncertainty and how it impacts the reliability of rare-event estimates. Specifically, we consider the basic setup of the exceedance of i.i.d. sum, and investigate how the lack of tail information of each input summand can affect the output probability. We argue that heavy-tailed problems are much more vulnerable to input uncertainty than light-tailed problems, reasoned through their large deviations behaviors and numerical evidence. We also investigate some approaches to quantify model errors in this problem using a combination of the bootstrap and extreme value theory, showing some positive outcomes but also uncovering some statistical challenges.

math.ST↗

arXiv2023

Broadband Dispersive-Wave Emission Coupled with Two-Stage Soliton Self-Compression in Gas-Filled Anti-Resonant Hollow-Core Fibers

We studied the underlying mechanism of broadband dispersive-wave emission within a resonance band of gas-filled anti-resonant hollow-core fiber. Both theoretical and experimental results unveiled that the high-order soliton, launched into the hollow-core fiber, experienced two stages of pulse compression, resulting in a multi-peak structure of the dispersive-wave spectrum. Over the first-stage pulse compression, a sharp increase of the pulse peak power triggered the first time of dispersion-wave emission, and simultaneously caused ionization of the noble gas filled in the fiber core. Strong soliton-plasma interactions led to blue shifting of the pump pulse, and the blue-shifted pulse experienced a decreasing dispersion value in the fiber waveguide, resulting in an increase of its soliton order. Then, the second-stage pulse compression due to the high-order soliton effect triggered the second time of dispersive-wave emission at a phase-matched frequency slightly lower than that in the first stage. Multi-peak spectra of the output dispersive-waves and their formation dynamics were clearly observed in our experiments, which can be understood using a delicate coupling mechanism among three nonlinear effects including high-order-soliton compression, soliton-plasma interaction and phase-matched dispersive-wave emission. The output broadband dispersive-wave could be potentially compressed to sub-30 fs duration using precise chirp-compensation technique.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

Highly-stable, flexible delivery of microjoule-level ultrafast pulses in vacuumized anti-resonant hollow-core fibers for active synchronization

We demonstrate the stable and flexible light delivery of multi-μJ, sub-200-fs pulses over a ~10-m-long vacuumized anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (AR-HCF), which was successfully used for high-performance pulse synchronization. Compared with the pulse train launched into the AR-HCF, the transmitted pulse train out of the fiber exhibits excellent stabilities in pulse power and spectrum, with pointing stability largely improved. The walk-off between the fiber-delivery and the other free-space-propagation pulse trains, in an open loop, was measured to be <6 fs root-mean-square (RMS) over 90 minutes, corresponding to a relative optical-path variation of <2x10-7. This walk-off can be further suppressed to ~2 fs RMS simply using an active control loop, highlighting the great application potentials of this AR-HCF set-up in large-scale laser and accelerator facilities.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Over-Conservativeness of Variance-Based Efficiency Criteria and Probabilistic Efficiency in Rare-Event Simulation

In rare-event simulation, an importance sampling (IS) estimator is regarded as efficient if its relative error, namely the ratio between its standard deviation and mean, is sufficiently controlled. It is widely known that when a rare-event set contains multiple "important regions" encoded by the so-called dominating points, IS needs to account for all of them via mixing to achieve efficiency. We argue that in typical experiments, missing less significant dominating points may not necessarily cause inefficiency, and the traditional analysis recipe could suffer from intrinsic looseness by using relative error, or in turn estimation variance, as an efficiency criterion. We propose a new efficiency notion, which we call probabilistic efficiency, to tighten this gap. In particular, we show that under the standard Gartner-Ellis large deviations regime, an IS that uses only the most significant dominating points is sufficient to attain this efficiency notion. Our finding is especially relevant in high-dimensional settings where the computational effort to locate all dominating points is enormous.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

Scalable Safety-Critical Policy Evaluation with Accelerated Rare Event Sampling

Evaluating rare but high-stakes events is one of the main challenges in obtaining reliable reinforcement learning policies, especially in large or infinite state/action spaces where limited scalability dictates a prohibitively large number of testing iterations. On the other hand, a biased or inaccurate policy evaluation in a safety-critical system could potentially cause unexpected catastrophic failures during deployment. This paper proposes the Accelerated Policy Evaluation (APE) method, which simultaneously uncovers rare events and estimates the rare event probability in Markov decision processes. The APE method treats the environment nature as an adversarial agent and learns towards, through adaptive importance sampling, the zero-variance sampling distribution for the policy evaluation. Moreover, APE is scalable to large discrete or continuous spaces by incorporating function approximators. We investigate the convergence property of APE in the tabular setting. Our empirical studies show that APE can estimate the rare event probability with a smaller bias while only using orders of magnitude fewer samples than baselines in multi-agent and single-agent environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Self-referencing 3D characterization of ultrafast optical-vortex beams using tilted interference TERMITES technique

Femtosecond light pulses carrying optical angular momentums (OAMs), possessing intriguing properties of helical phase fronts and ultrafast temporal profiles, enable many applications in nonlinear optics, strong-field physics and laser micro-machining. While generation of OAM-carrying ultrafast pulses and their interactions with matters have been intensively studied in experiments, three-dimensional characterization of ultrafast OAM-carrying light beams in spatio-temporal domain has, however, proved difficult to achieve. Conventional measurement schemes rely on the use of a reference pulsed light beam which needs to be well-characterized in its phase front and to have sufficient overlap and coherence with the beam under test, largely limiting practical applications of these schemes. Here we demonstrate a self-referencing set-up based on a tilted interferometer that can be used to measure complete spatio-temporal information of OAM-carrying femtosecond pulses with different topological charges. Through scanning one interferometer arm, the spectral phase over the pulse spatial profile can be obtained using the tilted interference signal, and the temporal envelope of the light field at one particular position around its phase singularity can be retrieved simultaneously, enabling three-dimensional beam reconstruction. This self-referencing technique, capable of measuring spatio-temporal ultrafast optical-vortex beams, may find many applications in fields of nonlinear optics and light-matter interactions.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Measurements of microjoule-level, few-femtosecond ultraviolet dispersive-wave pulses generated in gas-filled hollow capillary fibers

High-energy ultraviolet pulse generation in gas-filled hollow capillary fibers (HCFs) through dispersive-wave-emission process, has attracted considerable attentions in recent several years due to its great application potentials in ultraviolet spectroscopy and photochemistry. While the ability of this technique to deliver high-energy, ultrafast ultraviolet pulses is widely recognized, few-fs duration of μJ-level dispersive-wave (DW) pulses has, however, escaped direct measurements. In this letter, we demonstrate that using several chirped mirrors, few-fs ultraviolet DW pulses can be obtained in atmosphere environment without the use of vacuum chambers. The pulse temporal profiles, measured using a self-diffraction frequency-resolved optical gating set-up, exhibit full-width-half-maximum pulse widths of 9.6 fs at 384 nm and 9.4 fs at 430 nm, close to the Fourier-transform limits. Moreover, theoretical and experimental studies reveal the strong influences of driving pulse energy and HCF length on temporal width and shape of the measured DW pulses. The ultraviolet pulses obtained in atmosphere environment with μJ-level pulse energy, few-fs pulse width and broadband wavelength tunability are ready to be used in many applications.

physics.optics↗