arXiv subjects

Ziying Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ziying Zhang.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beyond Coherence: Benchmarking Professional Editing-Technique Execution in Multi-Shot Audio-Video Generation

Recent multi-shot audio-video generators can produce increasingly coherent and cinematic outputs, but coherence does not imply the ability to execute editing techniques. Professional editing depends on shot structure, transition grammar, audio-video cut relations, and montage, yet existing benchmarks largely rely on proxies such as content quality, synchronization, or physical plausibility, systematically missing whether such editing instructions are actually executed. We introduce CutCraft, the first benchmark for editing-technique execution in multi-shot audio-video generation. CutCraft extends structured multi-shot prompts with explicit editing specifications and is paired with a hierarchical hybrid evaluation framework that combines shot-structure alignment, expert-model metrics, tool-grounded multimodal judgment, and rubric-based question answering. Beyond evaluation, we design an agentic editing baseline that decomposes generation into planning, shot-level synthesis, and post-hoc composition, explicitly realizing editing semantics such as J-cuts, L-cuts, and transition timing. Across 13 state-of-the-art closed- and open-source models, CutCraft reveals a consistent gap between coherence and editing-technique execution: current systems often produce plausible multi-shot videos yet fail to execute editorial instructions reliably. We find unstable shot structures, weak control of transition execution, and sharp degradation on higher-order montage, while aesthetic quality is only weakly correlated with editing-technique compliance. The benchmark and metrics, and the editing agent baseline are available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/cut-craft-bench.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Tora3: Trajectory-Guided Audio-Video Generation with Physical Coherence

Audio-video (AV) generation has recently made strong progress in perceptual quality and multimodal coherence, yet generating content with plausible motion-sound relations remains challenging. Existing methods often produce object motions that are visually unstable and sounds that are only loosely aligned with salient motion or contact events, largely because they lack an explicit motion-aware structure shared by video and audio generation. We present Tora3, a trajectory-guided AV generation framework that improves physical coherence by using object trajectories as a shared kinematic prior. Rather than treating trajectories as a video-only control signal, Tora3 uses them to jointly guide visual motion and acoustic events. Specifically, we design a trajectory-aligned motion representation for video, a kinematic-audio alignment module driven by trajectory-derived second-order kinematic states, and a hybrid flow matching scheme that preserves trajectory fidelity in trajectory-conditioned regions while maintaining local coherence elsewhere. We further curate PAV, a large-scale AV dataset emphasizing motion-relevant patterns with automatically extracted motion annotations. Extensive experiments show that Tora3 improves motion realism, motion-sound synchronization, and overall AV generation quality over strong open-source baselines. Project page: https://ali-videoai.github.io/tora3_page.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Continuity and Ordinality Matter: Constraining Time Series Tokens for Effective Time Series Analysis with Large Language Models

Token-based time series large language models (TS-LLMs) have emerged as a promising direction for time series analysis and reasoning. However, prior studies largely overlook the inherent continuity and ordinality of time series tokens, which substantially limits model performance. In this paper, we argue that preserving these properties in time series token embeddings is crucial for the effectiveness of token-based TS-LLMs. To this end, we propose COM (Continuity and Ordinality Matter), a continuity- and ordinality-aware strategy that integrates geometric constraints into both the initialization and training stages. Empirical results on multiple time series analysis benchmarks demonstrate that COM consistently improves the performance of token-based TS-LLMs, achieving competitive results and strong generalizability. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/COM .

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Searching Meta Reasoning Skeleton to Guide LLM Reasoning

Meta reasoning behaviors work as a skeleton to guide large language model (LLM) reasoning, thus help to improve reasoning performance. However, prior researches implement meta reasoning skeleton with manually designed structure, limiting ability to adapt to query-specific requirement and capture intricate logical dependency among reasoning steps. To deal with the challenges, we represent meta reasoning skeleton with directed acyclic graph (DAG) to unify skeletons proposed in prior works and model intricate logical dependency. Then we propose AutoMR, a framework that searches for query-aware meta reasoning skeleton automatically inspired by automated machine learning (AutoML). Specifically, we construct search space based on DAG representation of skeleton and then formulate the search problem. We design a dynamic skeleton sampling algorithm by expanding meta reasoning skeleton along with reasoning context at inference time. This algorithm can derive any meta reasoning skeleton in search space efficiently and adapt skeleton to evolving base reasoning context, thus enable efficient query-aware skeleton search. We conduct experiments on extensive benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that AutoMR achieves better reasoning performance than previous works broadly.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

LaTo: Landmark-tokenized Diffusion Transformer for Fine-grained Human Face Editing

Recent multimodal models for instruction-based face editing enable semantic manipulation but still struggle with precise attribute control and identity preservation. Structural facial representations such as landmarks are effective for intermediate supervision, yet most existing methods treat them as rigid geometric constraints, which can degrade identity when conditional landmarks deviate significantly from the source (e.g., large expression or pose changes, inaccurate landmark estimates). To address these limitations, we propose LaTo, a landmark-tokenized diffusion transformer for fine-grained, identity-preserving face editing. Our key innovations include: (1) a landmark tokenizer that directly quantizes raw landmark coordinates into discrete facial tokens, obviating the need for dense pixel-wise correspondence; (2) a location-mapped positional encoding and a landmark-aware classifier-free guidance that jointly facilitate flexible yet decoupled interactions among instruction, geometry, and appearance, enabling strong identity preservation; and (3) a landmark predictor that leverages vision-language models to infer target landmarks from instructions and source images, whose structured chain-of-thought improves estimation accuracy and interactive control. To mitigate data scarcity, we curate HFL-150K, to our knowledge the largest benchmark for this task, containing over 150K real face pairs with fine-grained instructions. Extensive experiments show that LaTo outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.8% in identity preservation and 4.6% in semantic consistency. Code and dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Empowered Representation Learning for Emerging Item Recommendation

In this work, we tackle the challenge of recommending emerging items, whose interactions gradually accumulate over time. Existing methods often overlook this dynamic process, typically assuming that emerging items have few or even no historical interactions. Such an assumption oversimplifies the problem, as a good model must preserve the uniqueness of emerging items while leveraging their shared patterns with established ones. To address this challenge, we propose EmerFlow, a novel LLM-empowered representation learning framework that generates distinctive embeddings for emerging items. It first enriches the raw features of emerging items through LLM reasoning, then aligns these representations with the embedding space of the existing recommendation model. Finally, new interactions are incorporated through meta-learning to refine the embeddings. This enables EmerFlow to learn expressive embeddings for emerging items from only limited interactions. Extensive experiments across diverse domains, including movies and pharmaceuticals, show that EmerFlow consistently outperforms existing methods.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Attending on Multilevel Structure of Proteins enables Accurate Prediction of Cold-Start Drug-Target Interactions

Cold-start drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction focuses on interaction between novel drugs and proteins. Previous methods typically learn transferable interaction patterns between structures of drug and proteins to tackle it. However, insight from proteomics suggest that protein have multi-level structures and they all influence the DTI. Existing works usually represent protein with only primary structures, limiting their ability to capture interactions involving higher-level structures. Inspired by this insight, we propose ColdDTI, a framework attending on protein multi-level structure for cold-start DTI prediction. We employ hierarchical attention mechanism to mine interaction between multi-level protein structures (from primary to quaternary) and drug structures at both local and global granularities. Then, we leverage mined interactions to fuse structure representations of different levels for final prediction. Our design captures biologically transferable priors, avoiding the risk of overfitting caused by excessive reliance on representation learning. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that ColdDTI consistently outperforms previous methods in cold-start settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

TD-BFR: Truncated Diffusion Model for Efficient Blind Face Restoration

Diffusion-based methodologies have shown significant potential in blind face restoration (BFR), leveraging their robust generative capabilities. However, they are often criticized for two significant problems: 1) slow training and inference speed, and 2) inadequate recovery of fine-grained facial details. To address these problems, we propose a novel Truncated Diffusion model for efficient Blind Face Restoration (TD-BFR), a three-stage paradigm tailored for the progressive resolution of degraded images. Specifically, TD-BFR utilizes an innovative truncated sampling method, starting from low-quality (LQ) images at low resolution to enhance sampling speed, and then introduces an adaptive degradation removal module to handle unknown degradations and connect the generation processes across different resolutions. Additionally, we further adapt the priors of pre-trained diffusion models to recover rich facial details. Our method efficiently restores high-quality images in a coarse-to-fine manner and experimental results demonstrate that TD-BFR is, on average, \textbf{4.75$\times$} faster than current state-of-the-art diffusion-based BFR methods while maintaining competitive quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

DR2: Diffusion-based Robust Degradation Remover for Blind Face Restoration

Blind face restoration usually synthesizes degraded low-quality data with a pre-defined degradation model for training, while more complex cases could happen in the real world. This gap between the assumed and actual degradation hurts the restoration performance where artifacts are often observed in the output. However, it is expensive and infeasible to include every type of degradation to cover real-world cases in the training data. To tackle this robustness issue, we propose Diffusion-based Robust Degradation Remover (DR2) to first transform the degraded image to a coarse but degradation-invariant prediction, then employ an enhancement module to restore the coarse prediction to a high-quality image. By leveraging a well-performing denoising diffusion probabilistic model, our DR2 diffuses input images to a noisy status where various types of degradation give way to Gaussian noise, and then captures semantic information through iterative denoising steps. As a result, DR2 is robust against common degradation (e.g. blur, resize, noise and compression) and compatible with different designs of enhancement modules. Experiments in various settings show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on heavily degraded synthetic and real-world datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Boomerang Spectra of Two Classes of Power Functions via Their Differential Spectra

In EUROCRYPT 2018, Cid $et\;al.$ introduced a new concept on the cryptographic property of S-boxes to evaluate the subtleties of boomerang-style attacks. This concept was named as boomerang connectivity table (BCT for short) . For a power function, the distribution of BCT can be directly determined by its boomerang spectrum. In this paper, we investigate the boomerang spectra of two classes power functions over even characteristic finite fields via their differential spectra. The boomerang spectrum of the power function $ {x^{2^{m+1} - 1}} $ over $ {\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}} $ is determined, where $2^{m+1}-1$ is a kind of Niho exponent. The boomerang spectrum of the Gold function $G(x)=x^{2^t+1}$ over $ {\mathbb{F}_{2^n}} $ is also determined. It is shown that the Gold function has two-valued boomerang spectrum.

cs.CR↗