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Di Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Di Wang.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

GeoEyes: On-Demand Visual Focusing for Evidence-Grounded Understanding of Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

The "thinking-with-images" paradigm enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to actively explore visual scenes via zoom-in tools. This is essential for ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing VQA, where task-relevant cues are sparse and tiny. However, we observe a consistent failure mode in existing zoom-enabled MLLMs: Tool Usage Homogenization, where tool calls collapse into task-agnostic patterns, limiting effective evidence acquisition. To address this, we propose GeoEyes, a staged training framework consisting of (1) a cold-start SFT dataset, UHR Chain-of-Zoom (UHR-CoZ), which covers diverse zooming regimes, and (2) an agentic reinforcement learning method, AdaZoom-GRPO, that explicitly rewards evidence gain and answer improvement during zoom interactions. The resulting model learns on-demand zooming with proper stopping behavior and achieves substantial improvements on UHR remote sensing benchmarks, with 54.23% accuracy on XLRS-Bench.

cs.CV↗

Differentially Private Non-convex Distributionally Robust Optimization

Real-world deployments routinely face distribution shifts, group imbalances, and adversarial perturbations, under which the traditional Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework can degrade severely. Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) addresses this issue by optimizing the worst-case expected loss over an uncertainty set of distributions, offering a principled approach to robustness. Meanwhile, as training data in DRO always involves sensitive information, safeguarding it against leakage under Differential Privacy (DP) is essential. In contrast to classical DP-ERM, DP-DRO has received much less attention due to its minimax optimization structure with uncertainty constraint. To bridge the gap, we provide a comprehensive study of DP-(finite-sum)-DRO with $ψ$-divergence and non-convex loss. First, we study DRO with general $ψ$-divergence by reformulating it as a minimization problem, and develop a novel $(\varepsilon, δ)$-DP optimization method, called DP Double-Spider, tailored to this structure. Under mild assumptions, we show that it achieves a utility bound of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}+ (\frac{\sqrt{d \log (1/δ)}}{n \varepsilon})^{2/3})$ in terms of the gradient norm, where $n$ denotes the data size and $d$ denotes the model dimension. We further improve the utility rate for specific divergences. In particular, for DP-DRO with KL-divergence, by transforming the problem into a compositional finite-sum optimization problem, we develop a DP Recursive-Spider method and show that it achieves a utility bound of $\mathcal{O}((\frac{\sqrt{d \log(1/δ)}}{n\varepsilon})^{2/3} )$, matching the best-known result for non-convex DP-ERM. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform existing approaches for DP minimax optimization.

cs.LG↗

OmniEarth-Bench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Earth's Six Spheres and Cross-Spheres Interactions with Multimodal Observational Earth Data

Existing benchmarks for multimodal learning in Earth science offer limited, siloed coverage of Earth's spheres and their cross-sphere interactions, typically restricting evaluation to the human-activity sphere of atmosphere and to at most 16 tasks. These limitations: narrow-source heterogeneity (single/few data sources), constrained scientific granularity, and limited-sphere extensibility. Therefore, we introduce OmniEarth-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark that systematically spans all six spheres: atmosphere, lithosphere, oceanosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and human-activity sphere, and cross-spheres. Built with a scalable, modular-topology data inference framework and native multi-observation sources and expert-in-the-loop curation, OmniEarth-Bench produces 29,855 standardized, expert-curated annotations. All annotations are organized into a four-level hierarchy (Sphere, Scenario, Ability, Task), encompassing 109 expert-curated evaluation tasks. Experiments on 9 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with our benchmarks, where none of them reach 35% accuracy, revealing systematic gaps in Earth-system cognitive ability. The dataset and evaluation code were released at OmniEarth-Bench (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OmniEarth-Bench-B1BD).

cs.CV↗

Text Before Vision: Staged Knowledge Injection Matters for Agentic RLVR in Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Understanding

Multimodal reasoning for ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) is usually bottlenecked by visual evidence acquisition: the model necessitates localizing tiny task-relevant regions in massive pixel spaces. While Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) using zoom-in tools offers a path forward, we find that standard reinforcement learning struggles to navigate these vast visual spaces without structured domain priors. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between post-training paradigms: comparing Cold-start Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), RLVR, and Agentic RLVR on the UHR RS benchmark.Our controlled studies yield a counter-intuitive finding: high-quality Earth-science text-only QA is a primary driver of UHR visual reasoning gains. Despite lacking images, domain-specific text injects the concepts, mechanistic explanations, and decision rules necessary to guide visual evidence retrieval.Based on this, we propose a staged knowledge injection recipe: (1) cold-starting with scalable, knowledge-graph-verified Earth-science text QA to instill reasoning structures;and (2) "pre-warming" on the same hard UHR image-text examples during SFT to stabilize and amplify subsequent tool-based RL. This approach achieves a 60.40% Pass@1 on XLRS-Bench, significantly outperforming larger general purpose models (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Intern-S1) and establishing a new state-of-the-art.

cs.AI↗

Towards Universal Spatial Transcriptomics Super-Resolution: A Generalist Physically Consistent Flow Matching Framework

Spatial transcriptomics provides an unprecedented perspective for deciphering tissue spatial heterogeneity. However, high-resolution spatial transcriptomic technology remains constrained by limited gene coverage, technical complexity, and high cost. Existing spatial transcriptomics super-resolution methods from low resolution data suffer from two fundamental limitations: poor out-of-distribution generalization stemming from a neglect of inherent biological heterogeneity, and a lack of physical consistency. To address these challenges, we propose SRast, a novel physically constrained generalist framework designed for robust spatial transcriptomics super-resolution. To tackle heterogeneity, SRast employs a strategic decoupling architecture that explicitly decouples gene semantics representation from spatial geometry deconvolution, utilizing self-supervised learning to align latent distributions and mitigate cross-sample shifts. Regarding physical priors, SRast reformulates the task as ratio prediction on the simplex, performing a flow matching model to learn optimal transport-based geometric transformations that strictly enforce local mass conservation. Extensive experiments across diverse species, tissues, and platforms demonstrate that SRast achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting superior zero-shot generalization capabilities and ensuring physical consistency in recovering fine-grained biological structures.

q-bio.BM↗

What Should Feature Distillation Transfer in LLMs? A Task-Tangent Geometry View

Feature-based knowledge distillation aims to transfer intermediate representations from a teacher LLM model to a student. Existing approaches typically rely on direct feature matching or learned projections, implicitly treating representations as objects with intrinsic meaning. However, the relevance of a representation dimension is determined solely by how it affects the model's output. In this work, we propose a functional perspective on feature-based distillation. We characterize knowledge transfer in terms of the teacher's functional geometry, i.e., how its output depends on internal representations, rather than direct representation alignment. This viewpoint reveals that effective distillation need not preserve full high-dimensional features, but instead should retain dominant directions of functional contribution, naturally inducing an effective functional dimension for each task. Building on this framework, we introduce Flex-KD, an architecture-agnostic and parameter-free distillation method that transfers the teacher's functional geometry while matching the student's representational capacity. Extensive experiments across language understanding and generation benchmarks demonstrate that Flex-KD consistently outperforms existing distillation approaches, particularly under severe teacher-student dimension mismatch.

cs.CL↗

Canzona: A Unified, Asynchronous, and Load-Balanced Framework for Distributed Matrix-based Optimizers

The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) drives interest in matrix-based optimizers (e.g., Shampoo, Muon, SOAP) for their convergence efficiency; yet their requirement for holistic updates conflicts with the tensor fragmentation in distributed frameworks like Megatron. Existing solutions are suboptimal: synchronous approaches suffer from computational redundancy, while layer-wise partitioning fails to reconcile this conflict without violating the geometric constraints of efficient communication primitives. To bridge this gap, we propose Canzona, a Unified, Asynchronous, and Load-Balanced framework that decouples logical optimizer assignment from physical parameter distribution. For Data Parallelism, we introduce an alpha-Balanced Static Partitioning strategy that respects atomicity while neutralizing the load imbalance. For Tensor Parallelism, we design an Asynchronous Compute pipeline utilizing Micro-Group Scheduling to batch fragmented updates and hide reconstruction overhead. Extensive evaluations on the Qwen3 model family (up to 32B parameters) on 256 GPUs demonstrate that our approach preserves the efficiency of established parallel architectures, achieving a 1.57x speedup in end-to-end iteration time and reducing optimizer step latency by 5.8x compared to the baseline.

cs.DC↗

CL-bench: A Benchmark for Context Learning

Current language models (LMs) excel at reasoning over prompts using pre-trained knowledge. However, real-world tasks are far more complex and context-dependent: models must learn from task-specific context and leverage new knowledge beyond what is learned during pre-training to reason and resolve tasks. We term this capability context learning, a crucial ability that humans naturally possess but has been largely overlooked. To this end, we introduce CL-bench, a real-world benchmark consisting of 500 complex contexts, 1,899 tasks, and 31,607 verification rubrics, all crafted by experienced domain experts. Each task is designed such that the new content required to resolve it is contained within the corresponding context. Resolving tasks in CL-bench requires models to learn from the context, ranging from new domain-specific knowledge, rule systems, and complex procedures to laws derived from empirical data, all of which are absent from pre-training. This goes far beyond long-context tasks that primarily test retrieval or reading comprehension, and in-context learning tasks, where models learn simple task patterns via instructions and demonstrations. Our evaluations of ten frontier LMs find that models solve only 17.2% of tasks on average. Even the best-performing model, GPT-5.1, solves only 23.7%, revealing that LMs have yet to achieve effective context learning, which poses a critical bottleneck for tackling real-world, complex context-dependent tasks. CL-bench represents a step towards building LMs with this fundamental capability, making them more intelligent and advancing their deployment in real-world scenarios.

cs.CL↗

Finding Differentially Private Second Order Stationary Points in Stochastic Minimax Optimization

We provide the first study of the problem of finding differentially private (DP) second-order stationary points (SOSP) in stochastic (non-convex) minimax optimization. Existing literature either focuses only on first-order stationary points for minimax problems or on SOSP for classical stochastic minimization problems. This work provides, for the first time, a unified and detailed treatment of both empirical and population risks. Specifically, we propose a purely first-order method that combines a nested gradient descent--ascent scheme with SPIDER-style variance reduction and Gaussian perturbations to ensure privacy. A key technical device is a block-wise ($q$-period) analysis that controls the accumulation of stochastic variance and privacy noise without summing over the full iteration horizon, yielding a unified treatment of both empirical-risk and population formulations. Under standard smoothness, Hessian-Lipschitzness, and strong concavity assumptions, we establish high-probability guarantees for reaching an $(α,\sqrt{ρ_Φα})$-approximate second-order stationary point with $α= \mathcal{O}( (\frac{\sqrt{d}}{n\varepsilon})^{2/3})$ for empirical risk objectives and $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{n^{1/3}} + (\frac{\sqrt{d}}{n\varepsilon})^{1/2})$ for population objectives, matching the best known rates for private first-order stationarity.

cs.LG↗

Understanding the Impact of Differentially Private Training on Memorization of Long-Tailed Data

Recent research shows that modern deep learning models achieve high predictive accuracy partly by memorizing individual training samples. Such memorization raises serious privacy concerns, motivating the widespread adoption of differentially private training algorithms such as DP-SGD. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that DP-SGD often leads to suboptimal generalization performance, particularly on long-tailed data that contain a large number of rare or atypical samples. Despite these observations, a theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains largely unexplored, and existing differential privacy analysis are difficult to extend to the nonconvex and nonsmooth neural networks commonly used in practice. In this work, we develop the first theoretical framework for analyzing DP-SGD on long-tailed data from a feature learning perspective. We show that the test error of DP-SGD-trained models on the long-tailed subpopulation is significantly larger than the overall test error over the entire dataset. Our analysis further characterizes the training dynamics of DP-SGD, demonstrating how gradient clipping and noise injection jointly adversely affect the model's ability to memorize informative but underrepresented samples. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

cs.LG↗

Short-length Adversarial Training Helps LLMs Defend Long-length Jailbreak Attacks: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence

Jailbreak attacks against large language models (LLMs) aim to induce harmful behaviors in LLMs through carefully crafted adversarial prompts. To mitigate attacks, one way is to perform adversarial training (AT)-based alignment, i.e., training LLMs on some of the most adversarial prompts to help them learn how to behave safely under attacks. During AT, the length of adversarial prompts plays a critical role in the robustness of aligned LLMs. While long-length adversarial prompts during AT might lead to strong LLM robustness, their synthesis however is very resource-consuming, which may limit the application of LLM AT. This paper focuses on adversarial suffix jailbreak attacks and unveils that to defend against a jailbreak attack with an adversarial suffix of length $Θ(M)$, it is enough to align LLMs on prompts with adversarial suffixes of length $Θ(\sqrt{M})$. Theoretically, we analyze the adversarial in-context learning of linear transformers on linear regression tasks and prove a robust generalization bound for trained transformers. The bound depends on the term $Θ(\sqrt{M_{\text{test}}}/M_{\text{train}})$, where $M_{\text{train}}$ and $M_{\text{test}}$ are the numbers of adversarially perturbed in-context samples during training and testing. Empirically, we conduct AT on popular open-source LLMs and evaluate their robustness against jailbreak attacks of different adversarial suffix lengths. Results confirm a positive correlation between the attack success rate and the ratio of the square root of the adversarial suffix length during jailbreaking to the length during AT. Our findings show that it is practical to defend against "long-length" jailbreak attacks via efficient "short-length" AT. The code is available at https://github.com/fshp971/adv-icl.

cs.LG↗

Controlling Repetition in Protein Language Models

Protein language models (PLMs) have enabled advances in structure prediction and de novo protein design, yet they frequently collapse into pathological repetition during generation. Unlike in text, where repetition merely reduces readability, in proteins it undermines structural confidence and functional viability. To unify this problem, we present the first systematic study of repetition in PLMs. We first propose quantitative metrics to characterize motif-level and homopolymer repetition and then demonstrate their negative impact on folding reliability. To address this challenge, we propose UCCS (Utility-Controlled Contrastive Steering), which steers protein generation with a constrained dataset. Instead of naively contrasting high- vs. low-repetition sequences, we construct contrastive sets that maximize differences in repetition while tightly controlling for structural utility. This disentanglement yields steering vectors that specifically target repetition without degrading foldability. Injected at inference, these vectors consistently reduce repetition without retraining or heuristic decoding. Experiments with ESM-3 and ProtGPT2 in CATH, UniRef50, and SCOP show that our method outperforms decoding penalties and other baselines, substantially lowering repetition while preserving AlphaFold confidence scores. Our results establish repetition control as a central challenge for PLMs and highlight dataset-guided steering as a principled approach for reliable protein generation.

q-bio.BM↗

iPEAR: Iterative Pyramid Estimation with Attention and Residuals for Deformable Medical Image Registration

Existing pyramid registration networks may accumulate anatomical misalignments and lack an effective mechanism to dynamically determine the number of optimization iterations under varying deformation requirements across images, leading to degraded performance. To solve these limitations, we propose iPEAR. Specifically, iPEAR adopts our proposed Fused Attention-Residual Module (FARM) for decoding, which comprises an attention pathway and a residual pathway to alleviate the accumulation of anatomical misalignment. We further propose a dual-stage Threshold-Controlled Iterative (TCI) strategy that adaptively determines the number of optimization iterations for varying images by evaluating registration stability and convergence. Extensive experiments on three public brain MRI datasets and one public abdomen CT dataset show that iPEAR outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) registration networks in terms of accuracy, while achieving on-par inference speed and model parameter size. Generalization and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed FARM and TCI.

cs.CV↗

Faithful-Patchscopes: Understanding and Mitigating Model Bias in Hidden Representations Explanation of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities for hidden representation interpretation through Patchscopes, a framework that uses LLMs themselves to generate human-readable explanations by decoding from internal hidden representations. However, our work shows that LLMs tend to rely on inherent linguistic patterns, which can override contextual information encoded in the hidden representations during decoding. For example, even when a hidden representation encodes the contextual attribute "purple" for "broccoli", LLMs still generate "green" in their explanations, reflecting a strong prior association. This behavior reveals a systematic unfaithfulness in Patchscopes. To systematically study this issue, we first designed a dataset to evaluate the faithfulness of Patchscopes under biased cases, and our results show that there is an 18.84\% faithfulness decrease on average. We then propose Bias Alignment through Logit Recalibration (BALOR), which treats the output logits from an unpatched prompt as capturing model bias and contrasts them with logits obtained under patched contextual information. By recalibrating the logit distribution through this contrast, BALOR suppresses model bias and amplifies contextual information during generation. Experiments across multiple LLMs demonstrate that BALOR consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving up to 33\% relative performance improvement.

cs.CL↗

Not All Code Is Equal: A Data-Centric Study of Code Complexity and LLM Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit strong reasoning abilities, often attributed to their capacity to generate chain-of-thought-style intermediate reasoning. Recent work suggests that exposure to code can further enhance these skills, but existing studies largely treat code as a generic training signal, leaving open the question of which properties of code actually contribute to improved reasoning. To address this gap, we study the structural complexity of code, which captures control flow and compositional structure that may shape how models internalise multi-step reasoning during fine-tuning. We examine two complementary settings: solution-driven complexity, where complexity varies across multiple solutions to the same problem, and problem-driven complexity, where complexity reflects variation in the underlying tasks. Using cyclomatic complexity and logical lines of code to construct controlled fine-tuning datasets, we evaluate a range of open-weight LLMs on diverse reasoning benchmarks. Our findings show that although code can improve reasoning, structural properties strongly determine its usefulness. In 83% of experiments, restricting fine-tuning data to a specific structural complexity range outperforms training on structurally diverse code, pointing to a data-centric path for improving reasoning beyond scaling.

cs.LG↗

SP^2DPO: An LLM-assisted Semantic Per-Pair DPO Generalization

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) controls the trade-off between fitting preference labels and staying close to a reference model using a single global temperature beta, implicitly treating all preference pairs as equally informative. Real-world preference corpora are heterogeneous: they mix high-signal, objective failures (for example, safety, factuality, instruction violations) with low-signal or subjective distinctions (for example, style), and also include label noise. We introduce our method, SP2DPO (Semantic Per-Pair DPO), a generalization that replaces the global temperature with an instance-specific schedule beta_i pre-decided offline from structured semantic-gap annotations (category, magnitude, confidence) produced by teacher language models. We instantiate this procedure on the UltraFeedback preference corpus (59,960 pairs), enabling large-scale construction of an auditable beta_i artifact, and incur zero training-time overhead: the inner-loop optimizer remains standard DPO with beta set per pair. We focus our empirical study on AlpacaEval 2.0, reporting both raw win rate and length-controlled win rate. Across four open-weight, instruction-tuned student backbones (4B-8B), SP2DPO is competitive with a tuned global-beta DPO baseline and improves AlpacaEval 2.0 length-controlled win rate on two of four backbones, while avoiding per-model beta sweeps. All code, annotations, and artifacts will be released.

cs.CL↗

Unlocking Scaling Law in Industrial Recommendation Systems with a Three-step Paradigm based Large User Model

Recent advancements in autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant milestones, largely attributed to their scalability, often referred to as the "scaling law". Inspired by these achievements, there has been a growing interest in adapting LLMs for Recommendation Systems (RecSys) by reformulating RecSys tasks into generative problems. However, these End-to-End Generative Recommendation (E2E-GR) methods tend to prioritize idealized goals, often at the expense of the practical advantages offered by traditional Deep Learning based Recommendation Models (DLRMs) in terms of in features, architecture, and practices. This disparity between idealized goals and practical needs introduces several challenges and limitations, locking the scaling law in industrial RecSys. In this paper, we introduce a large user model (LUM) that addresses these limitations through a three-step paradigm, designed to meet the stringent requirements of industrial settings while unlocking the potential for scalable recommendations. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that LUM outperforms both state-of-the-art DLRMs and E2E-GR approaches. Notably, LUM exhibits excellent scalability, with performance improvements observed as the model scales up to 7 billion parameters. Additionally, we have successfully deployed LUM in an industrial application, where it achieved significant gains in an A/B test, further validating its effectiveness and practicality.

cs.IR↗

Dependently-Typed AARA: A Non-Affine Approach for Resource Analysis of Higher-Order Programs

Static resource analysis determines the resource consumption (e.g., time complexity) of a program without executing it. Among the numerous existing approaches for resource analysis, affine type systems have been one dominant approach. However, these affine type systems fall short of deriving precise resource behavior of higher-order programs, particularly in cases that involve partial applications. This article presents λ_\ms{amor}^\ms{na}}, a non-affine AARA-style dependent type system for resource reasoning about higher-order functional programs. The key observation is that the main issue in previous approaches comes from (i) the close coupling of types and resources, and (ii) the conflict between affine and higher-order typing mechanisms. To derive precise resource behavior of higher-order functions, λ_\ms{amor}^\ms{na}} decouples resources from types and follows a non-affine typing mechanism. The non-affine type system of λ_\ms{amor}^\ms{na}} achieves this by using dependent types, which allows expressing type-level potential functions separate from ordinary types. This article formalizes λ_\ms{amor}^\ms{na}}'s syntax and semantics, and proves its soundness, which guarantees the correctness of resource bounds. Several challenging classic and higher-order examples are presented to demonstrate the expressiveness and compositionality of λ_\ms{amor}^\ms{na}}'s reasoning capability.

cs.PL↗