arXiv subjects

Linghe Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Linghe Kong.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

PlanViz: Evaluating Planning-Oriented Image Generation and Editing for Computer-Use Tasks

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating natural images and supporting multimodal reasoning. However, their potential in supporting computer-use planning tasks, which are closely related to our lives, remain underexplored. Image generation and editing in computer-use tasks require capabilities like spatial reasoning and procedural understanding, and it is still unknown whether UMMs have these capabilities to finish these tasks or not. Therefore, we propose PlanViz, a new benchmark designed to evaluate image generation and editing for computer-use tasks. To achieve the goal of our evaluation, we focus on sub-tasks which frequently involve in daily life and require planning. Specifically, three representative sub-tasks are designed: route planning, work diagramming, and web&UI displaying. We address challenges in data quality ensuring by curating human-annotated questions and reference images, and a quality control process. For detailed and exact evaluation, a task-adaptive score, PlanScore, is proposed. The score helps understanding the correctness, visual quality and efficiency of generated images. Through experiments, we highlight key limitations and opportunities for future research on this topic.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DVFace: Spatio-Temporal Dual-Prior Diffusion for Video Face Restoration

Video face restoration aims to enhance degraded face videos into high-quality results with realistic facial details, stable identity, and temporal coherence. Recent diffusion-based methods have brought strong generative priors to restoration and enabled more realistic detail synthesis. However, existing approaches for face videos still rely heavily on generic diffusion priors and multi-step sampling, which limit both facial adaptation and inference efficiency. These limitations motivate the use of one-step diffusion for video face restoration, yet achieving faithful facial recovery alongside temporally stable outputs remains challenging. In this paper, we propose, DVFace, a one-step diffusion framework for real-world video face restoration. Specifically, we introduce a spatio-temporal dual-codebook design to extract complementary spatial and temporal facial priors from degraded videos. We further propose an asymmetric spatio-temporal fusion module to inject these priors into the diffusion backbone according to their distinct roles. Evaluation on various benchmarks shows that DVFace delivers superior restoration quality, temporal consistency, and identity preservation compared to recent methods. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DVFace.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ALPINE: Closed-Loop Adaptive Privacy Budget Allocation for Mobile Edge Crowdsensing

Mobile edge crowdsensing (MECS) enables large-scale real-time sensing services, but its continuous data collection and transmission pipeline exposes terminal devices to dynamic privacy risks. Existing privacy protection schemes in MECS typically rely on static configurations or coarse-grained adaptation, making them difficult to balance privacy, data utility, and device overhead under changing channel conditions, data sensitivity, and resource availability. To address this problem, we propose ALPINE, a lightweight closed-loop framework for adaptive privacy budget allocation in MECS. ALPINE performs multi-dimensional risk perception on terminal devices by jointly modeling channel, semantic, contextual, and resource risks, and maps the resulting risk state to a privacy budget through an offline-trained TD3 policy. The selected budget is then used to drive local differential privacy perturbation before data transmission, while edge-side privacy-utility evaluation provides feedback for policy switching and periodic refinement. In this way, ALPINE forms a terminal-edge collaborative control loop that enables real-time, risk-adaptive privacy protection with low online overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that ALPINE achieves a better privacy-utility trade-off than representative baselines, reduces the effectiveness of membership inference, property inference, and reconstruction attacks, and preserves robust downstream task performance under dynamic risk conditions. Prototype deployment further demonstrates that ALPINE introduces only modest runtime overhead on resource-constrained devices.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

PANTHER: Generative Pretraining Beyond Language for Sequential User Behavior Modeling

Large language models (LLMs) have shown that generative pretraining can distill vast world knowledge into compact token representations. While LLMs encapsulate extensive world knowledge, they remain limited in modeling the behavioral knowledge contained within user interaction histories. User behavior forms a distinct modality, where each action, defined by multi-dimensional attributes such as time, context, and transaction type, constitutes a behavioral token. Modeling these high-cardinality sequences is challenging, and discriminative models often falter under limited supervision. To bridge this gap, we extend generative pretraining to user behavior, learning transferable representations from unlabeled behavioral data analogous to how LLMs learn from text. We present PANTHER, a hybrid generative-discriminative framework that unifies user behavior pretraining and downstream adaptation, enabling large-scale sequential user representation learning and real-time inference. PANTHER introduces: (1) Structured Tokenization to compress multi-dimensional transaction attributes into an interpretable vocabulary; (2) Sequence Pattern Recognition Module (SPRM) for modeling periodic transaction motifs; (3) a Unified User-Profile Embedding that fuses static demographics with dynamic transaction histories; and (4) Real-time scalability enabled by offline caching of pretrained embeddings for millisecond-level inference. Fully deployed and operational online at WeChat Pay, PANTHER delivers a 25.6 percent boost in next-transaction prediction HitRate@1 and a 38.6 percent relative improvement in fraud detection recall over baselines. Cross-domain evaluations on public benchmarks show strong generalization, achieving up to 21 percent HitRate@1 gains over transformer baselines, establishing PANTHER as a scalable, high-performance framework for industrial sequential user behavior modeling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

AdaFuse: Accelerating Dynamic Adapter Inference via Token-Level Pre-Gating and Fused Kernel Optimization

The integration of dynamic, sparse structures like Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with parameter-efficient adapters (e.g., LoRA) is a powerful technique for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this architectural enhancement comes at a steep cost: despite minimal increases in computational load, the inference latency often skyrockets, leading to decoding speeds slowing by over 2.5 times. Through a fine-grained performance analysis, we pinpoint the primary bottleneck not in the computation itself, but in the severe overhead from fragmented, sequential CUDA kernel launches required for conventional dynamic routing. To address this challenge, we introduce AdaFuse, a framework built on a tight co-design between the algorithm and the underlying hardware system to enable efficient dynamic adapter execution. Departing from conventional layer-wise or block-wise routing, AdaFuse employs a token-level pre-gating strategy, which makes a single, global routing decision for all adapter layers before a token is processed. This "decide-once, apply-everywhere" approach effectively staticizes the execution path for each token, creating an opportunity for holistic optimization. We capitalize on this by developing a custom CUDA kernel that performs a fused switching operation, merging the parameters of all selected LoRA adapters into the backbone model in a single, efficient pass. Experimental results on popular open-source LLMs show that AdaFuse achieves accuracy on par with state-of-the-art dynamic adapters while drastically cutting decoding latency by a factor of over 2.4x, thereby bridging the gap between model capability and inference efficiency.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Enhanced Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models with Model Fusion

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) represent a significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence by integrating visual and textual modalities to achieve impressive zero-shot capabilities. However, VLMs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when sequentially fine-tuned on multiple downstream tasks. Existing continual learning methods for VLMs face various limitations, often relying on additional reference datasets, compromising zero-shot performance, or being restricted to parameter-efficient fine-tuning scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Continual Decoupling-Unifying (ConDU) approach that pioneers the use of model fusion for continual learning in VLMs. Specifically, ConDU maintains a unified model along with task triggers and prototype sets, employing an iterative process of decoupling task experts for previous tasks and unifying them with the task expert for the newly learned task. Additionally, we introduce an inference strategy for zero-shot scenarios by aggregating predictions from multiple decoupled task experts. Extensive experiments on the MTIL benchmark show that ConDU achieves up to a 2\% improvement in average performance across all seen tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while also enhancing zero-shot capabilities relative to the original VLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangzicong518/ConDU.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Diagnosing and Repairing Distributed Routing Configurations Using Selective Symbolic Simulation

Although substantial progress has been made in automatically verifying whether distributed routing configurations conform to certain requirements, diagnosing and repairing configuration errors remains manual and time-consuming. To fill this gap, we propose S^2Sim, a novel system for automatic routing configuration diagnosis and repair. Our key insight is that by selectively simulating variants of the given configuration in a symbolic way, we can find an intent-compliant variant, whose differences between the given configuration reveal the errors in the given configuration and suggest the patches. Building on this insight, we also design techniques to support complex scenarios (e.g., multiple protocol networks) and requirements (e.g., k-link failure tolerance). We implement a prototype of S^2Sim and evaluate its performance using networks of size O(10) ~ O(1000) with synthetic real-world configurations. Results show that S^2Sim diagnoses and repairs errors for 1) all WAN configurations within 10 s and 2) all DCN configurations within 20 minutes.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

DVD-Quant: Data-free Video Diffusion Transformers Quantization

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art architecture for video generation, yet their computational and memory demands hinder practical deployment. While post-training quantization (PTQ) presents a promising approach to accelerate Video DiT models, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) dependence on computation-heavy and inflexible calibration procedures, and (2) considerable performance deterioration after quantization. To address these challenges, we propose DVD-Quant, a novel Data-free quantization framework for Video DiTs. Our approach integrates three key innovations: (1) Bounded-init Grid Refinement (BGR) and (2) Auto-scaling Rotated Quantization (ARQ) for calibration data-free quantization error reduction, as well as (3) $δ$-Guided Bit Switching ($δ$-GBS) for adaptive bit-width allocation. Extensive experiments across multiple video generation benchmarks demonstrate that DVD-Quant achieves an approximately 2$\times$ speedup over full-precision baselines on advanced DiT models while maintaining visual fidelity. Notably, DVD-Quant is the first to enable W4A4 PTQ for Video DiTs without compromising video quality. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/lhxcs/DVD-Quant.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

IDER: IDempotent Experience Replay for Reliable Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting, the tendency of neural networks to forget previously learned knowledge when learning new tasks, has been a major challenge in continual learning (CL). To tackle this challenge, CL methods have been proposed and shown to reduce forgetting. Furthermore, CL models deployed in mission-critical settings can benefit from uncertainty awareness by calibrating their predictions to reliably assess their confidences. However, existing uncertainty-aware continual learning methods suffer from high computational overhead and incompatibility with mainstream replay methods. To address this, we propose idempotent experience replay (IDER), a novel approach based on the idempotent property where repeated function applications yield the same output. Specifically, we first adapt the training loss to make model idempotent on current data streams. In addition, we introduce an idempotence distillation loss. We feed the output of the current model back into the old checkpoint and then minimize the distance between this reprocessed output and the original output of the current model. This yields a simple and effective new baseline for building reliable continual learners, which can be seamlessly integrated with other CL approaches. Extensive experiments on different CL benchmarks demonstrate that IDER consistently improves prediction reliability while simultaneously boosting accuracy and reducing forgetting. Our results suggest the potential of idempotence as a promising principle for deploying efficient and trustworthy continual learning systems in real-world applications.Our code is available at https://github.com/YutingLi0606/Idempotent-Continual-Learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context. Recent "Thinking-with-Images" methods alleviate this by iteratively zooming in and out regions of interest during inference, but incur high latency due to repeated tool calls and visual re-encoding. To address this, we propose Region-to-Image Distillation, which transforms zooming from an inference-time tool into a training-time primitive, thereby internalizing the benefits of agentic zooming into a single forward pass of an MLLM. In particular, we first zoom in to micro-cropped regions to let strong teacher models generate high-quality VQA data, and then distill this region-grounded supervision back to the full image. After training on such data, the smaller student model improves "single-glance" fine-grained perception without tool use. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we further present ZoomBench, a hybrid-annotated benchmark of 845 VQA data spanning six fine-grained perceptual dimensions, together with a dual-view protocol that quantifies the global--regional "zooming gap". Experiments show that our models achieve leading performance across multiple fine-grained perception benchmarks, and also improve general multimodal cognition on benchmarks such as visual reasoning and GUI agents. We further discuss when "Thinking-with-Images" is necessary versus when its gains can be distilled into a single forward pass. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/Zooming-without-Zooming.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Pedagogically-Inspired Data Synthesis for Language Model Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller models has emerged as a critical technique for deploying efficient AI systems. However, current methods for distillation via synthetic data lack pedagogical awareness, treating knowledge transfer as a one-off data synthesis and training task rather than a systematic learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel pedagogically-inspired framework for LLM knowledge distillation that draws from fundamental educational principles. Our approach introduces a three-stage pipeline -- Knowledge Identifier, Organizer, and Adapter (IOA) -- that systematically identifies knowledge deficiencies in student models, organizes knowledge delivery through progressive curricula, and adapts representations to match the cognitive capacity of student models. We integrate Bloom's Mastery Learning Principles and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development to create a dynamic distillation process where student models approach teacher model's performance on prerequisite knowledge before advancing, and new knowledge is introduced with controlled, gradual difficulty increments. Extensive experiments using LLaMA-3.1/3.2 and Qwen2.5 as student models demonstrate that IOA achieves significant improvements over baseline distillation methods, with student models retaining 94.7% of teacher performance on DollyEval while using less than 1/10th of the parameters. Our framework particularly excels in complex reasoning tasks, showing 19.2% improvement on MATH and 22.3% on HumanEval compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

BinaryDemoire: Moiré-Aware Binarization for Image Demoiréing

Image demoiréing aims to remove structured moiré artifacts in recaptured imagery, where degradations are highly frequency-dependent and vary across scales and directions. While recent deep networks achieve high-quality restoration, their full-precision designs remain costly for deployment. Binarization offers an extreme compression regime by quantizing both activations and weights to 1-bit. Yet, it has been rarely studied for demoiréing and performs poorly when naively applied. In this work, we propose BinaryDemoire, a binarized demoiréing framework that explicitly accommodates the frequency structure of moiré degradations. First, we introduce a moiré-aware binary gate (MABG) that extracts lightweight frequency descriptors together with activation statistics. It predicts channel-wise gating coefficients to condition the aggregation of binary convolution responses. Second, we design a shuffle-grouped residual adapter (SGRA) that performs structured sparse shortcut alignment. It further integrates interleaved mixing to promote information exchange across different channel partitions. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed BinaryDemoire surpasses current binarization methods. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/BinaryDemoire.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

VEQ: Modality-Adaptive Quantization for MoE Vision-Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer remarkable performance but incur prohibitive memory and computational costs, making compression essential. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective training-free technique to address the massive memory and computation overhead. Existing quantization paradigms fall short as they are oblivious to two critical forms of heterogeneity: the inherent discrepancy between vision and language tokens, and the non-uniform contribution of different experts. To bridge this gap, we propose Visual Expert Quantization (VEQ), a dual-aware quantization framework designed to simultaneously accommodate cross-modal differences and heterogeneity between experts. Specifically, VEQ incorporates 1)Modality-expert-aware Quantization, which utilizes expert activation frequency to prioritize error minimization for pivotal experts, and 2)Modality-affinity-aware Quantization, which constructs an enhanced Hessian matrix by integrating token-expert affinity with modality information to guide the calibration process. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks verify that VEQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, under the W3A16 configuration, our method achieves significant average accuracy gains of 2.04\% on Kimi-VL and 3.09\% on Qwen3-VL compared to the previous SOTA quantization methods, demonstrating superior robustness across various multimodal tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/guangshuoqin/VEQ.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ARB-LLM: Alternating Refined Binarizations for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly pushed forward advancements in natural language processing, yet their high memory and computational demands hinder practical deployment. Binarization, as an effective compression technique, can shrink model weights to just 1 bit, significantly reducing the high demands on computation and memory. However, current binarization methods struggle to narrow the distribution gap between binarized and full-precision weights, while also overlooking the column deviation in LLM weight distribution. To tackle these issues, we propose ARB-LLM, a novel 1-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) technique tailored for LLMs. To narrow the distribution shift between binarized and full-precision weights, we first design an alternating refined binarization (ARB) algorithm to progressively update the binarization parameters, which significantly reduces the quantization error. Moreover, considering the pivot role of calibration data and the column deviation in LLM weights, we further extend ARB to ARB-X and ARB-RC. In addition, we refine the weight partition strategy with column-group bitmap (CGB), which further enhance performance. Equipping ARB-X and ARB-RC with CGB, we obtain ARB-LLM$_\text{X}$ and ARB-LLM$_\text{RC}$ respectively, which significantly outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) binarization methods for LLMs. As a binary PTQ method, our ARB-LLM$_\text{RC}$ is the first to surpass FP16 models of the same size. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/ZHITENGLI/ARB-LLM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

FlexSpec: Frozen Drafts Meet Evolving Targets in Edge-Cloud Collaborative LLM Speculative Decoding

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in mobile and edge computing environments is constrained by limited on-device resources, scarce wireless bandwidth, and frequent model evolution. Although edge-cloud collaborative inference with speculative decoding (SD) can reduce end-to-end latency by executing a lightweight draft model at the edge and verifying it with a cloud-side target model, existing frameworks fundamentally rely on tight coupling between the two models. Consequently, repeated model synchronization introduces excessive communication overhead, increasing end-to-end latency, and ultimately limiting the scalability of SD in edge environments. To address these limitations, we propose FlexSpec, a communication-efficient collaborative inference framework tailored for evolving edge-cloud systems. The core design of FlexSpec is a shared-backbone architecture that allows a single and static edge-side draft model to remain compatible with a large family of evolving cloud-side target models. By decoupling edge deployment from cloud-side model updates, FlexSpec eliminates the need for edge-side retraining or repeated model downloads, substantially reducing communication and maintenance costs. Furthermore, to accommodate time-varying wireless conditions and heterogeneous device constraints, we develop a channel-aware adaptive speculation mechanism that dynamically adjusts the speculative draft length based on real-time channel state information and device energy budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexSpec achieves superior performance compared to conventional SD approaches in terms of inference efficiency.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

UmniBench: Unified Understand and Generation Model Oriented Omni-dimensional Benchmark

Unifying multimodal understanding and generation has shown impressive capabilities in cutting-edge proprietary systems. However, evaluations of unified multimodal models (UMMs) remain decoupled, assessing their understanding and generation abilities separately with corresponding datasets. To address this, we propose UmniBench, a benchmark tailored for UMMs with omni-dimensional evaluation. First, UmniBench can assess the understanding, generation, and editing ability within a single evaluation process. Based on human-examined prompts and QA pairs, UmniBench leverages UMM itself to evaluate its generation and editing ability with its understanding ability. This simple but effective paradigm allows comprehensive evaluation of UMMs. Second, UmniBench covers 13 major domains and more than 200 concepts, ensuring a thorough inspection of UMMs. Moreover, UmniBench can also decouple and separately evaluate understanding, generation, and editing abilities, providing a fine-grained assessment. Based on UmniBench, we benchmark 24 popular models, including both UMMs and single-ability large models. We hope this benchmark provides a more comprehensive and objective view of unified models and logistical support for improving the performance of the community model.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Fose: Fusion of One-Step Diffusion and End-to-End Network for Pansharpening

Pansharpening is a significant image fusion task that fuses low-resolution multispectral images (LRMSI) and high-resolution panchromatic images (PAN) to obtain high-resolution multispectral images (HRMSI). The development of the diffusion models (DM) and the end-to-end models (E2E model) has greatly improved the frontier of pansharping. DM takes the multi-step diffusion to obtain an accurate estimation of the residual between LRMSI and HRMSI. However, the multi-step process takes large computational power and is time-consuming. As for E2E models, their performance is still limited by the lack of prior and simple structure. In this paper, we propose a novel four-stage training strategy to obtain a lightweight network Fose, which fuses one-step DM and an E2E model. We perform one-step distillation on an enhanced SOTA DM for pansharping to compress the inference process from 50 steps to only 1 step. Then we fuse the E2E model with one-step DM with lightweight ensemble blocks. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the significant improvement of the proposed Fose on three commonly used benchmarks. Moreover, we achieve a 7.42 speedup ratio compared to the baseline DM while achieving much better performance. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/Fose.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

B2LoRa: Boosting LoRa Transmission for Satellite-IoT Systems with Blind Coherent Combining

With the rapid growth of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, satellite-IoT systems using the LoRa technique have been increasingly deployed to provide widespread Internet services to low-power and low-cost ground devices. However, the long transmission distance and adverse environments from IoT satellites to ground devices pose a huge challenge to link reliability, as evidenced by the measurement results based on our real-world setup. In this paper, we propose a blind coherent combining design named B2LoRa to boost LoRa transmission performance. The intuition behind B2LoRa is to leverage the repeated broadcasting mechanism inherent in satellite-IoT systems to achieve coherent combining under the low-power and low-cost constraints, where each re-transmission at different times is regarded as the same packet transmitted from different antenna elements within an antenna array. Then, the problem is translated into aligning these packets at a fine granularity despite the time, frequency, and phase offsets between packets in the case of frequent packet loss. To overcome this challenge, we present three designs - joint packet sniffing, frequency shift alignment, and phase drift mitigation to deal with ultra-low SNRs and Doppler shifts featured in satellite-IoT systems, respectively. Finally, experiment results based on our real-world deployments demonstrate the high efficiency of B2LoRa.

cs.NI↗