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Ziyang Guo

Publications and source records attributed to Ziyang Guo.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

SFC-Aware Online Aggregated Data-Link Orchestration for SDN/NFV-Enabled SAGINs

Civil aviation space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) are expected to support heterogeneous cockpit and cabin services over dynamic air-to-air (A2A), air-to-ground (A2G), and air-to-satellite (A2S) data links. This paper studies service function chain (SFC)-aware online access-side aggregated data-link orchestration for civil aviation SAGINs enabled by software-defined networking and network function virtualization (SDN/NFV). We jointly orchestrate spatial bearer resources and temporal elasticity enabled by temporal elastic mapping and parking (TEMP). A rolling-slot model is developed with four request-level actions: NOW, TEMP, REJECT, and DROP, under a lexicographic objective that prioritizes service success, then normalized access-orchestration delay, and finally residual TEMP-related risk. To avoid exhaustive search over the full binary action space, we propose Model-Induced Risk and Scarcity-Aware Refinement (MRSAR), which derives deferred-realization risk from the success-prioritized objective and resource-scarcity signals from data-link and TEMP buffer constraints. These signals guide valuation-based feasible construction and bounded neighborhood refinement. Simulation results show that MRSAR remains close to the Gurobi-MILP reference in service success, outperforms arrival-order and delay-myopic greedy baselines, controls REJECT and DROP failures, and achieves a favorable quality-complexity tradeoff for rolling online orchestration.

cs.NI

ViTacWorld: Scaling Visuo-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation

Contact-rich robot manipulation requires physical interaction cues that are often invisible to cameras, making tactile sensing essential for robust control. However, scaling visuo-tactile robot learning remains difficult because real tactile interaction data are expensive to collect, hardware-dependent, and limited in task and scene diversity. We present ViTacWorld, an action-conditioned visuo-tactile world model for scalable contact-rich robot manipulation. ViTacWorld leverages public real tactile datasets and a constructed simulation environment to scale visuo-tactile-action data, exploiting the fact that tactile signals are directly grounded in physical contact and can exhibit a smaller simulation-to-real gap than purely visual observations. The model is first pretrained with large-scale real and simulated visuo-tactile trajectories, and then finetuned with real-world policy rollouts to better match downstream manipulation behaviors. Given robot actions, ViTacWorld predicts temporally aligned visual observations and tactile feedback, enabling visuo-tactile-action rollout generation. To the best of our knowledge, ViTacWorld is the first framework that uses a world model for robot visuo-tactile-action trajectory generation and policy evaluation. It serves two roles: synthesizing rollouts to improve downstream tactile policies, and evaluating policies by predicting action-conditioned visuo-tactile outcomes under controlled action sequences. Experiments on contact-rich manipulation tasks show that ViTacWorld generates physically meaningful rollouts, improves policy performance through scalable data augmentation, and enables action-conditioned policy evaluation. Project page: https://vitacworld.github.io/

cs.RO

ComplLLM: Fine-tuning LLMs to Discover Complementary Signals for Decision-making

Multi-agent decision pipelines can outperform single agent workflows when complementarity holds, i.e., different agents bring unique information to the table to inform a final decision. We propose ComplLLM, a post-training framework based on decision theory that fine-tunes a decision-assistant LLM using complementary information as reward to output signals that complement existing agent decisions. We validate ComplLLM on synthetic and real-world tasks involving domain experts, demonstrating how the approach recovers known complementary information and produces plausible explanations of complementary signals to support downstream decision-makers.

cs.AI

Explanations are a Means to an End: Decision Theoretic Explanation Evaluation

Explanations of model behavior are commonly evaluated via proxy properties weakly tied to the purposes explanations serve in practice. We contribute a decision theoretic framework that treats explanations as information signals valued by the expected improvement they enable on a specified decision task. This approach yields three distinct estimands: 1) a theoretical benchmark that upperbounds achievable performance by any agent with the explanation, 2) a human-complementary value that quantifies the theoretically attainable value that is not already captured by a baseline human decision policy, and 3) a behavioral value representing the causal effect of providing the explanation to human decision-makers. We instantiate these definitions in a practical validation workflow, and apply them to assess explanation potential and interpret behavioral effects in human-AI decision support and mechanistic interpretability.

cs.AI

Explaining and Improving Information Complementarities in Multi-Agent Decision-making

Multiple agents are increasingly combined to make decisions with the expectation of achieving complementary performance, where the decisions they make together outperform those made individually. However, knowing how to improve the performance of collaborating agents requires knowing what information and strategies each agent employs. With a focus on human-AI pairings, we contribute a decision-theoretic framework for characterizing the value of information. By defining complementary information, our approach identifies opportunities for agents to better exploit available information in AI-assisted decision workflows. We present a novel explanation technique (ILIV-SHAP) that adapts SHAP explanations to highlight human-complementing information. We validate the effectiveness of our framework and ILIV-SHAP through a study of human-AI decision-making, and demonstrate the framework on examples from chest X-ray diagnosis and deepfake detection. We find that presenting ILIV-SHAP with AI predictions leads to reliably greater reductions in error over non-AI assisted decisions more than vanilla SHAP.

cs.AI

Learning Multi-Access Point Coordination in Agentic AI Wi-Fi with Large Language Models

Multi-access point coordination (MAPC) is a key technology for enhancing throughput in next-generation Wi-Fi within dense overlapping basic service sets. However, existing MAPC protocols rely on static, protocol-defined rules, which limits their ability to adapt to dynamic network conditions such as varying interference levels and topologies. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Agentic AI Wi-Fi framework where each access point, modeled as an autonomous large language model agent, collaboratively reasons about the network state and negotiates adaptive coordination strategies in real time. This dynamic collaboration is achieved through a cognitive workflow that enables the agents to engage in natural language dialogue, leveraging integrated memory, reflection, and tool use to ground their decisions in past experience and environmental feedback. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that our agentic framework successfully learns to adapt to diverse and dynamic network environments, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art spatial reuse baseline and validating its potential as a robust and intelligent solution for future wireless networks.

cs.AI

A Decision Theoretic Framework for Measuring AI Reliance

Humans frequently make decisions with the aid of artificially intelligent (AI) systems. A common pattern is for the AI to recommend an action to the human who retains control over the final decision. Researchers have identified ensuring that a human has appropriate reliance on an AI as a critical component of achieving complementary performance. We argue that the current definition of appropriate reliance used in such research lacks formal statistical grounding and can lead to contradictions. We propose a formal definition of reliance, based on statistical decision theory, which separates the concepts of reliance as the probability the decision-maker follows the AI's recommendation from challenges a human may face in differentiating the signals and forming accurate beliefs about the situation. Our definition gives rise to a framework that can be used to guide the design and interpretation of studies on human-AI complementarity and reliance. Using recent AI-advised decision making studies from literature, we demonstrate how our framework can be used to separate the loss due to mis-reliance from the loss due to not accurately differentiating the signals. We evaluate these losses by comparing to a baseline and a benchmark for complementary performance defined by the expected payoff achieved by a rational decision-maker facing the same decision task as the behavioral decision-makers.

cs.AI

Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Distributed Channel Access in WLANs

This paper investigates the use of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to address distributed channel access in wireless local area networks. In particular, we consider the challenging yet more practical case where the agents heterogeneously adopt value-based or policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms to train the model. We propose a heterogeneous MARL training framework, named QPMIX, which adopts a centralized training with distributed execution paradigm to enable heterogeneous agents to collaborate. Moreover, we theoretically prove the convergence of the proposed heterogeneous MARL method when using the linear value function approximation. Our method maximizes the network throughput and ensures fairness among stations, therefore, enhancing the overall network performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed QPMIX algorithm improves throughput, mean delay, delay jitter, and collision rates compared with conventional carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism in the saturated traffic scenario. Furthermore, the QPMIX algorithm is robust in unsaturated and delay-sensitive traffic scenarios. It coexists well with the conventional CSMA/CA mechanism and promotes cooperation among heterogeneous agents.

cs.LG

Conformal Prediction and Human Decision Making

Methods to quantify uncertainty in predictions from arbitrary models are in demand in high-stakes domains like medicine and finance. Conformal prediction has emerged as a popular method for producing a set of predictions with specified average coverage, in place of a single prediction and confidence value. However, the value of conformal prediction sets to assist human decisions remains elusive due to the murky relationship between coverage guarantees and decision makers' goals and strategies. How should we think about conformal prediction sets as a form of decision support? We outline a decision theoretic framework for evaluating predictive uncertainty as informative signals, then contrast what can be said within this framework about idealized use of calibrated probabilities versus conformal prediction sets. Informed by prior empirical results and theories of human decisions under uncertainty, we formalize a set of possible strategies by which a decision maker might use a prediction set. We identify ways in which conformal prediction sets and posthoc predictive uncertainty quantification more broadly are in tension with common goals and needs in human-AI decision making. We give recommendations for future research in predictive uncertainty quantification to support human decision makers.

cs.LG

Unexploited Information Value in Human-AI Collaboration

Humans and AIs are often paired on decision tasks with the expectation of achieving complementary performance -- where the combination of human and AI outperforms either one alone. However, how to improve performance of a human-AI team is often not clear without knowing more about what particular information and strategies each agent employs. In this paper, we propose a model based in statistical decision theory to analyze human-AI collaboration from the perspective of what information could be used to improve a human or AI decision. We demonstrate our model on a deepfake detection task to investigate seven video-level features by their unexploited value of information. We compare the human alone, AI alone and human-AI team and offer insights on how the AI assistance impacts people's usage of the information and what information that the AI exploits well might be useful for improving human decisions.

cs.HC

VMC: A Grammar for Visualizing Statistical Model Checks

Visualizations play a critical role in validating and improving statistical models. However, the design space of model check visualizations is not well understood, making it difficult for authors to explore and specify effective graphical model checks. VMC defines a model check visualization using four components: (1) samples of distributions of checkable quantities generated from the model, including predictive distributions for new data and distributions of model parameters; (2) transformations on observed data to facilitate comparison; (3) visual representations of distributions; and (4) layouts to facilitate comparing model samples and observed data. We contribute an implementation of VMC as an R package. We validate VMC by reproducing a set of canonical model check examples, and show how using VMC to generate model checks reduces the edit distance between visualizations relative to existing visualization toolkits. The findings of an interview study with three expert modelers who used VMC highlight challenges and opportunities for encouraging exploration of correct, effective model check visualizations.

cs.HC

EVM: Incorporating Model Checking into Exploratory Visual Analysis

Visual analytics (VA) tools support data exploration by helping analysts quickly and iteratively generate views of data which reveal interesting patterns. However, these tools seldom enable explicit checks of the resulting interpretations of data -- e.g., whether patterns can be accounted for by a model that implies a particular structure in the relationships between variables. We present EVM, a data exploration tool that enables users to express and check provisional interpretations of data in the form of statistical models. EVM integrates support for visualization-based model checks by rendering distributions of model predictions alongside user-generated views of data. In a user study with data scientists practicing in the private and public sector, we evaluate how model checks influence analysts' thinking during data exploration. Our analysis characterizes how participants use model checks to scrutinize expectations about data generating process and surfaces further opportunities to scaffold model exploration in VA tools.

cs.HC

The Rational Agent Benchmark for Data Visualization

Understanding how helpful a visualization is from experimental results is difficult because the observed performance is confounded with aspects of the study design, such as how useful the information that is visualized is for the task. We develop a rational agent framework for designing and interpreting visualization experiments. Our framework conceives two experiments with the same setup: one with behavioral agents (human subjects), and the other one with a hypothetical rational agent. A visualization is evaluated by comparing the expected performance of behavioral agents to that of a rational agent under different assumptions. Using recent visualization decision studies from the literature, we demonstrate how the framework can be used to pre-experimentally evaluate the experiment design by bounding the expected improvement in performance from having access to visualizations, and post-experimentally to deconfound errors of information extraction from errors of optimization, among other analyses.

cs.HC

Beep: Balancing Effectiveness and Efficiency when Finding Multivariate Patterns in Racket Sports

Modeling each hit as a multivariate event in racket sports and conducting sequential analysis aids in assessing player/team performance and identifying successful tactics for coaches and analysts. However, the complex correlations among multiple event attributes require pattern mining algorithms to be highly effective and efficient. This paper proposes Beep to discover meaningful multivariate patterns in racket sports. In particular, Beep introduces a new encoding scheme to discover patterns with correlations among multiple attributes and high-level tolerances of noise. Moreover, Beep applies an algorithm based on LSH (Locality-Sensitive Hashing) to accelerate summarizing patterns. We conducted a case study on a table tennis dataset and quantitative experiments on multi-scaled synthetic datasets to compare Beep with the SOTA multivariate pattern mining algorithm. Results showed that Beep can effectively discover patterns and noises to help analysts gain insights. Moreover, Beep was about five times faster than the SOTA algorithm.

cs.DB

Learning-based Autonomous Channel Access in the Presence of Hidden Terminals

We consider the problem of autonomous channel access (AutoCA), where a group of terminals tries to discover a communication strategy with an access point (AP) via a common wireless channel in a distributed fashion. Due to the irregular topology and the limited communication range of terminals, a practical challenge for AutoCA is the hidden terminal problem, which is notorious in wireless networks for deteriorating the throughput and delay performances. To meet the challenge, this paper presents a new multi-agent deep reinforcement learning paradigm, dubbed MADRL-HT, tailored for AutoCA in the presence of hidden terminals. MADRL-HT exploits topological insights and transforms the observation space of each terminal into a scalable form independent of the number of terminals. To compensate for the partial observability, we put forth a look-back mechanism such that the terminals can infer behaviors of their hidden terminals from the carrier sensed channel states as well as feedback from the AP. A window-based global reward function is proposed, whereby the terminals are instructed to maximize the system throughput while balancing the terminals' transmission opportunities over the course of learning. Extensive numerical experiments verified the superior performance of our solution benchmarked against the legacy carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol.

cs.LG

RASIPAM: Interactive Pattern Mining of Multivariate Event Sequences in Racket Sports

Experts in racket sports like tennis and badminton use tactical analysis to gain insight into competitors' playing styles. Many data-driven methods apply pattern mining to racket sports data -- which is often recorded as multivariate event sequences -- to uncover sports tactics. However, tactics obtained in this way are often inconsistent with those deduced by experts through their domain knowledge, which can be confusing to those experts. This work introduces RASIPAM, a RAcket-Sports Interactive PAttern Mining system, which allows experts to incorporate their knowledge into data mining algorithms to discover meaningful tactics interactively. RASIPAM consists of a constraint-based pattern mining algorithm that responds to the analysis demands of experts: Experts provide suggestions for finding tactics in intuitive written language, and these suggestions are translated into constraints to run the algorithm. RASIPAM further introduces a tailored visual interface that allows experts to compare the new tactics with the original ones and decide whether to apply a given adjustment. This interactive workflow iteratively progresses until experts are satisfied with all tactics. We conduct a quantitative experiment to show that our algorithm supports real-time interaction. Two case studies in tennis and in badminton respectively, each involving two domain experts, are conducted to show the effectiveness and usefulness of the system.

cs.HC

Deep Learning Based MAC via Joint Channel Access and Rate Adaptation

The existing medium access control (MAC) protocol of Wi-Fi networks (i.e., carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA)) suffers from poor performance in dense deployments due to the increasing number of collisions and long average backoff time in such scenarios. To tackle this issue, we propose an intelligent wireless MAC protocol based on deep learning (DL), referred to as DL-MAC, which significantly improves the spectrum efficiency of Wi-Fi networks. The goal of DL-MAC is to enable not only intelligent channel access but also intelligent rate adaptation. To achieve this goal, we design a deep neural network (DNN) that takes the historical received signal strength indications (RSSIs) as inputs and outputs joint channel access and rate adaptation decision. Notably, the proposed DL-MAC takes the constraints of practical applications into account and the DL-MAC is evaluated using the real wireless data sampled from the actual environments on the 2.4GHz frequency band. The experimental results show that our DL-MAC can achieve around 86\% performance of the global optimal MAC, and around the double performance of the traditional Wi-Fi MAC in the environments of our lab and the Shenzhen Baoan International Airport departure hall.

cs.IT

Time Synchronization Attack and Countermeasure for Multi-System Scheduling in Remote Estimation

We consider time synchronization attack against multi-system scheduling in a remote state estimation scenario where a number of sensors monitor different linear dynamical processes and schedule their transmissions through a shared collision channel. We show that by randomly injecting relative time offsets on the sensors, the malicious attacker is able to make the expected estimation error covariance of the overall system diverge without any system knowledge. For the case that the attacker has full system information, we propose an efficient algorithm to calculate the optimal attack, which spoofs the least number of sensors and leads to unbounded average estimation error covariance. To mitigate the attack consequence, we further propose a countermeasure by constructing shift invariant transmission policies and characterize the lower and upper bounds for system estimation performance. Simulation examples are provided to illustrate the obtained results.

eess.SY