arXiv subjects

Zhuofan Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zhuofan Li.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Inference Efficiency to Embodied Efficiency: Revisiting Efficiency Metrics for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled embodied agents to perform increasingly complex tasks by jointly reasoning over visual, linguistic, and motor modalities. However, we find that the prevailing notion of ``efficiency'' in current VLA research, characterized by parameters, FLOPs, or token decoding throughput, does not reflect actual performance on robotic platforms. In real-world execution, efficiency is determined by system-level embodied behaviors such as task completion time, trajectory smoothness, cumulative joint rotation, and motion energy. Through controlled studies across model compression, token sparsification, and action sequence compression, we make several observations that challenge common assumptions. (1) Methods that reduce computation under conventional metrics often increase end-to-end execution cost or degrade motion quality, despite maintaining task success rates. (2) System-level embodied efficiency metrics reveal performance differences in the learned action policies that remain hidden under conventional evaluations. (3) Common adaptation methods such as in-context prompting or supervised fine-tuning show only mild and metric-specific improvements in embodied efficiency. While these methods can reduce targeted embodied-efficiency metrics such as jerk or action rate, the resulting gains may come with trade-offs in other metrics, such as longer completion time. Taken together, our results suggest that conventional inference efficiency metrics can overlook important aspects of embodied execution. Incorporating embodied efficiency provides a more complete view of policy behavior and practical performance, enabling fairer and more comprehensive comparisons of VLA models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Qualitative Research in an Era of AI: A Pragmatic Approach to Data Analysis, Workflow, and Computation

Computational developments--particularly artificial intelligence--are reshaping social scientific research and raise new questions for in-depth methods such as ethnography and qualitative interviewing. Building on classic debates about computers in qualitative data analysis (QDA), we revisit possibilities and dangers in an era of automation, Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots, and 'big data.' We introduce a typology of contemporary approaches to using computers in qualitative research: streamlining workflows, scaling up projects, hybrid analytical methods, the sociology of computation, and technological rejection. Drawing from scaled team ethnographies and solo research integrating computational social science (CSS), we describe methodological choices across study lifecycles, from literature reviews through data collection, coding, text retrieval, and representation. We argue that new technologies hold potential to address longstanding methodological challenges when deployed with knowledge, purpose, and ethical commitment. Yet a pragmatic approach--moving beyond technological optimism and dismissal--is essential given rapidly changing tools that are both generative and dangerous. Computation now saturates research infrastructure, from algorithmic literature searches to scholarly metrics, making computational literacy a core methodological competence in and beyond sociology. We conclude that when used carefully and transparently, contemporary computational tools can meaningfully expand--rather than displace--the irreducible insights of qualitative research.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

RANA: Robust Active Learning for Noisy Network Alignment

Network alignment has attracted widespread attention in various fields. However, most existing works mainly focus on the problem of label sparsity, while overlooking the issue of noise in network alignment, which can substantially undermine model performance. Such noise mainly includes structural noise from noisy edges and labeling noise caused by human-induced and process-driven errors. To address these problems, we propose RANA, a Robust Active learning framework for noisy Network Alignment. RANA effectively tackles both structure noise and label noise while addressing the sparsity of anchor link annotations, which can improve the robustness of network alignment models. Specifically, RANA introduces the proposed Noise-aware Selection Module and the Label Denoising Module to address structural noise and labeling noise, respectively. In the first module, we design a noise-aware maximization objective to select node pairs, incorporating a cleanliness score to address structural noise. In the second module, we propose a novel multi-source fusion denoising strategy that leverages model and twin node pairs labeling to provide more accurate labels for node pairs. Empirical results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that RANA outperforms state-of-the-art active learning-based methods in alignment accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/YXNan0110/RANA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Ethnography and Machine Learning: Synergies and New Directions

Ethnography (social scientific methods that illuminate how people understand, navigate and shape the real world contexts in which they live their lives) and machine learning (computational techniques that use big data and statistical learning models to perform quantifiable tasks) are each core to contemporary social science. Yet these tools have remained largely separate in practice. This chapter draws on a growing body of scholarship that argues that ethnography and machine learning can be usefully combined, particularly for large comparative studies. Specifically, this paper (a) explains the value (and challenges) of using machine learning alongside qualitative field research for certain types of projects, (b) discusses recent methodological trends to this effect, (c) provides examples that illustrate workflow drawn from several large projects, and (d) concludes with a roadmap for enabling productive coevolution of field methods and machine learning.

cs.LG↗