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Wei Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Tang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Hardware-Efficient Reinforcement-Learned Scheduling for Quantum LDPC Decoders

Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes are promising for fault-tolerant quantum computing, but their decoding algorithms present significant hardware implementation challenges. Reinforcement-learned sequential belief propagation (RL-S) improves the error-correction performance of conventional belief propagation (BP) through adaptive variable-node scheduling. However, its heap-based priority management introduces substantial hardware overhead. This paper presents hardware implementations of BP, RL-S, and bucket-based reinforcement-learned BP (BRL-S) for the [[288,12,18]] bivariate bicycle QLDPC code. The BRL-S architectures employ quantized priorities and first-in, first-out (FIFO) buckets to simplify scheduling. Three configurations with two, four, and eight priority levels are evaluated. FPGA synthesis results demonstrate that BRL-S reduces lookup-table utilization by approximately 68--72% compared with RL-S. ASIC synthesis further shows reductions of 63--67% in area and 64--69% in estimated power consumption. These results demonstrate that bucket-based scheduling substantially improves the hardware efficiency of reinforcement-learned QLDPC decoders.

cs.IT↗

Diffusion Plug-in Priors for Self-Supervised Ultrasound Video Restoration

\textit{Objective:} Ultrasound videos are limited by hardware-constrained spatial resolution and signal-dependent speckle, while paired low- and high-resolution acquisitions for supervised restoration are rarely available. We aim to jointly super-resolve and despeckle ultrasound videos without paired training data or network retraining. \textit{Methods:} We propose UltraDiff, which uses a frozen pre-trained diffusion model (DM) as a plug-in prior and restores each frame by optimizing the latent seed of the DM sampler under a range-constrained maximum a posteriori formulation. We derive a speckle-aware data-fidelity term from a Rayleigh scale-family model and characterize its relative-residual and variance-adaptive weighting properties. We further introduce a stabilized fidelity that is bounded below and strictly convex in log intensity for positive observations in its unclamped form. A total-variation regularizer complements the DM prior, and a temporal seed update warm-starts each frame from the optimized seed of its predecessor. \textit{Results:} On EchoNet-LVH videos with simulated speckle and additive noise, UltraDiff with a natural-image prior improves PSNR by 1.24\,dB over the strongest baseline, and ultrasound-related priors improve it further. On real clinical echocardiography videos, UltraDiff reduces the mean absolute error of zero-shot ejection fraction (EF) prediction from 7.31 to 6.37 EF points relative to DUP, the strongest baseline. \textit{Conclusion:} Combining a speckle-aware fidelity with frozen diffusion priors enables ground-truth-free ultrasound video restoration that benefits downstream measurement. \textit{Significance:} UltraDiff needs neither paired data nor retraining and is not tied to a specific diffusion checkpoint. Code associated with this work will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

MATS: A Multi-Agent Framework for Controllable and Reflective Tumor Synthesis

Synthesizing realistic tumors on medical images helps address data scarcity for clinical AI. Existing diffusion-based methods, however, lack fine-grained attribute-level controllability, closed-loop quality verification, and awareness of which morphological patterns are underrepresented in the target distribution. We present MATS, a multi-agent framework for text-controllable, cross-organ tumor synthesis. Given a target disease, MATS first profiles its morphological distribution over a fine-grained attribute space covering tumor geometry and appearance, and constructs a generation plan that amplifies underrepresented subtypes while keeping common ones dominant. It then localizes the target organ, proposes anatomically valid placement, and executes two-stage diffusion to produce the tumor mask and render texture, each conditioned on the corresponding attributes. A closed-loop reflective mechanism verifies attribute alignment at three checkpoints throughout synthesis and provides targeted feedback to guide re-generation when misalignment is detected. Trained exclusively on a single-source pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor dataset, MATS consistently improves downstream segmentation both in-domain and across LiTS, KiTS, and MSD-Pancreas benchmarks, whereas most prior generative augmentation methods fall below real-only training.

cs.CV↗

EEG-VID: Task-Guided Latent Predictive Pretraining for EEG Decoding and Assistive Target Selection

We propose EEG-VID, a task-guided latent predictive pretraining framework for EEG decoding under session and subject shifts. EEG-VID predicts future latent EEG states from recent history using an exponential-moving-average target encoder and weak task guidance, followed by supervised fine-tuning. Across VIG-48 and BCI Competition IV-2a/IV-2b, Stage 1 improves mean accuracy in 41 of 42 matched backbone-dataset-protocol comparisons, including all 12 leave-one-subject-out settings, with a maximum gain of 16.22 percentage points. On the 48-region cross-day VIG-48 task, EEG-VID achieves 6.52% Top-1 and 30.50% Top-5 accuracy. In a separate six-participant offline robot-scene study, candidate-constrained target selection reaches 40.24% versus a 25% chance level after subject-specific calibration. These results support task-guided latent prediction as a transferable pretraining strategy for EEG decoding and scene-constrained assistive target selection.

cs.LG↗

Ultra Flash: Scaling Real-Time Streaming Video Generation to High Resolutions

While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/UltraFlash/

cs.CV↗

How to Train Your Little Dragon: Teaching a Small Language Model to Construct and Refine GPU Optimization Scripts

Compiler transformations interact, making GPU kernel optimization a search for combinations that preserve the computation while improving performance. We introduce HOW TO TRAIN YOUR LITTLE DRAGON, a training method that teaches a small language model both to construct complete optimization scripts and to improve existing ones. Instead of ranking candidates or generating kernel code, our model generates optimization scripts. We devise a compact, lossless representation whose deterministic decoding reconstructs the exact compiler trace, preserving its transformation parameters and dependencies. We use a compiler framework TVM MetaSchedule to build training data on 54,116 distinct workloads, and construct 108,594 examples in two training sets: 60,236 teach the model to generate an optimized script from an unoptimized kernel, while 48,358 teach it to produce a better script given the kernel and a somewhat optimized script. Supervised fine-tuning teaches the model to construct and improve optimization scripts from these search-derived examples. We then add reinforcement learning with a shaped reward that combines correctness with measured performance, awarding a latency-based bonus only to numerically correct kernels. We apply this training method to a model with 8 billion parameters. After supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, the model achieves per-attempt correctness of 91.27% for construction and 92.01% for refinement, while reinforcement learning produces faster kernels than supervised training on 88 of 102 construction tasks and 145 of 170 refinement prompts. With only 8B parameters, our LITTLE DRAGON achieves higher per-attempt correctness and better kernel performance than six frontier LLMs: GPT-6 Astra, Opus 5, Kimi-K3, and GLM-5.3 among them, each with hundreds of billions to trillions of parameters, for which task-specific training is unavailable or expensive.

cs.LG↗

Refinement as a Service: Algorithmic Predictor Refinement

Prediction aggregation aims to combine information from multiple predictors into a more informative one. We study this question in the setting of calibrated predictors, where each prediction must equal the conditional expectation of the quantity being predicted given the predictor's signal. Given several calibrated input predictors and the feature distribution, but not the underlying Bayes probabilities, we ask when one can construct refined calibrated predictors that preserve the information in the original predictors and cannot be further refined using the available information. We formulate calibrated predictors as signaling schemes and define refinement through feature-independent garblings: a predictor refines another if its signal can simulate the other's signal. Constructibility is characterized through observable linear information: each signal corresponds to a vector over the feature space, and a new signal is constructible exactly when its vector lies in the linear span of the input signal vectors. Under this formulation, we establish a sharp algorithmic picture. For deterministic output predictors, bilateral refinement admits a polynomial-time algorithm based on a bipartite graph between the two input signal partitions, while refinement with an arbitrary number of input predictors is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard. In contrast, when randomized output predictors are allowed, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for any number of input predictors by decomposing constructible signal vectors into extreme rays of the associated polyhedral cone.

cs.GT↗

Experimentation and Commitment under Reward Shifts

Decision-makers in learning environments face a dilemma when their short-term optimal actions may not favor their long-term benefits the most. To understand the fundamental tradeoff behind the dilemma, we study adaptive experimentation with post-commitment reward shifts. During an experiment phase, the decision-maker may adaptively test multiple options; during a subsequent commitment phase, the decision-maker must commit to a single option, whose reward may differ from its pre-commitment reward. We propose the Reserved Arm Eliminations for Commitment (RAEC) algorithm, which reserves a predetermined portion of the experiment phase to identify the best post-shift option while using the remaining rounds to minimize short-run regret. We establish regret upper bounds for RAEC across all parameter regimes and matching minimax lower bounds, providing a tight characterization of the cost of balancing short-term performance and long-term commitment. A key implication is that deciding in advance how much of the experiment phase to reserve for the commitment decision is sufficient to achieve the best possible worst-case regret rate; adapting this amount as more data are observed does not improve the rate. We further study extensions with structural knowledge of reward shifts and with concave commitment rewards and portfolio choice. Numerical experiments confirm that our proposed algorithms achieve the regret predicted by our theory and outperform other baselines.

cs.LG↗

Joint Class-Time Learning for Video Classification with Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning

Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) addresses inexact supervision in both the instance and label spaces, which can be applied to video classification. However, bag-level labels do not explicitly supervise the correspondence between candidate classes and temporal evidence. We propose {\ours}, which couples label disambiguation with temporal evidence allocation through a joint class--time assignment. Occupancy-regularized spherical matching associates contextualized video features while learning nonuniform temporal mass and discouraging excessive concentration. During training, candidate-restricted inference recomputes the assignment within the candidate label set. A dual-marginal KL projection then constructs a structured teacher that incorporates momentum-refined class beliefs while preserving the proposal's temporal occupancy. A single plan-level KL objective aligns the full-space predictor with this teacher. Our analysis characterizes when candidate re-solving differs from masking and shows that, under the stated construction, the joint objective decomposes into class-marginal and class-conditional temporal supervision. We construct VCMIPL benchmarks from Breakfast, DoTA, and FineAction using model-generated candidate labels and evaluate the method across four feature representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PIVOTMIPL outperforms existing MIPL algorithms in both effectiveness and efficiency.

cs.CV↗

Belief-Trajectory Energy: Measuring the Path to a Prediction

Large language models (LLMs) progressively revise their predictions across Transformer layers, yet we typically observe only the final output, discarding the trajectory through which it is formed. We introduce Belief-Trajectory Energy(BTE), a model-grounded measure that characterizes an input through the layerwise predictive revisions it induces in a model. By mapping intermediate states into a shared predictive space, BTE provides a principled measure of belief change that can be summarized as either a scalar or a structured depth profile. Theoretically, we show that local BTE corresponds to predictive revision under the Fisher-Rao geometry, while the sequence of revisions captures information beyond the initial-to-final belief change. Empirically, scalar BTE provides a model-relative signal of difficulty across diverse reasoning tasks, while richer BTE representations support human-LLM review detection and fine-grained generator attribution, reaching up to $0.998$ macro-AUROC and $95.6\%$ eight-way attribution accuracy. Further analysis shows that BTE develops throughout pretraining and is selectively reshaped by targeted training, demonstrating that the resulting measurement reflects what the scoring model has learned. Together, our results establish belief trajectories as a principled model-grounded signal and suggest a broader perspective in which learned models can themselves serve as instruments for characterizing the data they process. More demonstrations can be found at https://yingjiahao14.github.io/BTE-web/.

cs.CL↗

Two Heads Are Better Than One: Aggregating Weaker LLMs for Better Forecasts

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to forecast real-world events, but access to the strongest individual forecaster may be costly or otherwise constrained. We study weak-to-strong forecast aggregation: can individually weaker LLM forecasters be aggregated to outperform a stronger forecaster? Using ForecastBench (Karger et al., 2025), we evaluate 70 LLM forecasters across 16 comparison groups, each with more than 1,000 shared subquestions, yielding 1,121 weaker-model pairs. Within each group, we identify the strongest individual by test Brier score and evaluate aggregates composed exclusively of weaker forecasters, with aggregation weights learned on separate training data. We find substantial evidence of weak-to-strong improvement. Learned linear pooling identifies a weaker pair that matches or outperforms the strongest individual in 11 of 16 groups and comes within 5% of its Brier score in all 16 groups. We also find that these improvements do not rely on having a near-best constituent and are generally accompanied by good calibration. Additional analyses show that adding more models does not consistently improve performance, and competitive weaker-model aggregates also remain available under practical constraints.

cs.LG↗

A Support-Enhanced Granular-Jamming Gripper for RL-based Grasping with Continuum Manipulators

Continuum manipulators provide dexterous motion in confined spaces, but structural compliance, hysteresis, and load-dependent deformation leave residual position and orientation errors that can undermine reliable contact with rigid grippers. To address this limitation, this paper presents a lightweight support-enhanced granular-jamming gripper tailored to a continuum manipulator. The gripper maintains compliance before jamming while establishing a direct load path to the continuum manipulator tip after jamming. To improve its grasping performance, we systematically designed membrane materials, particles, filling ratios, and the internal support structure, and further identify geometry-dependent grasp boundaries with respect to contact offset and object shape. Building on these results, we construct a physical manipulation system integrating the continuum manipulator, granular-jamming gripper, visual feedback, tendon actuation, and pneumatic control. We then train a reinforcement-learning-based reaching controller in a randomized simulation and deploy it on the physical system, demonstrating how positioning control and contact level mechanical adaptation can complement each other in a modular grasp-and-release task. By introducing an adaptive structure that relaxes the need for highly accurate modeling and positioning control, this work explores a design paradigm that integrates physical and embodied intelligence.

cs.RO↗

Training Trajectories Determine Circuit Removability in Annealable Soft-Prior Transformers

Soft positional priors can help small Transformers learn retrieval circuits, but it is unclear whether the resulting circuits remain functional once the prior is removed. We test this with an annealable soft-prior Transformer whose attention biases can be learned, faded, or zeroed during training and evaluation. On associative recall, unforced models perform well with the prior active ($0.772 \pm 0.020$) but collapse at zero gate ($0.095 \pm 0.009$). Smooth fade-to-zero training preserves high zero-gate accuracy ($0.734 \pm 0.028$), whereas forced-zero training, hard switching, and post hoc continuation fail to recover the same effect. The pattern also appears on Markov induction. Linear regression ICL provides a boundary case because zero-gate training can learn that task directly. Mechanistic traces show that circuit consolidation occurs after the gate reaches zero, even though the responsible heads vary across seeds. These results suggest that circuit removability in small discrete retrieval tasks depends on the training trajectory, not just the final architecture.

cs.LG↗

ZimaBlue: Evolving Generalizable World Action Models through Scalable Video Pre-training

Robotic manipulation faces a fundamental scaling challenge: robust generalization demands broad physical experience, yet action-labeled robot trajectories are expensive to collect and inherently limited in diversity. Egocentric videos offer a far more scalable source of embodied experience, capturing object interactions, contact dynamics, tool use, and long-horizon behaviors across diverse environments. The central challenge is how to convert this abundant but action-free experience into effective robot control. We introduce ZimaBlue, a scalable framework for learning generalizable World Action Models (WAMs) from large-scale video. ZimaBlue follows a three-stage training curriculum: it first performs causal embodied video pre-training on large-scale human and robot egocentric videos, then grounds the learned visual dynamics in heterogeneous robot trajectories through video-action mid-training with a unified action representation, and finally specializes the model to a target robot for deployment. To make generative WAMs practical for real-time control, ZimaBluefurther adopts an asynchronous Slow-Fast dual-system architecture, where a high-capacity Slow world model provides generalizable spatiotemporal representations and a lightweight Fast branch enables 30 Hz action prediction on NVIDIA RTX 4090. On real-robot zero-shot evaluations, scaling from target-robot data alone to over 120,000 hours of embodied video improves success from 36.1% to 77.8%. ZimaBlue further delivers strong performance across multiple benchmarks, with particularly pronounced gains on unseen tasks.

cs.CV↗

PROVE: Proof-guided Regime-aware Operator Verification for Hallucination Detection in Medical Visual Question Answering

In medical visual question answering (VQA), hallucinations of vision-language models (VLMs) may lead to confident but incorrect responses, raising the risk of diagnostic errors. Existing hallucination detection methods uniformly estimate the reliability of VLM outputs from response consistency or visual evidence. However, such uniform verification across questions ignores question-specific characteristics, resulting in missed overconfident errors and false alarms from over-verification. We present PROVE (Proof-guided Regime-aware Operator Verification), a black-box detector that adapts verification strategy to the evidential structure of each question. PROVE classifies questions into three verification regimes based on what kind of visual proof they demand, activates a regime-specific subset of five complementary operators, and adjusts operator importance per question through a lightweight calibration layer conditioned on deterministic question-answer features. PROVE uses question-specific evidence to reweight operators and produce a calibrated risk score. Evaluated on 8048 test samples across three medical VQA benchmarks and four frontier VLMs, PROVE achieves 0.821 AUROC, outperforming the strongest baseline by +0.159, with consistent gains across all models and benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

Dynamic Pricing and Advertising with Demand Learning

We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework in which a seller not only sets the product price but also designs flexible advertising schemes to influence customers' valuations of the product. We impose no structural restriction on the seller's feasible advertising strategies and allow her to advertise the product by disclosing or concealing any information. Following the information design literature, we model this fully flexible advertising as the seller choosing an arbitrary information policy that signals the product quality to customers. Customers observe the advertising signal and form a Bayesian posterior belief over the product quality. We investigate two questions in this work: (1) What is the value of advertising? To what extent can advertising enhance a seller's revenue? (2) Without any a priori knowledge of the customers' demand function, how can a seller adaptively learn and optimize both pricing and advertising strategies using past purchase responses? To study the first question, we quantify the value of advertising by comparing the optimal revenue from jointly designing advertising and a single posted price with the optimal revenue from pricing alone. We show that advertising can increase revenue by at most a factor of two, and this bound is tight. For the second question, we study the seller's dynamic pricing and advertising problem under demand uncertainty. Our main result for this question is a computationally efficient online algorithm that achieves the optimal $O(T^{2/3} (m\log T)^{1/3})$ regret rate when the valuation function is linear in the product quality. Here, $m$ is the cardinality of the discrete product quality domain and $T$ is the time horizon.

cs.GT↗

Teacher-Feature Drifting: One-Step Diffusion Distillation with Pretrained Diffusion Representations

Sampling from pretrained diffusion and flow-matching models typically requires many forward passes to generate diverse and high-fidelity images. Existing distillation methods often rely on multiple auxiliary networks, carefully designed training stages, or complex optimization pipelines. In this work, we revisit the recently proposed Drifting Model objective and show that a single drifting loss can be directly used to simplify one step distillation. A key observation is that the pretrained diffusion teacher itself already provides a strong representation space. Unlike the original Drifting Model, which relies on an additional pretrained feature extractor, we use intermediate hidden states of the pretrained teacher model as the feature representation. This removes the need for training or introducing an extra representation network while preserving a semantically meaningful feature geometry for drifting. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight mode coverage loss to mitigate mode collapse during distillation and encourage the student generator to cover diverse teacher-supported regions. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and SDXL demonstrate that our method achieves efficient one step generation with competitive image quality and diversity, achieving FID scores of 1.58 on ImageNet-64$\times$64 and 18.4 on SDXL, while substantially simplifying the overall distillation framework.

cs.CV↗

Private Private Information in Second-Price Auction

Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information independence in a second-price auction when the seller commits to a private private information structure, meaning bidders' signals are independent ex ante, while bidders share a symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over their valuations. We first show that the seller optimal efficient outcome with full surplus extraction can always be implemented by a private private information structure that admits a Bayes Nash equilibrium. However, this equilibrium may not be stable. We then further construct a private private information structure that achieves revenue arbitrarily close to maximum welfare while admitting a strict equilibrium. At the same time, we establish an impossibility result: under private private information, in general, bidder surplus cannot achieve maximal welfare exactly, and we characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the prior distribution under which bidder surplus can be made arbitrarily close to maximal welfare. We finally explore which other efficient outcomes are achievable under private private information.

econ.TH↗