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Tianrui Li

Publications and source records attributed to Tianrui Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Regularizing modality contribution drift in multimodal continual learning

Multimodal continual learning (MMCL) aims to acquire new knowledge from multimodal data while retaining previously learned knowledge. Existing MMCL methods primarily mitigate forgetting by aligning cross-modal representations or preserving feature-level semantic similarity. However, different tasks may rely on different modalities, and learning new tasks can alter how modalities contribute to predictions on previously learned tasks. It remains underexplored how modality contributions evolve across incremental stages and how such changes relate to forgetting in MMCL. We term such changes Modality Contribution Drift (MCD) and introduce an MCD score based on controlled modality-subset interventions. Our theoretical and empirical analyses show how contribution drift can lead to forgetting, while existing MMCL and conventional CL methods do not effectively mitigate MCD. To address this issue, we propose Continual Modality Contribution Drift Regularization (CMCDR) to preserve the modality contribution profiles of previously learned tasks in both replay-based and replay-free settings. In the replay-based setting, CMCDR estimates modality contributions from stored old samples and regularizes their drift relative to a frozen previous model. In the replay-free setting, CMCDR uses current-task samples as probes to match old-class contribution profiles between the current and frozen models without storing old exemplars. Across six benchmarks covering multimodal class-incremental learning and continual multimodal question answering, CMCDR substantially reduces modality contribution drift, improves average accuracy by 0.88-7.66 percentage points, and reduces average forgetting by 0.85-11.55 percentage points over the corresponding baselines.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Opacity Is Not Just Opacity

Web graphics travel with content across pages and themes, where changing backgrounds can require recoloring and maintenance. Opacity already makes a fixed object's appearance depend on its background, yet is usually understood only as how much the object obscures it. In fact, opacity controls the scaling of the object-background color difference; transparency is only one effect of this relationship. Zero places the output at the background and one at the source color, but difference scaling need not stop at either position. We retain the compositing expression and extend the coefficient domain from $[0,1]$ to the real numbers: negative values reverse the difference, whereas values above one expand it in the same direction. We focus on same-direction expansion for reusing Web graphics across backgrounds. Each object carries a fixed source color and coefficient, while the actual background determines the enhancement direction. Background-adaptive contrast enhancement thus becomes part of the object's compositing properties, reducing the design and maintenance of separate color variants. The implementation reuses the original equation without increasing the per-pixel arithmetic operation count within the same pipeline. Enumerating all 8-bit sRGB source colors on 16 predefined light and dark canvases, a fixed $α=1.1$ increases the contrast ratio in 99.8145% of combinations. Without changing source colors, 4.8346% of all combinations newly reach the $3:1$ contrast threshold. Output validation and timing across three browsers demonstrate implementation in the same WebGL pipeline, with no sustained additional runtime observed.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

Phase-controlled super-modes in a `lossy' tri-waveguide coupled micro-ring resonator system

In coupled micro-ring resonator (MRR) systems, the coupling process plays a critical role in determining the optical response, yet models of these structures typically assume this process to be either lossless, or dissipative with either purely real or purely imaginary coupling rate, respectively. Dissipative coupling is contingent on having appropriately phase engineered structures with intricate coupling geometries, but systems exhibiting `lossy coupling', i.e., characterized by complex-valued coupling rates, have received comparatively little attention. In this work, we investigate the effect of such `lossy' coupling, by modelling the optical response of a tri-waveguide coupled MRR system, using Temporal Coupled-Mode Theory (TCMT). The `lossy' coupling occurs via a common bus waveguide, positioned between a pair of MRRs, leading to the emergence of a pair of intrinsic resonances, whose frequency and linewidth may be tailored by controlling the respective coupling rates from either MRR. We develop these ideas, and by connecting the input (driving) waveguides, using a 3dB y-splitter, demonstrate a novel, coherently driven, lossy-coupled MRR, which exhibits either an absorptive or transparent resonance peak on demand by phase-controlled super-modes.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2026

Unlocking air traffic flow prediction through microscopic aircraft-state modeling

Short-term air traffic flow prediction in terminal airspace is essential for proactive air traffic management. Existing approaches predominantly model traffic flow as aggregated time series. However, traffic dynamics are governed by aircraft states and their interactions in continuous airspace. Such aggregation obscures fine-grained information, including aircraft kinematics, boundary interactions, and control-intent cues. Here we present AeroSense, a state-to-flow modeling paradigm that predicts future traffic flow directly from instantaneous airspace situations represented as dynamic sets of aircraft states derived from ADS-B trajectories. By establishing an end-to-end mapping from microscopic aircraft states to future regional traffic flow, AeroSense preserves aircraft-level dynamics while naturally accommodating varying traffic density, and avoids reliance on historical look-back windows. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that AeroSense exhibits strong predictive accuracy and robustness compared with time series-based forecasting approaches, without requiring exhaustive hyperparameter tuning. These findings suggest that aircraft-state situation modeling provides a promising alternative to conventional time-series forecasting in air traffic flow management.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Generalized Temporal Coupled Mode Theory (g-TCMT) applied to Coupled Resonator Optical Waveguides with Exchange Symmetry (CROWe)

In this paper, we extend our generalized Temporal Coupled Mode Theory (g-TCMT) model, developed earlier [1], from a simple, dual-coupled micro-ring resonator (MRR) system to higher-order, n-serially coupled MRRs. By treating each pair of adjacent MRRs as a single `equivalent resonator', we demonstrate excellent agreement in spectral resonance position, between the g-TCMT and numerical results obtained using the transfer matrix method (TMM), for systems up to and including order n=4. The validity of this approach hinges on the existence, or otherwise, of exchange symmetry, and so we refer to these structures as Coupled Resonator Optical Waveguides with exchange symmetry (CROWe's). We explore the limitations of our approach with illustrative examples of strongly coupled systems of order n \geq 5. Finally, we explore the properties of such higher order CROWe's for applications in non-Hermitian photonics, i.e., in which gain in some of the component MRRs and loss in the others leads to Parity-Time (PT) symmetry.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2026

EvoOMG: An Evolution-Oriented Multi-Agent Guidance Framework for Heterogeneous Legacy-and-MLO Wi-Fi Networks

The gradual deployment of Wi-Fi 7/8 multi-link operation (MLO) will lead to long-term coexistence between legacy non-MLO stations (STAs) and MLO-capable STAs in WLANs. This mixed deployment makes throughput optimization challenging because legacy STAs follow single-link contention and transmission, whereas MLO-capable STAs can exploit multiple links with richer access opportunities. Existing learning-based methods usually treat such networks as homogeneous systems and directly map the current observation to a complete MAC action, which cannot faithfully represent both legacy single-link and MLO multi-link behaviors. To address this issue, we propose EvoOMG, an evolution-oriented multi-agent guidance framework for heterogeneous legacy-and-MLO Wi-Fi networks. EvoOMG reformulates throughput optimization as a standard-constrained staged multi-agent decision problem. Each agent encodes recent channel, queue, contention, and transmission histories, first generates contention guidance, and then produces aggregation guidance conditioned on the preceding access stage and standard-specific feasibility constraints. This autoregressive design follows the Wi-Fi MAC order of ``contention before transmission'' while preserving distinct protocol behaviors of legacy and MLO-capable STAs. NS-3 evaluations show that EvoOMG improves scheduled goodput, convergence stability, and MLO link utilization over static enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA), one-step MADDPG, and independent-learning baselines, achieving substantial performance gains in representative mixed-standard scenarios.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

Machine Learning for Depression Screening and Intervention: an Original Circadian Rhythm Score-based Methodology

Depression screening from large-scale behavioral data is challenged by fragmented circadian indicators, limited interpretability, and the lack of intervention-oriented analysis. Existing approaches typically analyze sleep, activity, and social behaviors in isolation, failing to capture their joint circadian structure. To address this limitation, we first propose the Circadian Rhythm Score (CRS), a composite index that compresses multi-domain daily behaviors into a unified representation of circadian rhythm. CRS is constructed to maximize discriminative power for depression screening while preserving behavioral semantics through non-negativity constraints. Empirical results demonstrate near-lossless compression, where a single CRS retains almost the full predictive capability compared with multiple raw behavioral indicators. Building upon CRS, we develop an interpretable depression screening framework based on gradient-boosted trees and SHAP analysis, revealing nonlinear and saturation-like associations between circadian rhythm and depression risk. Beyond risk prediction, we further integrate interaction modeling and counterfactual regression to estimate heterogeneous and dose-dependent behavioral effects, enabling intervention-oriented reasoning under different circadian contexts. Experiments on the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS, n=15,233), demonstrate robust screening performance (ROC-AUC=0.825) and identify actionable behavioral thresholds, including a minimum effective exercise dose of approximately 300 MET-min/week and an optimal restorative nap duration of approximately 65 minutes for sleep-deprived individuals. By bridging supervised representation learning and interpretable modeling, this work provides a scalable framework for depression screening and intervention-aware healthcare data mining.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Federated Learning for Global Carbon Emission Forecasting: A Hybrid Time-Series Approach with Statistical and Neural Models

Climate change, primarily driven by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, requires accurate forecasting tools to support effective mitigation policies and sustainable development strategies. Existing forecasting approaches typically rely on centralized data collection, which is often restricted by privacy regulations and the distributed nature of emission data across countries and industrial sectors. This paper proposes a novel federated hybrid forecasting framework that integrates ARIMA-based trend modeling, GARCH-based volatility modeling, LSTM-Attention temporal representation learning, and XGBoost prediction within a privacy-preserving federated learning environment. The proposed framework enables collaborative learning among distributed clients without requiring the exchange of raw data. Experimental evaluation across 14 clients demonstrates strong forecasting performance, achieving client R2 values between 0.50 and 0.97 with an average of 0.73, RMSE values ranging from 0.06 to 2.35 with an average of 1.21, and MAPE values between 1.5% and 11.3% with an average of 6.5%. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides an accurate, scalable, and regulation-compliant solution for collaborative carbon-emission forecasting.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

MP3: Multi-Period Pattern Pre-training for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Spatio-Temporal forecasting is crucial in diverse fields, such as transportation, climate, and energy. Urban spatio-temporal data exhibits temporal mirage: similar short-window inputs have divergent future trends, and vice versa. Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) cannot effectively identify such mirages. We argue that the core reason lies in the short-window inputs that have incomplete period observation, heterogeneous global spatial correlation, and cross-period superposition causality. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel Multi- Period Pattern Pre-training (MP3), a plug-and-play pre-training plugin for distinguishing temporal mirages. MP3 presents two core innovations: (1) The multi-period pattern learning is designed to learn multi-period patterns from long time series. Specifically, multi-period temporal modeling leverages edge convolution to identify different multi-period patterns. Multi-period spatial modeling uses a bottleneck project and a global memory bank to capture heterogeneous global spatial relations efficiently. Cross-period pattern interaction employs a causality-enhanced Transformer to capture dependencies across different period patterns. (2) This plugin can seamlessly integrate into existing STGNN backbones to strengthen their forecasting performance. The experiment on five STGNN baselines across five real-world datasets (including a large-scale dataset CA) verify the effectiveness, superior scalability and strong adaptability of MP3, which brings consistent and robust performance improvements across all evaluated baselines. On average, MP3 reduces the MAE 4.7% and the RMSE 5.0%. The code can be available at https://github.com/YAN-outlook/MP3.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Causal Disentanglement-Inspired Degradation Representation Learning for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Existing deep network-based full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) models typically work by performing pairwise comparisons of deep features from the reference and distorted images. In this paper, we approach this problem from a different perspective and propose a novel FR-IQA paradigm based on causal inference and decoupled representation learning. Unlike typical feature comparison-based FR-IQA models, our approach formulates degradation estimation as a causal disentanglement process guided by intervention on latent representations. We first decouple degradation and content representations by exploiting the content invariance between the reference and distorted images. Second, inspired by the human visual masking effect, we design a masking module to model the causal relationship between image content and degradation features, thereby extracting content-influenced degradation features from distorted images. Finally, quality scores are predicted from these degradation features using either supervised regression or label-free dimensionality reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves highly competitive performance on standard IQA benchmarks across fully supervised, few-label, and label-free settings. Furthermore, we evaluate the approach on diverse non-standard natural image domains with scarce data, including underwater, radiographic, medical, neutron, and screen-content images. Benefiting from its ability to perform scenario-specific training and prediction without labeled IQA data, our method exhibits superior cross-domain generalization compared to existing training-free FR-IQA models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Defenses: Manifold-Aligned Regularization for Intrinsic 3D Point Cloud Robustness

Despite extensive progress in point cloud robustness, existing methods primarily rely on augmentation strategies or defense mechanisms while overlooking the geometric nature of adversarial fragility. We hypothesize that adversarial vulnerability in 3D networks arises from a manifold misalignment between the latent geometry learned by the model and the intrinsic geometry of the underlying surface. Small, geometry-preserving perturbations along the input manifold often induce disproportionate distortions in feature space, potentially leading to misclassifications. We formalize this phenomenon by developing a geometric interpretation of 3D robustness that links classical adversarial theory to the intrinsic structure of point clouds. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce Manifold-Aligned Point Recognition (MAPR), a framework that regularizes the latent geometry by aligning predictions across intrinsic perturbations. MAPR augments each point cloud with intrinsic features capturing local curvature and diffusion structure, and applies a consistency loss that preserves invariance to intrinsic, geometry-preserving perturbations. Without relying on adversarial training or additional data, MAPR consistently improves robustness under multiple adversarial attacks across several datasets, achieving average robustness gains of +20.02 and +8.83 percentage points over vanilla models on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, respectively.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SplAttN: Bridging 2D and 3D with Gaussian Soft Splatting and Attention for Point Cloud Completion

Although multi-modal learning has advanced point cloud completion, the theoretical mechanisms remain unclear. Recent works attribute success to the connection between modalities, yet we identify that standard hard projection severs this connection: projecting a sparse point cloud onto the image plane yields an extremely sparse support, which hinders visual prior propagation, a failure mode we term Cross-Modal Entropy Collapse. To address this practical limitation, we propose SplAttN, which replaces hard projection with Differentiable Gaussian Splatting to produce a dense, continuous image-plane representation. By reformulating projection as continuous density estimation, SplAttN avoids collapsed sparse support, facilitates gradient flow, and improves cross-modal connection learnability. Extensive experiments show that SplAttN achieves state-of-the-art performance on PCN and ShapeNet-55/34. Crucially, we utilize the real-world KITTI benchmark as a stress test for multi-modal reliance. Counter-factual evaluation reveals that while baselines degenerate into unimodal template retrievers insensitive to visual removal, SplAttN maintains a robust dependency on visual cues, validating that our method establishes an effective cross-modal connection. Code is available at https://github.com/zay002/SplAttN.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Plan in Sandbox, Navigate in Open Worlds: Learning Physics-Grounded Abstracted Experience for Embodied Navigation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional general reasoning capabilities. However, their performance in embodied navigation remains hindered by a scarcity of aligned open-world vision and robot control data. Despite simulators providing a cost-effective alternative for data collection, the inherent reliance on photorealistic simulations often limits the transferability of learned policies. To this end, we propose \textit{\textbf{S}andbox-\textbf{A}bstracted \textbf{G}rounded \textbf{E}xperience} (\textbf{\textit{SAGE}}), a framework that enables agents to learn within a physics-grounded semantic abstraction rather than a photorealistic simulation, mimicking the human capacity for mental simulation where plans are rehearsed in simplified physics abstractions before execution. \textit{SAGE} system operates via three synergistic phases: (1) \textit{Genesis}: constructing diverse, physics-constrained semantic environments to bootstrap experience; (2) \textit{Evolution}: distilling experiences through Reinforcement Learning (RL), utilizing a novel asymmetric adaptive clipping mechanism to stabilize updates; (3) \textit{Navigation}: bridging the abstract policy to open-world control. We demonstrate that \textit{SAGE} significantly improves planner-assisted embodied navigation, achieving a 53.21\% LLM-Match Success Rate on A-EQA (+9.7\% over baseline), while showing encouraging transfer to physical indoor robot deployment.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Plug-and-Play Label Map Diffusion for Universal Goal-Oriented Navigation

In embodied vision, Goal-Oriented Navigation (GON) requires robots to locate a specific goal within an unexplored environment. The primary challenge of GON arises from the need to construct a Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) map to understand the environment while simultaneously localizing an unobserved goal. Existing map-based methods typically employ self-centered semantic maps, often facing challenges such as reliance on complete maps or inconsistent semantic association. To this end, we propose Plug-and-Play Label Map Diffusion (PLMD), which defines a novel map completion diffusion model based on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). PLMD generates obstacle and semantic labels for unobserved regions through a diffusion-based completion process, thereby enabling goal localization even in partially observed environments. Moreover, it mitigates inconsistent semantic association by leveraging structural consistency between known and unknown obstacle layouts and integrating obstacle priors into the semantic denoising process. By substituting predicted labels for unobserved regions, robots can accurately localize the specified objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PLMD \textbf{(I)} effectively expands the region of unknown maps, \textbf{(II)} integrates seamlessly into existing navigation strategies that rely on semantic maps, \textbf{(III)} achieves state-of-the-art performance on three GON tasks.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration

Unified image restoration using a single model often faces task interference due to diverse degradations. To address this, we propose DACG-IR (Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating), which enables explicit perception of degradation characteristics to dynamically modulate feature representations. Our method constructs degradation-aware contextual representations from the input to modulate attention distribution, frequency-domain features, and feature aggregation. Specifically, a lightweight multi-scale degradation-aware module extracts coarse degradation information and generates layer-wise prompts. These prompts guide attention temperature and output gating in encoder and decoder blocks for adaptive feature extraction. Additionally, a spatial-channel dual-gated adaptive fusion mechanism refines encoder features, suppressing noise propagation from shallow to deep layers. This design effectively suppresses degradation-induced noise while preserving informative structures. Experiments show DACG-IR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in single-task, all-in-one, adverse weather removal, and composite degradation settings. Code: https://github.com/HlHomes/DACG-IR-code

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Causally Sufficient and Necessary Feature Expansion for Class-Incremental Learning

Current expansion-based methods for Class Incremental Learning (CIL) effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting by freezing old features. However, such task-specific features learned from the new task may collide with the old features. From a causal perspective, spurious feature correlations are the main cause of this collision, manifesting in two scopes: (i) guided by empirical risk minimization (ERM), intra-task spurious correlations cause task-specific features to rely on shortcut features. These non-robust features are vulnerable to interference, inevitably drifting into the feature space of other tasks; (ii) inter-task spurious correlations induce semantic confusion between visually similar classes across tasks. To address this, we propose a Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS)-based regularization method to guide feature expansion in CIL. Specifically, we first extend the definition of PNS to expansion-based CIL, termed CPNS, which quantifies both the causal completeness of intra-task representations and the separability of inter-task representations. We then introduce a dual-scope counterfactual generator based on twin networks to ensure the measurement of CPNS, which simultaneously generates: (i) intra-task counterfactual features to minimize intra-task PNS risk and ensure causal completeness of task-specific features, and (ii) inter-task interfering features to minimize inter-task PNS risk, ensuring the separability of inter-task representations. Theoretical analyses confirm its reliability. The regularization is a plug-and-play method for expansion-based CIL to mitigate feature collision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Self-Distilled Reinforcement Learning for Co-Evolving Agentic Recommender Systems

Large language model-empowered agentic recommender systems (ARS) reformulate recommendation as a multi-turn interaction between a recommender agent and a user agent, enabling iterative preference elicitation and refinement beyond conventional one-shot prediction. However, existing ARS are mainly optimized in a Reflexion-style paradigm, where past interaction trajectories are stored as textual memory and retrieved as prompt context for later reasoning. Although this design allows agents to recall prior feedback and observations, the accumulated experience remains external to model parameters, leaving agents reliant on generic reasoning rather than progressively acquiring recommendation-specific decision-making ability through learning. Reinforcement learning (RL) therefore provides a natural way to internalize such interaction experience into parameters. Yet existing RL methods for ARS still suffer from two key limitations. First, they fail to capture the interactive nature of ARS, in which the recommender agent and the user agent continuously influence each other and can naturally generate endogenous supervision through interaction feedback. Second, they reduce a rich multi-turn interaction process to final outcomes, overlooking the dense supervision embedded throughout the trajectory. To this end, we propose CoARS, a self-distilled reinforcement learning framework for co-evolving agentic recommender systems. CoARS introduces two complementary learning schemes: interaction reward, which derives coupled task-level supervision for the recommender agent and the user agent from the same interaction trajectory, and self-distilled credit assignment, which converts historical trajectories into token-level credit signals under teacher-student conditioning. Experiments on multiple datasets show that CoARS outperforms representative ARS baselines in recommendation performance and user alignment.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

A Survey of Continual Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important machine learning paradigm for solving sequential decision-making problems. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in this field due to the rapid development of deep neural networks. However, the success of RL currently relies on extensive training data and computational resources. In addition, RL's limited ability to generalize across tasks restricts its applicability in dynamic and real-world environments. With the arisen of Continual Learning (CL), Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) has emerged as a promising research direction to address these limitations by enabling agents to learn continuously, adapt to new tasks, and retain previously acquired knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive examination of CRL, focusing on its core concepts, challenges, and methodologies. Firstly, we conduct a detailed review of existing works, organizing and analyzing their metrics, tasks, benchmarks, and scenario settings. Secondly, we propose a new taxonomy of CRL methods, categorizing them into four types from the perspective of knowledge storage and/or transfer. Finally, our analysis highlights the unique challenges of CRL and provides practical insights into future directions.

cs.LG↗