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Cheng Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Cheng Chen.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

CodeDelegator: Mitigating Context Pollution via Role Separation in Code-as-Action Agents

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) allow agents to represent actions as executable code, offering greater expressivity than traditional tool-calling. However, real-world tasks often demand both strategic planning and detailed implementation. Using a single agent for both leads to context pollution from debugging traces and intermediate failures, impairing long-horizon performance. We propose CodeDelegator, a multi-agent framework that separates planning from implementation via role specialization. A persistent Delegator maintains strategic oversight by decomposing tasks, writing specifications, and monitoring progress without executing code. For each sub-task, a new Coder agent is instantiated with a clean context containing only its specification, shielding it from prior failures. To coordinate between agents, we introduce Ephemeral-Persistent State Separation (EPSS), which isolates each Coder's execution state while preserving global coherence, preventing debugging traces from polluting the Delegator's context. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CodeDelegator across diverse scenarios.

cs.CL↗

RidgeWalker: Perfectly Pipelined Graph Random Walks on FPGAs

Graph Random Walks (GRWs) offer efficient approximations of key graph properties and have been widely adopted in many applications. However, GRW workloads are notoriously difficult to accelerate due to their strong data dependencies, irregular memory access patterns, and imbalanced execution behavior. While recent work explores FPGA-based accelerators for GRWs, existing solutions fall far short of hardware potential due to inefficient pipelining and static scheduling. This paper presents RidgeWalker, a high-performance GRW accelerator designed for datacenter FPGAs. The key insight behind RidgeWalker is that the Markov property of GRWs allows decomposition into stateless, fine-grained tasks that can be executed out-of-order without compromising correctness. Building on this, RidgeWalker introduces an asynchronous pipeline architecture with a feedback-driven scheduler grounded in queuing theory, enabling perfect pipelining and adaptive load balancing. We prototype RidgeWalker on datacenter FPGAs and evaluated it across a range of GRW algorithms and real-world graph datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RidgeWalker achieves an average speedup of 7.0x over state-of-the-art FPGA solutions and 8.1x over GPU solutions, with peak speedups of up to 71.0x and 22.9x, respectively. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/RidgeWalker.

cs.AR↗

Fourier-Jacobi models for real symplectic-metaplectic groups: the basic case

In this paper, we generalize the method of Gan-Ichino and Atobe in [GI16][A18] to the field of real numbers and prove the basic tempered case of the local Gan-Gross-Prasad conjecture for Fourier-Jacobi models of symplectic-metaplectic groups, based on the tempered case of the conjecture for Bessel models proved in [CL22] by Chen-Luo.

math.NT↗

On the orbital evolution of binaries with polar circumbinary disks

Binaries occur in many astrophysical systems, from young protostellar binaries in star forming regions to supermassive black hole binaries in galaxy centers. In many cases, a circumbinary disk of gas forms around the binary with an orbit that may be misaligned to the binary plane. Misaligned disks around nearly circular binaries evolve into disks that are either aligned or counteraligned with the binary orbit. However, if the binary is sufficiently eccentric, then it can be more likely that the disk ends up in a polar-aligned configuration in which the disk angular momentum vector aligns with the binary eccentricity vector. We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations, evolved to an approximate steady state under mass injection, to determine the orbital evolution of a binary with a polar-aligned disk for a range of binary-disk parameters. We find that, in all of the cases we have simulated, the binary shrinks with time. The decay rate is larger than for binaries surrounded by aligned or retrograde disks with matched disk parameters. The rate of shrinkage is largely unaltered by the size of the sink radii employed for the binary stars, but for small enough sink radii some of the models exhibit long-lived polar circumprimary disks, which are continually fed mass from the circumbinary disk. We discuss our results in the contexts of planet formation in young polar-aligned disks and merging supermassive black holes in galaxy centers.

astro-ph.EP↗

Multi-Subspace Multi-Modal Modeling for Diffusion Models: Estimation, Convergence and Mixture of Experts

Recently, diffusion models have achieved a great performance with a small dataset of size $n$ and a fast optimization process. However, the estimation error of diffusion models suffers from the curse of dimensionality $n^{-1/D}$ with the data dimension $D$. Since images are usually a union of low-dimensional manifolds, current works model the data as a union of linear subspaces with Gaussian latent and achieve a $1/\sqrt{n}$ bound. Though this modeling reflects the multi-manifold property, the Gaussian latent can not capture the multi-modal property of the latent manifold. To bridge this gap, we propose the mixture subspace of low-rank mixture of Gaussian (MoLR-MoG) modeling, which models the target data as a union of $K$ linear subspaces, and each subspace admits a mixture of Gaussian latent ($n_k$ modals with dimension $d_k$). With this modeling, the corresponding score function naturally has a mixture of expert (MoE) structure, captures the multi-modal information, and contains nonlinear property. We first conduct real-world experiments to show that the generation results of MoE-latent MoG NN are much better than MoE-latent Gaussian score. Furthermore, MoE-latent MoG NN achieves a comparable performance with MoE-latent Unet with $10 \times$ parameters. These results indicate that the MoLR-MoG modeling is reasonable and suitable for real-world data. After that, based on such MoE-latent MoG score, we provide a $R^4\sqrt{Σ_{k=1}^Kn_k}\sqrt{Σ_{k=1}^Kn_kd_k}/\sqrt{n}$ estimation error, which escapes the curse of dimensionality by using data structure. Finally, we study the optimization process and prove the convergence guarantee under the MoLR-MoG modeling. Combined with these results, under a setting close to real-world data, this work explains why diffusion models only require a small training sample and enjoy a fast optimization process to achieve a great performance.

cs.LG↗

A Near-optimal, Scalable and Parallelizable Framework for Stochastic Bandits Robust to Adversarial Corruptions and Beyond

We investigate various stochastic bandit problems in the presence of adversarial corruptions. A seminal work for this problem is the BARBAR~\cite{gupta2019better} algorithm, which achieves both robustness and efficiency. However, it suffers from a regret of $O(KC)$, which does not match the lower bound of $Ω(C)$, where $K$ denotes the number of arms and $C$ denotes the corruption level. In this paper, we first improve the BARBAR algorithm by proposing a novel framework called BARBAT, which eliminates the factor of $K$ to achieve an optimal regret bound up to a logarithmic factor. We also extend BARBAT to various settings, including multi-agent bandits, graph bandits, combinatorial semi-bandits and batched bandits. Compared with the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader framework, our methods are more amenable to parallelization, making them suitable for multi-agent and batched bandit settings, and they incur lower computational costs, particularly in semi-bandit problems. Numerical experiments verify the efficiency of the proposed methods.

cs.LG↗

The World is Your Canvas: Painting Promptable Events with Reference Images, Trajectories, and Text

We present WorldCanvas, a framework for promptable world events that enables rich, user-directed simulation by combining text, trajectories, and reference images. Unlike text-only approaches and existing trajectory-controlled image-to-video methods, our multimodal approach combines trajectories -- encoding motion, timing, and visibility -- with natural language for semantic intent and reference images for visual grounding of object identity, enabling the generation of coherent, controllable events that include multi-agent interactions, object entry/exit, reference-guided appearance and counterintuitive events. The resulting videos demonstrate not only temporal coherence but also emergent consistency, preserving object identity and scene despite temporary disappearance. By supporting expressive world events generation, WorldCanvas advances world models from passive predictors to interactive, user-shaped simulators. Our project page is available at: https://worldcanvas.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

Near-Zero-Overhead Freshness for Recommendation Systems via Inference-Side Model Updates

Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) underpin personalized services but face a critical freshness-accuracy tradeoff due to massive parameter synchronization overheads. Production DLRMs deploy decoupled training/inference clusters, where synchronizing petabyte-scale embedding tables (EMTs) causes multi-minute staleness, degrading recommendation quality and revenue. We observe that (1) inference nodes exhibit sustained CPU underutilization (peak <= 20%), and (2) EMT gradients possess intrinsic low-rank structure, enabling compact update representation. We present LiveUpdate, a system that eliminates inter-cluster synchronization by colocating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) trainers within inference nodes. LiveUpdate addresses two core challenges: (1) dynamic rank adaptation via singular value monitoring to constrain memory overhead (<2% of EMTs), and (2) NUMA-aware resource scheduling with hardware-enforced QoS to eliminate update inference contention (P99 latency impact <20ms). Evaluations show LiveUpdate reduces update costs by 2x versus delta-update baselines while achieving higher accuracy within 1-hour windows. By transforming idle inference resources into freshness engines, LiveUpdate delivers online model updates while outperforming state-of-the-art delta-update methods by 0.04% to 0.24% in accuracy.

cs.DC↗

Unleashing the Power of Image-Tabular Self-Supervised Learning via Breaking Cross-Tabular Barriers

Multi-modal learning integrating medical images and tabular data has significantly advanced clinical decision-making in recent years. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for pretraining these models on large-scale unlabeled image-tabular data, aiming to learn discriminative representations. However, existing SSL methods for image-tabular representation learning are often confined to specific data cohorts, mainly due to their rigid tabular modeling mechanisms when modeling heterogeneous tabular data. This inter-tabular barrier hinders the multi-modal SSL methods from effectively learning transferrable medical knowledge shared across diverse cohorts. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL framework, namely CITab, designed to learn powerful multi-modal feature representations in a cross-tabular manner. We design the tabular modeling mechanism from a semantic-awareness perspective by integrating column headers as semantic cues, which facilitates transferrable knowledge learning and the scalability in utilizing multiple data sources for pretraining. Additionally, we propose a prototype-guided mixture-of-linear layer (P-MoLin) module for tabular feature specialization, empowering the model to effectively handle the heterogeneity of tabular data and explore the underlying medical concepts. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on Alzheimer's disease diagnosis task across three publicly available data cohorts containing 4,461 subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that CITab outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, paving the way for effective and scalable cross-tabular multi-modal learning.

cs.CV↗

ViSA: 3D-Aware Video Shading for Real-Time Upper-Body Avatar Creation

Generating high-fidelity upper-body 3D avatars from one-shot input image remains a significant challenge. Current 3D avatar generation methods, which rely on large reconstruction models, are fast and capable of producing stable body structures, but they often suffer from artifacts such as blurry textures and stiff, unnatural motion. In contrast, generative video models show promising performance by synthesizing photorealistic and dynamic results, but they frequently struggle with unstable behavior, including body structural errors and identity drift. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach that combines the strengths of both paradigms. Our framework employs a 3D reconstruction model to provide robust structural and appearance priors, which in turn guides a real-time autoregressive video diffusion model for rendering. This process enables the model to synthesize high-frequency, photorealistic details and fluid dynamics in real time, effectively reducing texture blur and motion stiffness while preventing the structural inconsistencies common in video generation methods. By uniting the geometric stability of 3D reconstruction with the generative capabilities of video models, our method produces high-fidelity digital avatars with realistic appearance and dynamic, temporally coherent motion. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces artifacts and achieves substantial improvements in visual quality over leading methods, providing a robust and efficient solution for real-time applications such as gaming and virtual reality. Project page: https://lhyfst.github.io/visa

cs.CV↗

From Observations to Parameters: Detecting Changepoint in Nonlinear Dynamics with Simulation-based Inference

Detecting regime shifts in chaotic time series is hard because observation-space signals are entangled with intrinsic variability. We propose Parameter--Space Changepoint Detection (Param--CPD), a two--stage framework that first amortizes Bayesian inference of governing parameters with a neural posterior estimator trained by simulation-based inference, and then applies a standard CPD algorithm to the resulting parameter trajectory. On Lorenz--63 with piecewise-constant parameters, Param--CPD improves F1, reduces localization error, and lowers false positives compared to observation--space baselines. We further verify identifiability and calibration of the inferred posteriors on stationary trajectories, explaining why parameter space offers a cleaner detection signal. Robustness analyses over tolerance, window length, and noise indicate consistent gains. Our results show that operating in a physically interpretable parameter space enables accurate and interpretable changepoint detection in nonlinear dynamical systems.

cs.LG↗

CuES: A Curiosity-driven and Environment-grounded Synthesis Framework for Agentic RL

Large language model based agents are increasingly deployed in complex, tool augmented environments. While reinforcement learning provides a principled mechanism for such agents to improve through interaction, its effectiveness critically depends on the availability of structured training tasks. In many realistic settings, however, no such tasks exist a challenge we term task scarcity, which has become a key bottleneck for scaling agentic RL. Existing approaches typically assume predefined task collections, an assumption that fails in novel environments where tool semantics and affordances are initially unknown. To address this limitation, we formalize the problem of Task Generation for Agentic RL, where an agent must learn within a given environment that lacks predefined tasks. We propose CuES, a Curiosity driven and Environment grounded Synthesis framework that autonomously generates diverse, executable, and meaningful tasks directly from the environment structure and affordances, without relying on handcrafted seeds or external corpora. CuES drives exploration through intrinsic curiosity, abstracts interaction patterns into reusable task schemas, and refines them through lightweight top down guidance and memory based quality control. Across three representative environments, AppWorld, BFCL, and WebShop, CuES produces task distributions that match or surpass manually curated datasets in both diversity and executability, yielding substantial downstream policy improvements. These results demonstrate that curiosity driven, environment grounded task generation provides a scalable foundation for agents that not only learn how to act, but also learn what to learn. The code is available at https://github.com/modelscope/AgentEvolver/tree/main/research/CuES.

cs.AI↗

PhyCustom: Towards Realistic Physical Customization in Text-to-Image Generation

Recent diffusion-based text-to-image customization methods have achieved significant success in understanding concrete concepts to control generation processes, such as styles and shapes. However, few efforts dive into the realistic yet challenging customization of physical concepts. The core limitation of current methods arises from the absence of explicitly introducing physical knowledge during training. Even when physics-related words appear in the input text prompts, our experiments consistently demonstrate that these methods fail to accurately reflect the corresponding physical properties in the generated results. In this paper, we propose PhyCustom, a fine-tuning framework comprising two novel regularization losses to activate diffusion model to perform physical customization. Specifically, the proposed isometric loss aims at activating diffusion models to learn physical concepts while decouple loss helps to eliminate the mixture learning of independent concepts. Experiments are conducted on a diverse dataset and our benchmark results demonstrate that PhyCustom outperforms previous state-of-the-art and popular methods in terms of physical customization quantitatively and qualitatively.

cs.CV↗

SwiftVLA: Unlocking Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Lightweight VLA Models at Minimal Overhead

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models built on pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show strong potential but are limited in practicality due to their large parameter counts. To mitigate this issue, using a lightweight VLM has been explored, but it compromises spatiotemporal reasoning. Although some methods suggest that incorporating additional 3D inputs can help, they usually rely on large VLMs to fuse 3D and 2D inputs and still lack temporal understanding. Therefore, we propose SwiftVLA, an architecture that enhances a compact model with 4D understanding while preserving design efficiency. Specifically, our approach features a pretrained 4D visual geometry transformer with a temporal cache that extracts 4D features from 2D images. Then, to enhance the VLM's ability to exploit both 2D images and 4D features, we introduce Fusion Tokens, a set of learnable tokens trained with a future prediction objective to generate unified representations for action generation. Finally, we introduce a mask-and-reconstruct strategy that masks 4D inputs to the VLM and trains the VLA to reconstruct them, enabling the VLM to learn effective 4D representations and allowing the 4D branch to be dropped at inference with minimal performance loss. Experiments in real and simulated environments show that SwiftVLA outperforms lightweight baselines and rivals VLAs up to 7 times larger, achieving comparable performance on edge devices while being 18 times faster and reducing memory footprint by 12 times.

cs.CV↗

Domain adaptation of large language models for geotechnical applications

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) is transforming opportunities in geotechnical engineering, where workflows rely on complex, text-rich data. While general-purpose LLMs demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, their effectiveness in geotechnical applications is constrained by limited exposure to specialized terminology and domain logic. Thus, domain adaptation, tailoring general LLMs for geotechnical use, has become essential. This paper presents the first systematic review of LLM adaptation and application in geotechnical contexts. It critically examines four key adaptation strategies, including prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation, domain-adaptive pretraining, and fine-tuning, and evaluates their comparative benefits, limitations, and implementation trends. This review synthesizes current applications spanning geological interpretation, subsurface characterization, design analysis, numerical modeling, risk assessment, and geotechnical education. Findings show that domain-adapted LLMs substantially improve reasoning accuracy, automation, and interpretability, yet remain limited by data scarcity, validation challenges, and explainability concerns. Future research directions are also suggested. This review establishes a critical foundation for developing geotechnically literate LLMs and guides researchers and practitioners in advancing the digital transformation of geotechnical engineering.

cs.AI↗

SAM3-Adapter: Efficient Adaptation of Segment Anything 3 for Camouflage Object Segmentation, Shadow Detection, and Medical Image Segmentation

The rapid rise of large-scale foundation models has reshaped the landscape of image segmentation, with models such as Segment Anything achieving unprecedented versatility across diverse vision tasks. However, previous generations-including SAM and its successor-still struggle with fine-grained, low-level segmentation challenges such as camouflaged object detection, medical image segmentation, cell image segmentation, and shadow detection. To address these limitations, we originally proposed SAM-Adapter in 2023, demonstrating substantial gains on these difficult scenarios. With the emergence of Segment Anything 3 (SAM3)-a more efficient and higher-performing evolution with a redesigned architecture and improved training pipeline-we revisit these long-standing challenges. In this work, we present SAM3-Adapter, the first adapter framework tailored for SAM3 that unlocks its full segmentation capability. SAM3-Adapter not only reduces computational overhead but also consistently surpasses both SAM and SAM2-based solutions, establishing new state-of-the-art results across multiple downstream tasks, including medical imaging, camouflaged (concealed) object segmentation, and shadow detection. Built upon the modular and composable design philosophy of the original SAM-Adapter, SAM3-Adapter provides stronger generalizability, richer task adaptability, and significantly improved segmentation precision. Extensive experiments confirm that integrating SAM3 with our adapter yields superior accuracy, robustness, and efficiency compared to all prior SAM-based adaptations. We hope SAM3-Adapter can serve as a foundation for future research and practical segmentation applications. Code, pre-trained models, and data processing pipelines are available.

cs.CV↗

Vision-Only Gaussian Splatting for Collaborative Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Collaborative perception enables connected vehicles to share information, overcoming occlusions and extending the limited sensing range inherent in single-agent (non-collaborative) systems. Existing vision-only methods for 3D semantic occupancy prediction commonly rely on dense 3D voxels, which incur high communication costs, or 2D planar features, which require accurate depth estimation or additional supervision, limiting their applicability to collaborative scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the first approach leveraging sparse 3D semantic Gaussian splatting for collaborative 3D semantic occupancy prediction. By sharing and fusing intermediate Gaussian primitives, our method provides three benefits: a neighborhood-based cross-agent fusion that removes duplicates and suppresses noisy or inconsistent Gaussians; a joint encoding of geometry and semantics in each primitive, which reduces reliance on depth supervision and allows simple rigid alignment; and sparse, object-centric messages that preserve structural information while reducing communication volume. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms single-agent perception and baseline collaborative methods by +8.42 and +3.28 points in mIoU, and +5.11 and +22.41 points in IoU, respectively. When further reducing the number of transmitted Gaussians, our method still achieves a +1.9 improvement in mIoU, using only 34.6% communication volume, highlighting robust performance under limited communication budgets.

cs.CV↗

Robust Decentralized Multi-armed Bandits: From Corruption-Resilience to Byzantine-Resilience

Decentralized cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandits (DeCMA2B) considers how multiple agents collaborate in a decentralized multi-armed bandit setting. Though this problem has been extensively studied in previous work, most existing methods remain susceptible to various adversarial attacks. In this paper, we first study DeCMA2B with adversarial corruption, where an adversary can corrupt reward observations of all agents with a limited corruption budget. We propose a robust algorithm, called DeMABAR, which ensures that each agent's individual regret suffers only an additive term proportional to the corruption budget. Then we consider a more realistic scenario where the adversary can only attack a small number of agents. Our theoretical analysis shows that the DeMABAR algorithm can also almost completely eliminate the influence of adversarial attacks and is inherently robust in the Byzantine setting, where an unknown fraction of the agents can be Byzantine, i.e., may arbitrarily select arms and communicate wrong information. We also conduct numerical experiments to illustrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.LG↗