arXiv subjects

Zhongyu Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhongyu Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MechReason: Benchmarking Multi-Image Multi-Hop Reasoning in Mechanical Engineering

Despite significant progress in general visual question answering and cross-modal understanding, multimodal large language models still face a pronounced gap in evaluation for complex reasoning within the mechanical engineering domain. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on rudimentary tasks such as drawing recognition, CAD interpretation, or single-chart querying, falling short of assessing whether models can integrate multiple images, textual conditions, physical principles, and engineering constraints to perform multi-step reasoning when confronted with authentic, intricate mechanical problems. To address this, we introduce MechReason, a benchmark derived from real mechanical engineering papers, comprising 12k question-answer pairs with explicit reasoning-chain annotations and 21k visual materials spanning nine evidence types, including statistical charts, parameter tables, engineering drawings, microscopic images, simulation images, system architectures, real mechanical scene photos, CAD model images and manufacturing flowcharts. MechReason covers eight task types across four reasoning dimensions: explanation, prediction, design, and diagnosis. We devise a four-stage construction pipeline: we first extract core engineering claims and decompose their supporting evidence into premises, reasoning processes, conclusions, and corroborative evidence; we then generate shortcut-preventing questions by masking posterior verification information; finally, we apply multimodal quality validation to ensure task quality and multi-hop nature. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MechReason is highly challenging, with even the most advanced models achieving only 62.89\% accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SafeSceneReason: A Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark Connecting Industrial Hazards with Accident Knowledge

Industrial-safety understanding requires more than detecting workers, equipment, and personal protective equipment. Models must also assess compliance, identify hazardous interactions, explain potential accident mechanisms, and recommend preventive actions. Existing safety datasets primarily focus on visual perception or isolated violation recognition and provide limited supervision for evidence-grounded reasoning. We introduce SafeSceneReason, a multimodal industrial-safety reasoning benchmark and companion training corpus that connects workplace scenes with knowledge from occupational accident investigations. SafeSceneReason combines two complementary data-construction pipelines. The scene-centric pipeline converts annotated workplace images into executable safety scene graphs and generates deterministic answers through program execution over objects, relations, and safety rules. The report-centric pipeline extracts figures and contextual evidence from accident reports and constructs multimodal questions using evidence graphs, explicit information boundaries, multi-step reasoning paths, and iterative verification. The resulting resource contains 110,581 verified scene-centric question--answer pairs and 13,114 refined report-centric question--answer pairs, covering perception, spatial and quantitative reasoning, compliance assessment, evidence synthesis, causal analysis, and mitigation-oriented decision making. Evaluation of representative proprietary and open-source vision--language models reveals substantial performance differences and persistent weaknesses in comparative, technical, and multi-evidence reasoning, demonstrating that strong general visual understanding does not yet guarantee reliable industrial-safety reasoning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MMArch: Benchmarking Multimodal Reasoning Grounded in Architectural Evidence

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform strongly on engineering imagery, yet existing benchmarks mostly test drawing recognition, information extraction, or compliance checking, leaving open whether models can combine distributed visual evidence with engineering principles to reach a conclusion. We introduce MMArch, a benchmark for architecture and civil engineering spanning ten subdomains and built entirely from figures in peer-reviewed papers. Its $1{,}212$ short-answer items are produced by a decoupled planner--writer pipeline and validated through automated screening, a blind adversarial audit, and expert review, so that answering requires perceiving the relevant evidence, identifying the governing principle, and applying it, not exploiting textual or single-figure shortcuts. Evaluating $18$ open-weight and proprietary MLLMs against a domain-expert panel, we find a wide gap: the strongest open-source model attains about $30\%$ and the best proprietary system $52\%$, while human experts reach $95\%$, more than forty points ahead. Our error analysis shows that failures concentrate in applying principles and combining evidence across figures rather than in locating it, pointing to substantial headroom for future research. Code and data are available at https://dcx-swjtu.github.io/MMArch/.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CircuitReason-1k: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Visual-to-Symbolic Reasoning inElectrical Circuits

Electrical circuit analysis requires more than recognizing components in an image. A solver must ground symbols and labels, recover latent topology, select a physical model, formulate coupled equations, propagate intermediate quantities, and preserve units, signs, directions, and phase conventions. We introduce \benchmark, a benchmark of 1,000 authentic textbook problems for evaluating this complete long-horizon visual-to-symbolic reasoning process. Each problem pairs one or more circuit diagrams with a self-contained question, a typed or semantically specified answer, and a reference worked solution. An evidence-first construction pipeline aligns questions, figures, and solutions, while a reasoning-oriented taxonomy organizes problems by circuit type and dependency depth. Evaluation combines conservative typed scoring with identity-blinded multi-model semantic consensus, retaining every problem in the denominator. Across three commercial chatbot systems and six open-source multimodal large language models, the highest-scoring system reaches 84.8\% accuracy. However, performance consistently deteriorates on long-horizon problems, and qualitative analysis exposes persistent failures in topology-to-target binding, physical conventions, and late-stage output propagation. \benchmark{} provides a focused testbed for measuring whether multimodal models can transform technical visual evidence into sustained, physically valid symbolic reasoning. Code are available at GitHub - CircuitReason/CircuitReason1K.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Conversational Human Audio-visual Talking Dialogue Generation

Large-scale dyadic interactive audio-visual dialogue (DIAD) datasets provide fundamental data resources for developing humanoid interactive virtual agents and digital humans. However, collecting such data is time-consuming, expensive, and ethically sensitive. To address this, we propose CHAT, a new dyadic interactive audio-visual dialogue generation (DIADG) framework that generates diverse, paired, and mutually responsive speech-face dialogue clips from a single textual prompt. CHAT unifies large language models and talking face models with interactive audio and facial behaviour refinement modules, enabling the generation of aligned dyadic dialogue clips with diverse contents and facial identities. Experiments show that CHAT outperforms existing related methods designed for similar tasks under both objective and subjective evaluations. Moreover, our synthesised CHAT-AVD-50k dataset serves as effective pre-training data for downstream interactive head generation, consistently improving PerFRDiff and ReactDiff on REACT 2024. CHAT offers a scalable alternative to the costly and ethically sensitive collection of real dyadic interaction data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ParaVT: Taming the Tool Prior Paradox for Parallel Tool Use in Agentic Video Reinforcement Learning

Training large multimodal models (LMMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) to natively invoke video-processing tools (e.g., cropping) has become a promising route to long-video understanding. However, existing native-RL methods dispatch tool calls sequentially (i.e., one per turn): a single wrong crop propagates errors without peer correction, multi-turn tool calls corrupt context, and inference cost scales linearly with the number of turns. We introduce ParaVT, the first multi-agent end-to-end RL-trained framework for Parallel Video Tool calling, dispatching multiple time-window crops in a single turn for cleaner context and better fault tolerance. Yet applying standard RL to ParaVT reveals an obstacle we term the Tool Prior Paradox: the pretrained tool priors that enable tool exploration also destabilize cold-started structural format and expose the skip-tool reward shortcut under temperature sampling. A cross-model contrast on a weaker-prior LMM supports this claim: format stays stable but RL elicits zero tool calls, indicating that prior strength is the shared driver of both format collapse and tool exploration. We propose PARA-GRPO (Parseability-Anchored and Ratio-gAted GRPO), which augments standard RL with two complementary mechanisms: (i) a targeted format reward applied only at the structural-token positions most prone to collapse, and (ii) a per-prompt frame-budget randomization that creates training prompts where calling the tool yields a measurable reward signal over skipping it. Across six long-video understanding benchmarks, ParaVT improves over the Qwen3-VL baseline by +7.9% on average, with PARA-GRPO lifting training-time format compliance from 0.13 to 0.64. As tool capabilities become increasingly internalized in modern LMMs, RL must cooperate with the resulting priors, and ParaVT offers a general recipe for agentic RL. Code, data, and model weights are publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Towards Successful Implementation of Automated Raveling Detection: Effects of Training Data Size, Illumination Difference, and Spatial Shift

Raveling, the loss of aggregates, is a major form of asphalt pavement surface distress, especially on highways. While research has shown that machine learning and deep learning-based methods yield promising results for raveling detection by classification on range images, their performance often degrades in large-scale deployments where more diverse inference data may originate from different runs, sensors, and environmental conditions. This degradation highlights the need of a more generalizable and robust solution for real-world implementation. Thus, the objectives of this study are to 1) identify and assess potential variations that impact model robustness, such as the quantity of training data, illumination difference, and spatial shift; and 2) leverage findings to enhance model robustness under real-world conditions. To this end, we propose RavelingArena, a benchmark designed to evaluate model robustness to variations in raveling detection. Instead of collecting extensive new data, it is built by augmenting an existing dataset with diverse, controlled variations, thereby enabling variation-controlled experiments to quantify the impact of each variation. Results demonstrate that both the quantity and diversity of training data are critical to the accuracy of models, achieving at least a 9.2% gain in accuracy under the most diverse conditions in experiments. Additionally, a case study applying these findings to a multi-year test section in Georgia, U.S., shows significant improvements in year-to-year consistency, laying foundations for future studies on temporal deterioration modeling. These insights provide guidance for more reliable model deployment in raveling detection and other real-world tasks that require adaptability to diverse conditions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SVAgent: Storyline-Guided Long Video Understanding via Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration

Video question answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that requires integrating spatial, temporal, and semantic information to capture the complex dynamics of video sequences. Although recent advances have introduced various approaches for video understanding, most existing methods still rely on locating relevant frames to answer questions rather than reasoning through the evolving storyline as humans do. Humans naturally interpret videos through coherent storylines, an ability that is crucial for making robust and contextually grounded predictions. To address this gap, we propose SVAgent, a storyline-guided cross-modal multi-agent framework for VideoQA. The storyline agent progressively constructs a narrative representation based on frames suggested by a refinement suggestion agent that analyzes historical failures. In addition, cross-modal decision agents independently predict answers from visual and textual modalities under the guidance of the evolving storyline. Their outputs are then evaluated by a meta-agent to align cross-modal predictions and enhance reasoning robustness and answer consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that SVAgent achieves superior performance and interpretability by emulating human-like storyline reasoning in video understanding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

MultiHaystack: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval and Reasoning over 40K Images, Videos, and Documents

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on benchmarks that evaluate text, image, or video understanding separately. However, these settings do not assess a critical real-world requirement, which involves retrieving relevant evidence from large, heterogeneous multimodal corpora prior to reasoning. Most existing benchmarks restrict retrieval to small, single-modality candidate sets, substantially simplifying the search space and overstating end-to-end reliability. To address this gap, we introduce MultiHaystack, the first benchmark designed to evaluate both retrieval and reasoning under large-scale, cross-modal conditions. MultiHaystack comprises over 46,000 multimodal retrieval candidates across documents, images, and videos, along with 747 open yet verifiable questions. Each question is grounded in a unique validated evidence item within the retrieval pool, requiring evidence localization across modalities and fine-grained reasoning. In our study, we find that models perform competitively when provided with the corresponding evidence, but their performance drops sharply when required to retrieve that evidence from the full corpus. Additionally, even the strongest retriever, E5-V, achieves only 40.8% Recall@1, while state-of-the-art MLLMs such as GPT-5 experience a significant drop in reasoning accuracy from 80.86% when provided with the corresponding evidence to 51.4% under top-5 retrieval. These results indicate that multimodal retrieval over heterogeneous pools remains a primary bottleneck for MLLMs, positioning MultiHaystack as a valuable testbed that highlights underlying limitations obscured by small-scale evaluations and promotes retrieval-centric advances in multimodal systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

XR: Cross-Modal Agents for Composed Image Retrieval

Retrieval is being redefined by agentic AI, demanding multimodal reasoning beyond conventional similarity-based paradigms. Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) exemplifies this shift as each query combines a reference image with textual modifications, requiring compositional understanding across modalities. While embedding-based CIR methods have achieved progress, they remain narrow in perspective, capturing limited cross-modal cues and lacking semantic reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce XR, a training-free multi-agent framework that reframes retrieval as a progressively coordinated reasoning process. It orchestrates three specialized types of agents: imagination agents synthesize target representations through cross-modal generation, similarity agents perform coarse filtering via hybrid matching, and question agents verify factual consistency through targeted reasoning for fine filtering. Through progressive multi-agent coordination, XR iteratively refines retrieval to meet both semantic and visual query constraints, achieving up to a 38% gain over strong training-free and training-based baselines on FashionIQ, CIRR, and CIRCO, while ablations show each agent is essential. Code is available: https://01yzzyu.github.io/xr.github.io/.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

InEx: Hallucination Mitigation via Introspection and Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration

Hallucination remains a critical challenge in large language models (LLMs), hindering the development of reliable multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). Existing solutions often rely on human intervention or underutilize the agent's ability to autonomously mitigate hallucination. To address these limitations, we draw inspiration from how humans make reliable decisions in the real world. They begin with introspective reasoning to reduce uncertainty and form an initial judgment, then rely on external verification from diverse perspectives to reach a final decision. Motivated by this cognitive paradigm, we propose InEx, a training-free, multi-agent framework designed to autonomously mitigate hallucination. InEx introduces internal introspective reasoning, guided by entropy-based uncertainty estimation, to improve the reliability of the decision agent's reasoning process. The agent first generates a response, which is then iteratively verified and refined through external cross-modal multi-agent collaboration with the editing agent and self-reflection agents, further enhancing reliability and mitigating hallucination. Extensive experiments show that InEx consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving 4%-27% gains on general and hallucination benchmarks, and demonstrating strong robustness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Script: Graph-Structured and Query-Conditioned Semantic Token Pruning for Multimodal Large Language Models

The rapid growth of visual tokens in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) leads to excessive memory consumption and inference latency, especially when handling high-resolution images and videos. Token pruning is a technique used to mitigate this issue by removing redundancy, but existing methods often ignore relevance to the user query or suffer from the limitations of attention mechanisms, reducing their adaptability and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose Script, a plug-and-play pruning method that requires no retraining and generalizes across diverse MLLMs. Script comprises two modules: a graph-structured pruning module that removes visually redundant tokens, and a query-conditioned semantic pruning module that preserves query-relevant visual information. Together, they enhance performance on multimodal tasks. Experiments on fourteen benchmarks across image and video understanding tasks show that Script consistently achieves higher model efficiency and predictive accuracy compared to existing pruning methods. On LLaVA-NeXT-7B, it achieves up to 6.8x prefill speedup and 10x FLOP reduction, while retaining 96.88% of the original performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Deep Learning for Crack Detection: A Review of Learning Paradigms, Generalizability, and Datasets

Crack detection plays a crucial role in civil infrastructures, including inspection of pavements, buildings, etc., and deep learning has significantly advanced this field in recent years. While numerous technical and review papers exist in this domain, emerging trends are reshaping the landscape. These shifts include transitions in learning paradigms (from fully supervised learning to semi-supervised, weakly-supervised, unsupervised, few-shot, domain adaptation and fine-tuning foundation models), improvements in generalizability (from single-dataset performance to cross-dataset evaluation), and diversification in dataset acquisition (from RGB images to specialized sensor-based data). In this review, we systematically analyze these trends and highlight representative works. Additionally, we introduce a new annotated dataset collected with 3D laser scans, 3DCrack, to support future research and conduct extensive benchmarking experiments to establish baselines for commonly used deep learning methodologies, including recent foundation models. Our findings provide insights into the evolving methodologies and future directions in deep learning-based crack detection. Project page: https://github.com/nantonzhang/Awesome-Crack-Detection

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

WikiAutoGen: Towards Multi-Modal Wikipedia-Style Article Generation

Knowledge discovery and collection are intelligence-intensive tasks that traditionally require significant human effort to ensure high-quality outputs. Recent research has explored multi-agent frameworks for automating Wikipedia-style article generation by retrieving and synthesizing information from the internet. However, these methods primarily focus on text-only generation, overlooking the importance of multimodal content in enhancing informativeness and engagement. In this work, we introduce WikiAutoGen, a novel system for automated multimodal Wikipedia-style article generation. Unlike prior approaches, WikiAutoGen retrieves and integrates relevant images alongside text, enriching both the depth and visual appeal of generated content. To further improve factual accuracy and comprehensiveness, we propose a multi-perspective self-reflection mechanism, which critically assesses retrieved content from diverse viewpoints to enhance reliability, breadth, and coherence, etc. Additionally, we introduce WikiSeek, a benchmark comprising Wikipedia articles with topics paired with both textual and image-based representations, designed to evaluate multimodal knowledge generation on more challenging topics. Experimental results show that WikiAutoGen outperforms previous methods by 8%-29% on our WikiSeek benchmark, producing more accurate, coherent, and visually enriched Wikipedia-style articles. Our code and examples are available at https://wikiautogen.github.io/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Pose State Perception of Interventional Robot for Cardio-cerebrovascular Procedures

In response to the increasing demand for cardiocerebrovascular interventional surgeries, precise control of interventional robots has become increasingly important. Within these complex vascular scenarios, the accurate and reliable perception of the pose state for interventional robots is particularly crucial. This paper presents a novel vision-based approach without the need of additional sensors or markers. The core of this paper's method consists of a three-part framework: firstly, a dual-head multitask U-Net model for simultaneous vessel segment and interventional robot detection; secondly, an advanced algorithm for skeleton extraction and optimization; and finally, a comprehensive pose state perception system based on geometric features is implemented to accurately identify the robot's pose state and provide strategies for subsequent control. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method's high reliability and accuracy in trajectory tracking and pose state perception.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

MapVision: CVPR 2024 Autonomous Grand Challenge Mapless Driving Tech Report

Autonomous driving without high-definition (HD) maps demands a higher level of active scene understanding. In this competition, the organizers provided the multi-perspective camera images and standard-definition (SD) maps to explore the boundaries of scene reasoning capabilities. We found that most existing algorithms construct Bird's Eye View (BEV) features from these multi-perspective images and use multi-task heads to delineate road centerlines, boundary lines, pedestrian crossings, and other areas. However, these algorithms perform poorly at the far end of roads and struggle when the primary subject in the image is occluded. Therefore, in this competition, we not only used multi-perspective images as input but also incorporated SD maps to address this issue. We employed map encoder pre-training to enhance the network's geometric encoding capabilities and utilized YOLOX to improve traffic element detection precision. Additionally, for area detection, we innovatively introduced LDTR and auxiliary tasks to achieve higher precision. As a result, our final OLUS score is 0.58.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Transparent Object Depth Completion

The perception of transparent objects for grasp and manipulation remains a major challenge, because existing robotic grasp methods which heavily rely on depth maps are not suitable for transparent objects due to their unique visual properties. These properties lead to gaps and inaccuracies in the depth maps of the transparent objects captured by depth sensors. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end network for transparent object depth completion that combines the strengths of single-view RGB-D based depth completion and multi-view depth estimation. Moreover, we introduce a depth refinement module based on confidence estimation to fuse predicted depth maps from single-view and multi-view modules, which further refines the restored depth map. The extensive experiments on the ClearPose and TransCG datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and robustness in complex scenarios with significant occlusion compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗