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Wei Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Tang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

From Correlation to Causation: Max-Pooling-Based Multi-Instance Learning Leads to More Robust Whole Slide Image Classification

In whole slide images (WSIs) analysis, attention-based multi-instance learning (MIL) models are susceptible to spurious correlations and degrade under domain shift. These methods may assign high attention weights to non-tumor regions, such as staining biases or artifacts, leading to unreliable tumor region localization. In this paper, we revisit max-pooling-based MIL methods from a causal perspective. Under mild assumptions, our theoretical results demonstrate that max-pooling encourages the model to focus on causal factors while ignoring bias-related factors. Furthermore, we discover that existing max-pooling-based methods may overfit the training set through rote memorization of instance features and fail to learn meaningful patterns. To address these issues, we propose FocusMIL, which couples max-pooling with an instance-level variational information bottleneck (VIB) to learn compact, predictive latent representations, and employs a multi-bag mini-batch scheme to stabilize optimization. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets and one semi-synthetic dataset. The results show that, by capturing causal factors, FocusMIL exhibits significant advantages in out-of-distribution scenarios and instance-level tumor region localization tasks.

cs.CV↗

Unleashing the Power of Vision-Language Models for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Visual Recognition

Long-tailed multi-label visual recognition poses a significant challenge, as images typically contain multiple labels with highly imbalanced class distributions, leading to biased models that favor head classes while underperforming on tail classes. Recent efforts have leveraged pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, alongside long-tailed learning techniques to exploit rich visual-textual priors for improved performance. However, existing methods often derive semantic inter-class relationships directly from imbalanced datasets, resulting in unreliable correlations for tail classes due to data scarcity. Moreover, CLIP's zero-shot paradigm is optimized for single-label image-text matching, making it suboptimal for multi-label tasks. To address these issues, we propose the correlation adaptation prompt network (CAPNET), a novel end-to-end framework that explicitly models label correlations from CLIP's textual encoder. The framework incorporates a graph convolutional network for label-aware propagation and learnable soft prompts for refined embeddings. It utilizes a distribution-balanced Focal loss with class-aware re-weighting for optimized training under imbalance. Moreover, it improves generalization through test-time ensembling and realigns visual-textual modalities using parameter-efficient fine-tuning to avert overfitting on tail classes without compromising head class performance. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on benchmarks including VOC-LT, COCO-LT, and NUS-WIDE demonstrate that CAPNET achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness for real-world long-tailed multi-label visual recognition.

cs.CV↗

Learning Primitive Embodied World Models: Towards Scalable Robotic Learning

While video-generation-based embodied world models have gained increasing attention, their reliance on large-scale embodied interaction data remains a key bottleneck. The scarcity, difficulty of collection, and high dimensionality of embodied data fundamentally limit the alignment granularity between language and actions and exacerbate the challenge of long-horizon video generation--hindering generative models from achieving a "GPT moment" in the embodied domain. There is a naive observation: the diversity of embodied data far exceeds the relatively small space of possible primitive motions. Based on this insight, we propose a novel paradigm for world modeling--Primitive Embodied World Models (PEWM). By restricting video generation to fixed short horizons, our approach 1) enables fine-grained alignment between linguistic concepts and visual representations of robotic actions, 2) reduces learning complexity, 3) improves data efficiency in embodied data collection, and 4) decreases inference latency. By equipping with a modular Vision-Language Model (VLM) planner and a Start-Goal heatmap Guidance mechanism (SGG), PEWM further enables flexible closed-loop control and supports compositional generalization of primitive-level policies over extended, complex tasks. Our framework leverages the spatiotemporal vision priors in video models and the semantic awareness of VLMs to bridge the gap between fine-grained physical interaction and high-level reasoning, paving the way toward scalable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied intelligence.

cs.RO↗

The Rise of Parameter Specialization for Knowledge Storage in Large Language Models

Over time, a growing wave of large language models from various series has been introduced to the community. Researchers are striving to maximize the performance of language models with constrained parameter sizes. However, from a microscopic perspective, there has been limited research on how to better store knowledge in model parameters, particularly within MLPs, to enable more effective utilization of this knowledge by the model. In this work, we analyze twenty publicly available open-source large language models to investigate the relationship between their strong performance and the way knowledge is stored in their corresponding MLP parameters. Our findings reveal that as language models become more advanced and demonstrate stronger knowledge capabilities, their parameters exhibit increased specialization. Specifically, parameters in the MLPs tend to be more focused on encoding similar types of knowledge. We experimentally validate that this specialized distribution of knowledge contributes to improving the efficiency of knowledge utilization in these models. Furthermore, by conducting causal training experiments, we confirm that this specialized knowledge distribution plays a critical role in improving the model's efficiency in leveraging stored knowledge.

cs.CL↗

Detection and Geographic Localization of Natural Objects in the Wild: A Case Study on Palms

Palms are ecologically and economically indicators of tropical forest health, biodiversity, and human impact that support local economies and global forest product supply chains. While palm detection in plantations is well-studied, efforts to map naturally occurring palms in dense forests remain limited by overlapping crowns, uneven shading, and heterogeneous landscapes. We develop PRISM (Processing, Inference, Segmentation, and Mapping), a flexible pipeline for detecting and localizing palms in dense tropical forests using large orthomosaic images. Orthomosaics are created from thousands of aerial images and spanning several to hundreds of gigabytes. Our contributions are threefold. First, we construct a large UAV-derived orthomosaic dataset collected across 21 ecologically diverse sites in western Ecuador, annotated with 8,830 bounding boxes and 5,026 palm center points. Second, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art object detectors based on efficiency and performance, integrating zero-shot SAM 2 as the segmentation backbone, and refining the results for precise geographic mapping. Third, we apply calibration methods to align confidence scores with IoU and explore saliency maps for feature explainability. Though optimized for palms, PRISM is adaptable for identifying other natural objects, such as eastern white pines. Future work will explore transfer learning for lower-resolution datasets (0.5 to 1m).

cs.CV↗

SAMPO:Scale-wise Autoregression with Motion PrOmpt for generative world models

World models allow agents to simulate the consequences of actions in imagined environments for planning, control, and long-horizon decision-making. However, existing autoregressive world models struggle with visually coherent predictions due to disrupted spatial structure, inefficient decoding, and inadequate motion modeling. In response, we propose \textbf{S}cale-wise \textbf{A}utoregression with \textbf{M}otion \textbf{P}r\textbf{O}mpt (\textbf{SAMPO}), a hybrid framework that combines visual autoregressive modeling for intra-frame generation with causal modeling for next-frame generation. Specifically, SAMPO integrates temporal causal decoding with bidirectional spatial attention, which preserves spatial locality and supports parallel decoding within each scale. This design significantly enhances both temporal consistency and rollout efficiency. To further improve dynamic scene understanding, we devise an asymmetric multi-scale tokenizer that preserves spatial details in observed frames and extracts compact dynamic representations for future frames, optimizing both memory usage and model performance. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory-aware motion prompt module that injects spatiotemporal cues about object and robot trajectories, focusing attention on dynamic regions and improving temporal consistency and physical realism. Extensive experiments show that SAMPO achieves competitive performance in action-conditioned video prediction and model-based control, improving generation quality with 4.4$\times$ faster inference. We also evaluate SAMPO's zero-shot generalization and scaling behavior, demonstrating its ability to generalize to unseen tasks and benefit from larger model sizes.

cs.CV↗

No-Regret Online Autobidding Algorithms in First-price Auctions

Automated bidding to optimize online advertising with various constraints, e.g. ROI constraints and budget constraints, is widely adopted by advertisers. A key challenge lies in designing algorithms for non-truthful mechanisms with ROI constraints. While prior work has addressed truthful auctions or non-truthful auctions with weaker benchmarks, this paper provides a significant improvement: We develop online bidding algorithms for repeated first-price auctions with ROI constraints, benchmarking against the optimal randomized strategy in hindsight. In the full feedback setting, where the maximum competing bid is observed, our algorithm achieves a near-optimal $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound, and in the bandit feedback setting (where the bidder only observes whether the bidder wins each auction), our algorithm attains $\widetilde{O}(T^{3/4})$ regret bound.

cs.GT↗

RSRNav: Reasoning Spatial Relationship for Image-Goal Navigation

Recent image-goal navigation (ImageNav) methods learn a perception-action policy by separately capturing semantic features of the goal and egocentric images, then passing them to a policy network. However, challenges remain: (1) Semantic features often fail to provide accurate directional information, leading to superfluous actions, and (2) performance drops significantly when viewpoint inconsistencies arise between training and application. To address these challenges, we propose RSRNav, a simple yet effective method that reasons spatial relationships between the goal and current observations as navigation guidance. Specifically, we model the spatial relationship by constructing correlations between the goal and current observations, which are then passed to the policy network for action prediction. These correlations are progressively refined using fine-grained cross-correlation and direction-aware correlation for more precise navigation. Extensive evaluation of RSRNav on three benchmark datasets demonstrates superior navigation performance, particularly in the "user-matched goal" setting, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

Scaling Wideband Massive MIMO Radar via Beamspace Dimension Reduction

We present an architecture for scaling digital beamforming for wideband massive MIMO radar. Conventional spatial processing becomes computationally prohibitive as array size grows; for example, the computational complexity of MVDR beamforming scales as O(N^3) for an N-element array. In this paper, we show that energy concentration in beamspace provides the basis for drastic complexity reduction, with array scaling governed by the O(NlogN) complexity of the spatial FFT used for beamspace transformation. Specifically, we propose an architecture for windowed beamspace MVDR beamforming, parallelized across targets and subbands, and evaluate its efficacy for beamforming and interference suppression for government-supplied wideband radar data from the DARPA SOAP (Scalable On-Array Processing) program. We demonstrate that our approach achieves detection performance comparable to full-dimensional benchmarks while significantly reducing computational and training overhead, and provide insight into tradeoffs between beamspace window size and FFT resolution in balancing complexity, detection accuracy, and interference suppression.

eess.SP↗

Gauging the variational optimization of projected entangled-pair states

Projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) constitute a powerful variational ansatz for capturing ground state physics of two-dimensional quantum systems. However, accurately computing and minimizing the energy expectation value remains challenging, in part because the impact of the gauge degrees of freedom that are present in the tensor network representation is poorly understood. We analyze the role of gauge transformations for the case of a U(1)-symmetric PEPS with point group symmetry, thereby reducing the gauge degrees of freedom to a single class. We show how gradient-based optimization strategies exploit the gauge freedom, causing the tensor network contraction to become increasingly inaccurate and to produce artificially low variational energies. Furthermore, we develop a gauge-fixed optimization strategy that largely suppresses this effect, resulting in a more robust optimization. Our study underscores the need for gauge-aware optimization strategies to guarantee reliability of variational PEPS in general settings.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Optimal Calibrated Signaling in Digital Auctions

In digital advertising, online platforms allocate ad impressions through real-time auctions, where advertisers typically rely on autobidding agents to optimize bids on their behalf. Unlike traditional auctions for physical goods, the value of an ad impression is uncertain and depends on the unknown click-through rate (CTR). While platforms can estimate CTRs more accurately using proprietary machine learning algorithms, these estimates/algorithms remain opaque to advertisers. This information asymmetry naturally raises the following questions: how can platforms disclose information in a way that is both credible and revenue-optimal? We address these questions through calibrated signaling, where each prior-free bidder receives a private signal that truthfully reflects the conditional expected CTR of the ad impression. Such signals are trustworthy and allow bidders to form unbiased value estimates, even without access to the platform's internal algorithms. We study the design of platform-optimal calibrated signaling in the context of second-price auction. Our first main result fully characterizes the structure of the optimal calibrated signaling, which can also be computed efficiently. We show that this signaling can extract the full surplus -- or even exceed it -- depending on a specific market condition. Our second main result is an FPTAS for computing an approximately optimal calibrated signaling that satisfies an IR condition. Our main technical contributions are: a reformulation of the platform's problem as a two-stage optimization problem that involves optimal transport subject to calibration feasibility constraints on the bidders' marginal bid distributions; and a novel correlation plan that constructs the optimal distribution over second-highest bids.

cs.GT↗

Visual Position Prompt for MLLM based Visual Grounding

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at various image-related tasks, they encounter challenges in precisely aligning coordinates with spatial information within images, particularly in position-aware tasks such as visual grounding. This limitation arises from two key factors. First, MLLMs lack explicit spatial references, making it difficult to associate textual descriptions with precise image locations. Second, their feature extraction processes prioritize global context over fine-grained spatial details, leading to weak localization capability. To address these issues, we introduce VPP-LLaVA, an MLLM enhanced with Visual Position Prompt (VPP) to improve its grounding capability. VPP-LLaVA integrates two complementary mechanisms: the global VPP overlays a learnable, axis-like tensor onto the input image to provide structured spatial cues, while the local VPP incorporates position-aware queries to support fine-grained localization.To effectively train our model with spatial guidance, we further introduce VPP-SFT, a curated dataset of 0.6M high-quality visual grounding samples. Designed in a compact format, it enables efficient training and is significantly smaller than datasets used by other MLLMs (e.g., ~21M samples in MiniGPT-v2), yet still provides a strong performance boost. The resulting model, VPP-LLaVA, not only achieves state-of-the-art results on standard visual grounding benchmarks but also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to challenging unseen datasets. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WayneTomas/VPP-LLaVA.

cs.CV↗

MoSAiC: Multi-Modal Multi-Label Supervision-Aware Contrastive Learning for Remote Sensing

Contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning transferable representations without the reliance on large labeled datasets. Its ability to capture intrinsic similarities and differences among data samples has led to state-of-the-art results in computer vision tasks. These strengths make CL particularly well-suited for Earth System Observation (ESO), where diverse satellite modalities such as optical and SAR imagery offer naturally aligned views of the same geospatial regions. However, ESO presents unique challenges, including high inter-class similarity, scene clutter, and ambiguous boundaries, which complicate representation learning -- especially in low-label, multi-label settings. Existing CL frameworks often focus on intra-modality self-supervision or lack mechanisms for multi-label alignment and semantic precision across modalities. In this work, we introduce MoSAiC, a unified framework that jointly optimizes intra- and inter-modality contrastive learning with a multi-label supervised contrastive loss. Designed specifically for multi-modal satellite imagery, MoSAiC enables finer semantic disentanglement and more robust representation learning across spectrally similar and spatially complex classes. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, BigEarthNet V2.0 and Sent12MS, show that MoSAiC consistently outperforms both fully supervised and self-supervised baselines in terms of accuracy, cluster coherence, and generalization in low-label and high-class-overlap scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Sensing Cardiac Health Across Scenarios and Devices: A Multi-Modal Foundation Model Pretrained on Heterogeneous Data from 1.7 Million Individuals

Cardiac biosignals, such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and photoplethysmograms (PPG), are of paramount importance for the diagnosis, prevention, and management of cardiovascular diseases, and have been extensively used in a variety of clinical tasks. Conventional deep learning approaches for analyzing these signals typically rely on homogeneous datasets and static bespoke models, limiting their robustness and generalizability across diverse clinical settings and acquisition protocols. In this study, we present a cardiac sensing foundation model (CSFM) that leverages advanced transformer architectures and a generative, masked pretraining strategy to learn unified representations from vast, heterogeneous health records. Our model is pretrained on an innovative multi-modal integration of data from multiple large-scale datasets (including MIMIC-III-WDB, MIMIC-IV-ECG, and CODE), comprising cardiac signals and the corresponding clinical or machine-generated text reports from approximately 1.7 million individuals. We demonstrate that the embeddings derived from our CSFM not only serve as effective feature extractors across diverse cardiac sensing scenarios, but also enable seamless transfer learning across varying input configurations and sensor modalities. Extensive evaluations across diagnostic tasks, demographic information recognition, vital sign measurement, clinical outcome prediction, and ECG question answering reveal that CSFM consistently outperforms traditional one-modal-one-task approaches. Notably, CSFM exhibits robust performance across multiple ECG lead configurations from standard 12-lead systems to single-lead setups, and in scenarios where only ECG, only PPG, or a combination thereof is available. These findings highlight the potential of CSFM as a versatile and scalable solution, for comprehensive cardiac monitoring.

cs.LG↗

FlowRAM: Grounding Flow Matching Policy with Region-Aware Mamba Framework for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation in high-precision tasks is essential for numerous industrial and real-world applications where accuracy and speed are required. Yet current diffusion-based policy learning methods generally suffer from low computational efficiency due to the iterative denoising process during inference. Moreover, these methods do not fully explore the potential of generative models for enhancing information exploration in 3D environments. In response, we propose FlowRAM, a novel framework that leverages generative models to achieve region-aware perception, enabling efficient multimodal information processing. Specifically, we devise a Dynamic Radius Schedule, which allows adaptive perception, facilitating transitions from global scene comprehension to fine-grained geometric details. Furthermore, we integrate state space models to integrate multimodal information, while preserving linear computational complexity. In addition, we employ conditional flow matching to learn action poses by regressing deterministic vector fields, simplifying the learning process while maintaining performance. We verify the effectiveness of the FlowRAM in the RLBench, an established manipulation benchmark, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The results demonstrate that FlowRAM achieves a remarkable improvement, particularly in high-precision tasks, where it outperforms previous methods by 12.0% in average success rate. Additionally, FlowRAM is able to generate physically plausible actions for a variety of real-world tasks in less than 4 time steps, significantly increasing inference speed.

cs.RO↗

DTVM: Revolutionizing Smart Contract Execution with Determinism and Compatibility

We introduce the DeTerministic Virtual Machine (DTVM) Stack, a next-generation smart contract execution framework designed to address critical performance, determinism, and ecosystem compatibility challenges in blockchain networks. Building upon WebAssembly (Wasm) while maintaining full Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ABI compatibility, DTVM introduces a Deterministic Middle Intermediate Representation (dMIR) and a hybrid lazy-JIT compilation engine to balance compilation speed and execution efficiency. DTVM further accommodates diverse instruction set architectures (e.g., EVM, RISC-V) through modular adaptation layers. This enables seamless integration with DTVM's hybrid lazy-JIT compilation engine, which dynamically optimizes performance while preserving deterministic execution guarantees across heterogeneous environments. The key contributions including: 1). The framework achieves up to 2$\times$ acceleration over evmone in dominant Ethereum contract (e.g. ERC20/721/1155) execution and reduces fibonacci computation latency by 11.8$\sim$40.5% compared to Wasm based VMs. 2). A novel trampoline hot-switch mechanism enables sub-millisecond (0.95ms) post-deployment invocation times, outperforming up to about 23$\times$ in compilation and invocation efficiency. 3). It supports multi-language development (Solidity, C++, Rust, Java, Go, and AssemblyScript) through unified bytecode conversion while maintaining EVM ABI compatibility for seamless invocation. It reduces machine code object sizes by 30.0$\sim$72.6%, coupled with a minimized Trusted Computing Base. 4). It offers SmartCogent, an AI-driven full-stack development experience, leveraging fine-tuned LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation to automate tasks across the smart contract lifecycle: development, debugging, security auditing, and deployment. DTVM Stack has been open-sourced (https://github.com/DTVMStack).

cs.DC↗

Tuning the Right Foundation Models is What you Need for Partial Label Learning

Partial label learning (PLL) seeks to train generalizable classifiers from datasets with inexact supervision, a common challenge in real-world applications. Existing studies have developed numerous approaches to progressively refine and recover ground-truth labels by training convolutional neural networks. However, limited attention has been given to foundation models that offer transferrable representations. In this work, we empirically conduct comprehensive evaluations of 11 foundation models across 13 PLL approaches on 8 benchmark datasets under 3 PLL scenarios. We further propose PartialCLIP, an efficient fine-tuning framework for foundation models in PLL. Our findings reveal that current PLL approaches tend to 1) achieve significant performance gains when using foundation models, 2) exhibit remarkably similar performance to each other, 3) maintain stable performance across varying ambiguity levels, while 4) are susceptible to foundation model selection and adaptation strategies. Additionally, we demonstrate the efficacy of text-embedding classifier initialization and effective candidate label filtering using zero-shot CLIP. Our experimental results and analysis underscore the limitations of current PLL approaches and provide valuable insights for developing more generalizable PLL models. The source code can be found at https://github.com/SEU-hk/PartialCLIP.

cs.LG↗

Disentangling Language and Culture for Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models

This paper introduces a Dual Evaluation Framework to comprehensively assess the multilingual capabilities of LLMs. By decomposing the evaluation along the dimensions of linguistic medium and cultural context, this framework enables a nuanced analysis of LLMs' ability to process questions within both native and cross-cultural contexts cross-lingually. Extensive evaluations are conducted on a wide range of models, revealing a notable "CulturalLinguistic Synergy" phenomenon, where models exhibit better performance when questions are culturally aligned with the language. This phenomenon is further explored through interpretability probing, which shows that a higher proportion of specific neurons are activated in a language's cultural context. This activation proportion could serve as a potential indicator for evaluating multilingual performance during model training. Our findings challenge the prevailing notion that LLMs, primarily trained on English data, perform uniformly across languages and highlight the necessity of culturally and linguistically model evaluations. Our code can be found at https://yingjiahao14. github.io/Dual-Evaluation/.

cs.CL↗