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Rui Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Learning and Reasoning with Geometry: How Generation Helps Spatial Understanding

Image and video generators can produce spatially consistent visual content, but how to use this capability to improve spatial understanding remains underexplored. We study this problem from two perspectives: geometric supervision during training and explicit geometric evidence during inference. To this end, we introduce a unified geometric understanding and generation model (GeoUG) that integrates depth and multi-view generation with spatial understanding. First, we design a multi-scale depth codec that enables metric-depth generation using a pretrained visual autoencoder, and show that joint training yields task-dependent gains in spatial understanding. Second, we introduce 3DCueBench to control geometric difficulty while balancing selected 2D cues, and find that generated depth provides larger reasoning gains on questions requiring fine-grained geometric discrimination. Building on this finding, we develop adaptive interleaved reasoning, in which GeoUG first drafts an answer and then decides whether to generate geometric evidence to confirm or revise it. We train this decision through reinforcement learning, balancing accuracy gains over retaining the draft against generation cost. GeoUG achieves circular accuracies of 97.9%, 90.8%, and 94.2% on CV-Bench-3D, 3DCueBench, and DA-2K with fewer generation calls than always generating.

cs.CV↗

Toward Global Large Language Models in Medicine

Despite continuous advances in medical technology, the global distribution of health care resources remains uneven. The development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of medicine and holds promise for improving health care quality and expanding access to medical information globally. However, existing LLMs are primarily trained on high-resource languages, limiting their applicability in global medical scenarios. To address this gap, we constructed GlobMed, a large multilingual medical dataset containing more than 800,000 entries spanning 20 languages, including seven low-resource languages. Building on this, we established GlobMed-Bench, which systematically assesses 56 state-of-the-art proprietary and open-weight LLMs across 12 of the 20 languages represented in GlobMed, comprising over 20,000 independent experiments and more than 32 million model responses. This large-scale evaluation revealed significant performance disparities across languages, particularly for low-resource languages. Additionally, we introduced GlobMed-LLMs, a suite of multilingual medical LLMs trained across the 12 benchmark languages, with parameters ranging from 1.7B to 8B. GlobMed-LLMs achieved an average performance improvement of nearly 40% relative to baseline LLMs, with a maximum performance improvement of more than threefold in low-resource languages. These resources provide an important foundation for advancing the equitable development and application of LLMs globally, enabling broader language communities to benefit from technological advances.

cs.CL↗

HealBench: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Psychological Comfort in Text-to-Image Generation

Despite advances in photorealism, semantic fidelity, and aesthetics, text-to-image generation and image editing remain understudied in a human-centered dimension: whether their outputs feel psychologically comforting. Grounded in cognitive evaluation theory, we define psychological comfort as an affective response shaped by viewers' appraisal of restorative and emotionally supportive visual cues. We introduce HealBench, a fine-grained benchmark of 30,000 high-quality image-text pairs spanning 19 categories and 92 subcategories, selected from 100,000 candidates through a human- and expert-in-the-loop pipeline combining vision-language model matching, human preference models, expert filtering, and exemplar-guided augmentation. We also construct HealBench-Eval, a feature-clustered evaluation set of 1,095 instances. Using HealBench-Eval, we conduct objective and subjective evaluations of 14 representative image generation models and prompt-rewriting strategies. Results reveal a gap between conventional visual quality and perceived comfort: strong semantic alignment and aesthetics do not guarantee emotionally restorative images. Reinforcement learning experiments further show that HealScorer can serve as a reward signal for assessing and improving the emotional and restorative quality of generated images. These findings establish psychological comfort as a distinct dimension of human-centered image generation and position HealBench as a foundation for affect-aware generative models.

cs.CV↗

Scaling Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Brain Encoding

Brain encoding models aim to predict neural responses to stimuli. The most widely used approach fits readouts from frozen pretrained backbones. Using neural data to train large models from scratch or fully fine-tune them after task-pretraining has proven difficult because neural data is costly and limited. We show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enables us to effectively adapt very large pretrained backbones for brain encoding with a small number of trainable parameters. To make it computationally practical, we exploit the backbone's causal structure to predict multiple timepoints in a single pass instead of using sliding windows, significantly reducing feature-extraction cost. This enables efficient fine-tuning of multimodal backbones with up to 104B parameters, the largest model adapted for brain encoding to our knowledge. Trained with a low-rank adapter (LoRA) and a lightweight readout, our approach consistently improves brain encoding performance across nine diverse multimodal backbones. On the same Qwen3-Omni backbone as the prior state-of-the-art (SoTA), our method BrainLoRA achieves the best published performance on the Algonauts 2025 Challenge. We also show the adapted multimodal backbones remain interpretable: modality attribution recovers the canonical sensory topography that prior work often obtains by construction from separate unimodal encoders, and neural adaptation increases the contribution of audio inputs and cross-modal mixing within the backbone. To scale out the number of adapted models, we develop a multi-LoRA kernel that accelerates joint training of multiple LoRAs on a shared backbone. This enables an ensemble of 200+ adapted models that ranks first on the public Algonauts post-challenge leaderboard at the time of writing. Together, our results highlight PEFT as an efficient and powerful paradigm for brain encoding.

cs.LG↗

T(R,O) Grasp++: Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping in Cluttered Environments at Scale

Dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes remains a central challenge in robotic manipulation, as it requires high-dimensional hand coordination under complex object-environment constraints. To address this problem, we introduce one of the largest simulation benchmarks to date, comprising around 0.5B grasp annotations across eight dexterous hands and approximately 50K objects. Furthermore, we propose T(R,O) Grasp++, a scalable diffusion-based framework for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp synthesis in cluttered environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving an average success rate of 88% across eight dexterous embodiments. Meanwhile, our pipeline achieves only 0.3s inference latency while improving inference sample efficiency by over 10 times.

cs.RO↗

RAP: A Dataset for Paper-to-Poster Generation via Declarative Markup from Human-Crafted Exemplars

Making a conference poster is visual coding in miniature: an entire paper must be compressed onto a single page, which exercises summarization, visual design, and code implementation at once, using nothing beyond the paper itself. Yet benchmarks for this task in the context of visual coding remain scarce: existing resources are small and annotated only with layout boxes, so evaluation must fall back on VLM-as-judge or human checklists rather than objective render-and-compare, and the generation methods they support design layouts from scratch, leaving human-crafted posters unusable as either a retrievable design library or as verified supervision. We introduce RAP (Reconstruct A Poster), a dataset and benchmark for paper-to-poster generation as a visual coding task. RAP contains 25K+ verified paper-poster pairs from various machine learning conferences held between 2022 and 2026, annotated with a three-level content taxonomy, plus a held-out benchmark of 150 test papers each paired with its human poster. A fully automated derendering pipeline turns each poster into styled HTML/CSS of typed, refillable slots, so every sample is a paper-poster-markup triplet verifiable by rendering against the source poster. The corpus serves both inference and training: PosterRAG, a training-free multi-agent pipeline, retrieves an exemplar and refills its slots without touching layout or styling, while an SFT+RL recipe trains a dedicated model from the same triplets. An online demo is available at https://reconstruct-a-poster.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

ZenFlow: Enabling Stall-Free Offloading for LLM Training

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often exceeds GPU memory limits, prompting systems to offload model states to CPU memory. However, existing offloaded training frameworks like ZeRO-Offload treat all parameters equally and update the full model on the CPU, causing severe GPU stalls, where fast, expensive GPUs sit idle, waiting for slow CPU updates and limited-bandwidth PCIe transfers. We present ZenFlow, a new offloaded training framework that decouples updates between GPU and CPU by prioritizing important gradients. ZenFlow performs in-place updates of important gradients on GPU while offloading and accumulating less important ones on CPU without blocking training iterations, fully overlapping CPU work with GPU computation. To make this importance-aware design scalable, ZenFlow leverages a novel spatio-temporal locality of important gradients, concentrated in specific positions that remain stable across iterations, to make important gradient identification efficient and lightweight while preserving fidelity. Evaluation shows that ZenFlow achieves up to 5x end-to-end speedup, 2x lower PCIe traffic, 85% less GPU stalls, and up to 72% lower cloud GPU cost, all while preserving accuracy.

cs.DC↗

DexMimic: A Generalist Dexterous Hand-Object Tracking Policy via Value-Guided Reset Allocation

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a central challenge in robotics. Learning from human hand-object interaction (HOI) datasets offers a promising pathway to diverse dexterous skills, yet existing physics-based approaches train specialist policies for individual trajectories, thereby limiting skill reuse at scale. We introduce DexMimic, a generalist dexterous hand-object tracking policy jointly trained across diverse HOI trajectories. Efficient joint training requires allocating each rollout to both an undertrained phase and a starting state that supports continued tracking. DexMimic realizes this insight through Value-Guided Reset Allocation, which adapts the initialization distribution online to prioritize difficult phases and select reset states with higher expected tracking returns. We further introduce a benchmark spanning training, fine-tuning, and generalization. Experiments show improved tracking success and training efficiency, faster fine-tuning, and the potential for zero-shot generalization to unseen trajectories and objects; larger training sets further improve efficiency and generalization. Finally, we validate DexMimic on a real-world dexterous manipulation platform.

cs.RO↗

OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyond

The rapid advancement toward long-context reasoning and multi-modal intelligence has made the memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache a dominant memory bottleneck for efficient deployment. While the established per-channel quantization effectively accommodates intrinsic channel-wise outliers in Key tensors, its efficacy diminishes under extreme compression. In this work, we revisit the inherent limitations of the per-channel quantization paradigm from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Our analysis identifies Token Norm Imbalance (TNI) as the primary bottleneck to quantization fidelity. We demonstrate that TNI systematically amplifies errors when shared quantization parameters are required to span token groups exhibiting substantial norm disparities. Instead of relying on intricate quantization pipelines (e.g., TurboQuant), we propose OScaR (Omni-Scaled Canalized Rotation), an accurate and lightweight KV cache compression framework for X-LLMs (i.e., text-only, multi-modal, and omni-modal LLMs). Advancing the per-channel paradigm, OScaR employs Canalized Rotation followed by Omni-Token Scaling to mitigate TNI-induced sequence-dimensional variance both effectively and efficiently, further supported by our optimized system design and CUDA kernels. Extensive evaluations across X-LLMs show that OScaR consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves near-lossless performance under INT2 quantization, establishing it as a robust, low-complexity, and universal framework that defines a new Pareto front. Compared with the BF16 FlashDecoding-v2 baseline, our OScaR implementation achieves a notable up to 3.0x speedup in decoding, reduces memory footprint by 5.3x, and increases throughput by 4.1x. The code for OScaR is publicly available at https://github.com/ZunhaiSu/OScaR-KV-Quant.

cs.LG↗

Same Request, Different Boundary: Evaluating Cybersecurity Assistance across Conversational Contexts

Cybersecurity assistance is dual use, requiring decisions about when to answer, limit, or refuse a request. Prior work studies refusal evaluation and conversational jailbreaking, but how conversational histories shift assistance boundaries in both directions for identical cybersecurity requests remains underexplored. We introduce 3R-Bench, a benchmark of 150 real-world cybersecurity requests evaluated across eight LLMs under direct prompting and two predefined conversational settings. We separately code refusal, bounded assistance, compliance, and provider blocking to characterize delivered assistance. On 400 matched ambiguous request-model pairs, compliance is 75.3% directly, 57.8% after refused precedent, and 81.0% after accepted precedent. A smaller repeated-generation panel reproduces the refusal-acceptance gap. On a balanced 75-request panel reusing the direct baseline, compliance decreases from 74.2% directly to 57.2% after neutral task-decomposition dialogue and 60.3% after failure-ended dialogue. These findings show that cybersecurity assistance varies with conversational history and model deployment, motivating evaluation beyond direct-request refusal rates.

cs.AI↗

When Protection Overrides Consequences: Understanding Protection Mode in Large Language Model Decision-Making

Frontier language models excel at complex tasks yet may prioritize protection over larger physical consequences in simple, urgent decisions. GPT-5.6 Sol, for example, moves a girl playing in shallow water before retrieving a submerged camera. We call this Protection Mode and study it with ProtectionBench: 285 prompts, 34 physical families, and nine models. At lowest effort, at least one of four responses prioritizes the subject on 34.74% of Sol prompts and over 83% of MiniMax M3 and Qwen3.5-27B prompts; none of four independent human raters does so. Controls show that choices usually track physical risk. We elicit both risks before requesting an action. Some models assess risk incorrectly; others state the correct ordering but still choose the subject. Qwen3.5-27B with thinking shows 100% correct risk ordering but 57.81% subject choice among eligible conversations on eight selected scenes. Attention audits find no stable reduction in attention to relevant facts; removing the stated risk direction reduces object-first choice in dots3-note-prev but not detectably in Qwen3.5-27B. Adding a general "people or animals before property" rule increases subject choice by 19-38 percentage points, whereas factual reminders favor the object by 0.7-5.2 points. Removing naturally generated versions of that rule lowers subject choice by 10-15 points. We also examine whether post-training introduces this pattern. Base models already show Protection Mode; post-training changes justifications more than choices.

cs.AI↗

Discovery or Memorization? A Faithful Benchmark for Real-World Business-Logic Vulnerability Discovery

The rapid advancement of cybersecurity agents in vulnerability discovery has increased the need for benchmarks that evaluate their capabilities accurately. However, synthetic benchmarks lack realism, real-life benchmarks are prone to contamination, and many existing benchmarks have already been saturated by current models. We therefore set out to develop a benchmark that is realistic, reproducible, resistant to contamination, and challenging. Our key insight is that real-life business-logic vulnerabilities are subtle and exercise complex application interactions, making them naturally demanding. The difficulty lies in specifying evaluation criteria precise enough to faithfully measure model capabilities while keeping the tasks free of data-leakage. We introduce AnonVul, a cross-language benchmark of 132 application-level business-logic vulnerabilities, built by a semi-automated pipeline that anonymizes each task, injects oracles from expert-written specifications, and differentially verifies proof-of-concept exploits. The benchmark spans nine languages, with two evaluation tracks on black-box and grey-box settings, where each task runs in a sandbox with specialized oracles embedded in key exploitation steps. We evaluate six state-of-the-art vulnerability-discovery agents on the AnonVul benchmark, measuring discovery success, cost-effectiveness, anonymization sensitivity, oracle validity, and failure modes. Our results show that AnonVul remains challenging, with the best agent succeeding in only 23.11% of attempts. On a matched cohort of 20 vulnerabilities, restoring software identity increases discovery from 21.25% to 40.83%, highlighting the importance of controlling recognizable software knowledge when evaluating vulnerability discovery.

cs.CR↗

An Agentic AI System for Multi-Framework Communication Coding

Clinical communication is central to patient outcomes, yet large-scale human annotation of patient-provider conversation remains labor-intensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Existing approaches based on large language models typically rely on single-task models that lack adaptability, interpretability, and reliability, especially when applied across various communication frameworks and clinical domains. In this study, we developed a Multi-framework Structured Agentic AI system for Clinical Communication (MOSAIC), built on a LangGraph-based architecture that orchestrates four core agents, including a Plan Agent for codebook selection and workflow planning, an Update Agent for maintaining up-to-date retrieval databases, a set of Annotation Agents that applies codebook-guided retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with dynamic few-shot prompting, and a Verification Agent that provides consistency checks and feedback. To evaluate performance, we compared MOSAIC outputs against gold-standard annotations created by trained human coders. We developed and evaluated MOSAIC using 26 gold standard annotated transcripts for training and 50 transcripts for testing, spanning rheumatology and OB/GYN domains. On the test set, MOSAIC achieved an overall F1 score of 0.928. Performance was highest in the Rheumatology subset (F1 = 0.962) and strongest for Patient Behavior (e.g., patients asking questions, expressing preferences, or showing assertiveness). Ablations revealed that MOSAIC outperforms baseline benchmarking.

cs.CL↗

LeapBot-JAC: Joint Action Chains for World Action Models

Action-chunking policies predict future controls but execute only a prefix before replanning. How should a fixed action-token budget be organized to support execution? We propose LeapBot-JAC, which allocates sparse future-control references and dense execution targets within one shared action expert. Both chains are supervised by demonstrated controls and jointly denoised at aligned physical-time positions. Directed attention allows execution tokens to read reference tokens subject to the host's visibility constraints. JAC adds neither action tokens nor parameters and retains the host's world-modeling process; both chains participate in inference, while only the execution chain drives the robot. On LIBERO, JAC reaches 98.3% success with FastWAM and LeapBot-WA, up from 97.0% and 97.3%. On zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, their success rates improve from 53.5% to 70.4% and from 73.1% to 77.3%, respectively. RoboTwin and two real-world tasks provide additional deployment evaluations. Single-training-seed comparisons and FastWAM ablations support action-role organization as a practical design choice under a fixed action-token budget.

cs.RO↗

Beyond a Single Crop: Contextualized Embeddings for Player Re-Identification

Person re-identification is typically addressed by learning identity-discriminative embeddings from individual person crops. However, player re-identification in broadcast sports videos presents a unique challenge: players from the same team often share similar appearances, while video sequences provide repeated observations of the same players under different viewpoints and surrounding contexts. Existing crop-based approaches largely ignore this contextual information, which can be critical for resolving visually similar identities. Here, we propose ContextReID, a contextualized embedding framework that represents a player by jointly considering other players in the same frame and observations from different frames of the broadcast sequence. By incorporating both co-occurring players and cross-frame observations, the model learns identity features relative to the surrounding visual context rather than relying only on isolated appearance cues. We implement this framework with a vision-language model that takes sets of player crops as input and generates context-aware embeddings for individual players. A combined contextual learning and retrieval objective encourages the model to capture cross-frame identity relationships while maintaining discriminative embeddings for player matching. Experiments across three multi-object tracking benchmarks show that ContextReID improves player retrieval over conventional single-crop embedding approaches in both Rank-1 and mAP. These results highlight the utility of spatial and temporal context for reliable player identification in broadcast sports videos.

cs.CV↗

Selection-Based Structured Reasoning: Toward Efficient Multimodal Search Agents

Multimodal agents commonly generate free-form reasoning before each action. For small models, limited model capacity can result in lengthy reasoning that provides little useful guidance for action generation while incurring substantial inference cost. To address this challenge, we introduce Selection-based Structured Reasoning (SSR), a framework that reformulates reasoning as selection instead of open-ended generation. SSR represents recurring high-level reasoning as pre-specified, reusable natural-language candidates. At each turn, the model selects from these reasoning candidates based on their likelihoods given the current context, without requiring an auxiliary task head. Using pre-specified reasoning traces enables parallel scoring, where teacher-forced prefilling computes token likelihoods concurrently within and across candidates using a shared context KV cache. We evaluate SSR on seven multimodal search benchmarks using 2B and 4B models. Across multiple reinforcement learning objectives and supervised fine-tuning, SSR delivers significant efficiency gains without sacrificing task performance. SSR achieves an average success rate competitive with leading search agents of the same scale, while reducing per-turn reasoning latency by over 90% and total per-question model inference latency by 28-54%. Project page: https://zfy0314.github.io/ssr-webpage/.

cs.LG↗

LoopFM: Learning frOm HistOrical RePresentations of Foundation Model for Recommendation

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers a single scalar prediction from a large foundation model (FM) to compact vertical models (VMs), suffering from diminishing transfer ratio -- the fraction of FM improvement captured by the VM -- as a single scalar cannot convey the rich intermediate knowledge that larger FMs learn. To address this bottleneck, we propose LoopFM (Learning frOm HistOrical RePresentations of FM), a framework that opens a high-bandwidth transfer channel by structuring FM intermediate embeddings as input features (e.g., user history sequence) for downstream VMs, without requiring real-time FM inference at serving and architectural coupling between FM and VM. We provide a theoretical framework for LoopFM with a gain decomposition and transfer-ratio analysis. On three public benchmarks, LoopFM demonstrates strong AUC improvements (e.g., 6%+ on TaobaoAd) and complementary knowledge transfer capability with KD. On industrial-scale systems (billions of examples, trillion-parameter FMs), LoopFM approximately doubles the knowledge transfer ratio on top of KD, delivering a +0.5% conversion improvement in the first half after its initial launch, and +1.03% and +1.22% conversion improvement from two individual launches in the subsequent half. Through systematic experiments, LoopFM demonstrates a scaling law in sequence length, embedding dimension, and upstream FM size.

cs.LG↗

Occlusion-Aware Contingency Safety-Critical Planning for Autonomous Driving

Ensuring safe driving while maintaining travel efficiency for autonomous vehicles in dynamic and occluded environments is a critical challenge. This paper proposes an occlusion-aware contingency safety-critical planning approach for real-time autonomous driving. Leveraging reachability analysis for risk assessment, forward reachable sets of phantom vehicles are used to derive risk-aware dynamic velocity boundaries. These velocity boundaries are incorporated into a biconvex nonlinear programming (NLP) formulation that formally enforces safety using spatiotemporal barrier constraints, while simultaneously optimizing exploration and fallback trajectories within a receding horizon planning framework. To enable real-time computation and coordination between trajectories, we employ the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose the biconvex NLP problem into low-dimensional convex subproblems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through simulations and real-world experiments in occluded intersections. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced safety and improved travel efficiency, enabling real-time safe trajectory generation in dynamic occluded intersections under varying obstacle conditions. The project page is available at https://zack4417.github.io/oacp-website/.

cs.RO↗