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Wei Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Two Birds with One Stone: Skill-Augmented Generation via Unified Retrieval and Utilization

Skills, as reusable external knowledge, have demonstrated substantial potential to enhance the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks. However, existing skill-augmented generation methods typically rely on separate models for skill retrieval and skill utilization, resulting in disconnected optimization of these two processes. To address this gap, we propose Skill-Uni, a unified reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes skill retrieval and utilization. Specifically, we adopt a generative skill retrieval paradigm that enables a single model to both learn how to retrieve relevant skills and leverage them for task solving. To effectively train this unified framework, we introduce a two-stage training strategy consisting of warm-up instruction tuning and GRPO, allowing the model to progressively improve its skill retrieval and utilization capabilities. Extensive experiments on five skill-related benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Skill-Uni, yielding average performance gains of 66.59% and 34.82% over the base Qwen3-4B and LLaMA3.1-8B models, respectively. Besides, Skill-Uni is compatible with various skill retrieval engines, demonstrating its flexibility and generalizability. Additional in-depth analyses also provide insights into the effectiveness of Skill-Uni.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Commanding at the Speed of Sound: Audio-Centric Referring Expression Segmentation for Aerial Scenes

Referring expression segmentation (RES) aims to localize targets at the pixel level guided by human instructions. However, current models predominantly follow a text-centric paradigm that treats discrete text as the primary interaction medium for these human instructions. This assumption is especially limiting in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, where rapid response, hands-free operation, and natural communication are often critical. In this paper, we reconstruct UAV referring expression segmentation through an audio-centric perspective. Grounded in information theory, we demonstrate that raw audio provides a higher upper bound for extracting rich semantic features than transcribed text. To achieve this, we construct an audio-driven UAV referring expression segmentation benchmark named Aerial-AudioRES by augmenting VisDrone with synthesized speech, forming "audio-text-image-mask" quadruples. Specifically, we employ an ambiguity filtering mechanism to ensure referential uniqueness, and incorporate eight distinct timbres alongside 4 realistic noises to simulate authentic environments. To drive the paradigm shift from text-centric to audio-centric, we propose the end-to-end Audio-centric Referring Expression Segmentation Network (ARES-Net). Distinct from discrete text-visual matching, our approach learns to establish a direct soft alignment between continuous acoustic manifolds and multi-scale visual representations. Comprehensive experiments show that our method obtains a peak accuracy of 64.23% in oIoU and demonstrates robust generalization on a collected real-human test set. Furthermore, it significantly reduces total interaction latency to one-third of the text-based method. Our code is available at https://github.com/LemonGauss/ARES-Net.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Shared-Factor-Conditioned Diffusion for Low-Rank Tensor Recovery

Tensor recovery spans heterogeneous data structures and observation processes, calling for a representation that can adapt across modalities and tasks. We propose DiffTR, an unsupervised framework that unifies tensor completion, denoising, and hyperspectral super-resolution through coordinate-conditioned diffusion. Shared factors indexed by tensor coordinates condition a compact score network, and score matching jointly learns the factors and an implicit tensor representation from the available observations. Scalar and vector-valued outputs accommodate individual entries and entire tubes, enabling a common formulation for tabular tensors, images, and videos. The framework separates representation learning from task-specific observation modeling: reverse diffusion recovers missing values; estimation via Tweedie's formula, soft thresholding, and optional spatial consistency support mixed-noise denoising; and measurement-guided sampling transfers a prior learned from low-resolution hyperspectral observations to high-resolution reconstruction, followed by post-sampling refinement with data consistency and spectral subspace regularization. This separation makes the representation compatible with different corruption models and permits task-specific constraints to be incorporated within the same recovery framework. Experiments across multiple tensor modalities and recovery tasks demonstrate competitive reconstruction quality and the flexibility of a unified conditional generative representation. The code is available at https://github.com/CZY-Code/DiffTR

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Are Textual Residuals Truly Complementary? Learning Visual Complements under Semantic Superposition for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Text-enhanced visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) exploits textual descriptions to compensate for appearance cues that are weak or unavailable under infrared imaging. Existing methods construct compensation from differences between modality-oriented textual representations, implicitly assuming that textual differences are visually complementary. We revisit this assumption through semantic superposition and show that dense textual residuals may entangle useful appearance variations with redundant, making direct residual fusion unreliable. We propose Superposition-Aware Residual Calibration, which transforms dense textual differences into selective and visually grounded complements. Low-Interference Sparse Residual Learning represents modality-oriented text embeddings as sparse activation strengths over a shared dictionary, selects positive strength differences, and suppresses both dictionary-level overlap and activation-weighted interference to reconstruct a compact, selectively controlled residual. Visual Complement and Counterfactual Calibration further calibrates the residual against identity-specific RGB-IR visual discrepancies, encouraging retained semantics to provide meaningful compensation while preserving the residual structure. Experiments on Tri-SYSU-MM01, Tri-RegDB, and Tri-LLCM show that SARC consistently improves the VI-ReID backbone and remains competitive with text-assisted methods. Mechanism analyses show that SARC produces more concentrated textual variations, reduces dictionary-level feature interference, and improves residual-visual-complement alignment for most samples. These results demonstrate that effective cross-modal compensation requires textual residuals to be selectively represented and explicitly calibrated, rather than directly treated as visual complements. Code and implementation details will be released upon publication.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

FormalASR: End-to-End Spoken Chinese to Formal Text

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are typically optimized for verbatim transcription, which preserves disfluencies, filler words, and informal spoken structures that are often unsuitable for downstream writing-oriented applications. A common workaround is a two-stage ASR+LLM pipeline for post-editing, but this design increases latency and memory cost and is difficult to deploy on-device. We present FormalASR, two compact end-to-end models with 0.6B and 1.7B parameters that directly transcribe spoken Chinese into formal written text. To enable this setting, we build WenetSpeech-Formal and Speechio-Formal, two large-scale spoken-to-formal datasets constructed by LLM-based rewriting and quality filtering. We then fine-tune Qwen3-ASR at both model scales with supervised fine-tuning. Experiments on WenetSpeech-Formal and Speechio-Formal show that FormalASR achieves up to 37.4% relative CER reduction over verbatim baselines, while also improving ROUGE-L and BERTScore. FormalASR requires no post-processing LLM at deployment time, providing a lightweight, on-device solution for spoken-to-formal transcription.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

BOLT: Multi-Bottleneck Bound-Guided Learning for Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling with Time Lags and Resource-Coupled Transport

Flexible job-shop scheduling becomes resource-coupled when a scarce vehicle fleet moves jobs between stations, because the schedule sets the transport waits. BOLT (bound-oriented learning for transport-coupled scheduling) builds a lower bound from chain, machine-capacity, and fleet-capacity relaxations. The bound equals the makespan at termination, so its per-step changes form a reward that sums to a constant minus the makespan. Because it never exceeds the attainable makespan, each candidate's bound increase is a proven rise of the makespan floor, which the policy reads as a price. The root bound certifies a completed schedule's suboptimality gap without a solver. On industry-motivated 10-module prefabricated-construction instances, explicit transport coupling outperforms a transport-penalty policy in every tested cell where loaded moves occupy at least 66% of fleet time and in none at or below 56%. Across five zero-shot 50- and 80-module production batches, BOLT outperforms the best dispatching-rule pair on four and the penalty policy on the three with long moves. In the three-vehicle 80-module batch, its mean makespan is 13.0% below the best pair and 4.2% below an hour-budget constraint-programming solver whose proven gap averages 34%. BOLT decides in 2.3-5.9 ms per event on one processor core and re-plans a disruption in seconds.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

CARD: Closing the Teacher-Student Loop for Adversarial Robustness Distillation

Adversarial robustness distillation typically treats a robust teacher as a fixed knowledge source and transfers robustness to a compact student in a one-way manner. This paradigm terminates teacher-student interaction once the student is distilled, thereby discarding potentially useful feedback from the distilled student. However, exploiting such feedback is nontrivial because indiscriminate weak-to-strong transfer may propagate student errors to the teacher. To address this issue, we propose Cyclic Adversarial Robustness Distillation (CARD), a closed-loop framework that turns the distilled student into a feedback source for refining the robust teacher and subsequently transfers the teacher gains back to the same student. CARD first performs strong-to-weak adversarial distillation and then uses reliability-enhanced student feedback to refine the robust teacher. The refinement combines inverse adversarial student feedback with teacher-student discrepancy maximization, after which the refined teacher is used to continue training the same student under the unchanged base distillation objective. We further establish a sample-level sufficient condition for reliable weak-to-strong feedback transfer and derive a distribution-level upper bound on the refined teacher's risk. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet-10 across multiple teacher-student architectures and base distillation methods show that CARD improves adversarial robustness in most evaluated settings while generally preserving clean accuracy. These results show that the distilled student can provide useful feedback to the teacher, enabling robustness transfer to proceed beyond the conventional one-way teacher-to-student paradigm.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

PyCache Trap: The Inspection-Execution Gap in Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills combine instructions with executable resources, giving third-party packages access to an agent's runtime. Existing skill scanners inspect documentation and visible source, but Python may execute a bundled bytecode cache with different behavior. We study this gap between inspection and execution through PyCache Trap, which pairs benign source with a substituted cache accepted by the loader and connects it to a task-relevant invocation. Scanner-guided rewriting changes the invocation wording while preserving the cache body, separating package admission from recognition of the concealed behavior. Across 100 skills and seven scanners, PyCache Trap achieves 94-100% attack success, with no semantic recognition of the cache-resident behavior. We propose execution-aware validation (EAV) to connect inspected instructions, scripts, imports, and runtime artifacts in a typed execution graph. EAV combines grounded behavioral analysis with trusted reproduction of compiled artifacts. It detects all 100 evaluated source-present cache substitutions and reaches 92.8% Recall at 10.0% FPR across five attack families and 200 benign skills. The results support checking the executable artifacts a runtime can select as part of skill admission, within the supported loaders and code-object normalization. The code is released at https://github.com/leo0481/PyCacheTrap.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Collaboratively Guided Adversarial Robust Distillation with Teacher-Favorable Examples

Adversarial distillation transfers robustness from high-capacity teachers to compact students. Existing adversarial distillation methods mainly use teacher predictions on clean or adversarial examples to supervise student learning. However, teacher-favorable supervision within the perturbation neighborhood remains underexplored in adversarial distillation. We therefore propose Collaboratively Guided Adversarial Robust Distillation (CGARD), which jointly optimizes distinct student-adversarial and teacher-collaborative examples within the same perturbation neighborhood. The teacher-collaborative example is constrained to incur no greater cross-entropy loss under the teacher than the clean input. CGARD combines collaborative teacher guidance with adversarial teacher supervision to improve robust knowledge transfer. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, including white-box evaluation and additional black-box transfer evaluation, demonstrate consistent robustness improvements over strong adversarial distillation baselines.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Instance-anchored interaction evidence: Grounding robot plans in human pointing and handling

A robot that assists people must often act on what a person has shown rather than said: which of several identical cartons was pointed at, or which box was handled. The plan is executed from the final scene, whereas the evidence occurs earlier, possibly on objects that have since moved. We propose instance-anchored interaction evidence (IAE), which registers every object of the final scene to its public identifier, keeps each identity through the video by backward mask propagation, and describes every frame by the geometry between hands, forearms and these instances. An evidence network trained only from task outcomes scores the instances. For pointing tasks, a grammar-constrained dynamic program trained with a structured loss decodes object-destination programs; symbolic programs handle reference disambiguation and, without learning, episodic tasks. On 1,255 WatchAct benchmark requests, scored by symbolic execution, IAE reaches 64.2% plan success on implicit-intent tasks against 27.5% for a 32B vision-language model (strict success 49.7% against 15.4%), and 46.4% against 27.0% on restoration, reversal and imitation without task-specific training. Controls with the same perception overlays, the same 32 frames, forward tracking, or a relation model trained on the same labels do not explain the gain. Given IAE's evidence as text with its meaning explained, the same language model reaches 57.4%: most of the gain comes from the instance-anchored evidence, and the explicit programs add 6.8 points at a fraction of the cost. Pointing remains the hardest case, with 16.9% strict success. The code is available at https://github.com/WeiZhou96/iae-watchact.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Fixed-Reference Pose Residuals for Measuring Cross-Dataset Cue Transfer in Human-Robot Interaction Anticipation

Social and service robots in public spaces need to anticipate which nearby person is about to approach and touch them, so that a response can be prepared before contact. It is largely unknown which cues support this anticipation when a model trained with one robot is used on another robot at a different site. We study this question with a fixed-reference pose residual (FRPR) model: a geometry predictor built from the person's bounding box and mask is trained and frozen, and a temporal network then learns from body pose an additive correction to its logit, so that every prediction splits exactly into a geometry term and a pose term. Between two public egocentric datasets recorded by different robots, HUI360 and SSUP-A, with every choice made on source data, the pose correction raised average precision (AP) from 0.277 to 0.321 from SSUP-A to HUI360 and gave no measurable gain in the opposite direction; the same asymmetry held over a stronger, source-selected geometry reference. Freezing gave no AP advantage over joint training, and simple geometric baselines and tree ensembles remained competitive or better, so the construction serves measurement rather than prediction accuracy. A head-orientation residual added small gains in both directions. Post hoc, whether a person faces the camera kept its discriminative direction across datasets, whereas head pitch reversed. With thresholds chosen on source data, the neural models that use geometry detected at most 17% of target interactions. Code and processed data are available at https://github.com/WeiZhou96/FRPR-interaction-anticipation.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Disk-Resident Graph ANN Search: An Experimental Evaluation

As data volumes grow while memory capacity remains limited, disk-resident graph-based approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) methods have become a practical alternative to memory-resident designs, shifting the bottleneck from computation to disk I/O. However, since their technical designs diverge widely across storage, layout, and execution paradigms, a systematic understanding of their fundamental performance trade-offs remains elusive. This paper presents a comprehensive experimental study of disk-resident graph-based ANN methods. First, we decompose such systems into five key technical components, i.e., storage strategy, disk layout, cache management, query execution, and update mechanism, and build a unified taxonomy of existing designs across these components. Second, we conduct fine-grained evaluations of representative strategies for each technical component to analyze the trade-offs in throughput, recall, and resource utilization. Third, we perform comprehensive end-to-end experiments and parameter-sensitivity analyses to evaluate overall system performance under diverse configurations. Fourth, our study reveals several non-obvious findings: (1) vector dimensionality fundamentally reshapes component effectiveness, necessitating dimension-aware design; (2) existing layout strategies exhibit surprisingly low I/O utilization (less than or equal to 15%); (3) page size critically affects feasibility and efficiency, with smaller pages preferred when layouts are carefully optimized; and (4) update strategies present clear workload-dependent trade-offs between in-place and out-of-place designs. Based on these findings, we derive practical guidelines for system design and configuration, and outline promising directions for future research.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

PFAdapter: Hierarchical LoRA Decomposition for Personalized Federated MLLMs

Agentic AI systems are reshaping communications and networking by deploying autonomous intelligent agents capable of collaborative learning while maintaining data privacy at network edges. Within distributed network environments, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) serve as cognitive engines for edge devices, yet federated fine-tuning faces substantial challenges in balancing global knowledge aggregation with local adaptation under heterogeneous network conditions. Conventional federated protocols typically rely on uniform parameter aggregation, which conflates domain-invariant features with client-specific nuances, thereby resulting in suboptimal personalization and excessive communication overhead. To address these challenges, we propose PFAdapter, a communication-efficient framework introducing hierarchical LoRA decomposition to explicitly separate adapter parameters into global-shared and local-private components. Query and key projections are assigned to global synchronization for capturing universal multimodal semantics across the network, while value and output projections remain localized for edge-specific adaptation. Additionally, orthogonality regularization based on the Frobenius norm enforces strict separation between these components, preventing redundant feature learning. Selective aggregation protocols synchronize only global-shared components across the federated network, preserving local expertise and reducing communication costs by nearly 50%. Extensive experiments on VQA-RAD, SLAKE, Hateful Memes, and CrisisMMD datasets demonstrate that PFAdapter consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracy improvements ranging from 2.4% to 4.8% across diverse edge intelligence tasks. Consequently, our framework establishes an efficient solution for agentic AI deployment in resource-constrained communication networks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Anomaly Detection and Generation with Diffusion Models: A Survey

Anomaly detection (AD) plays a pivotal role across diverse domains, including cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, and industrial manufacturing, by identifying unexpected patterns that deviate from established norms in real-world data. Recent advancements in deep learning, specifically diffusion models (DMs), have sparked significant interest due to their ability to learn complex data distributions and generate high-fidelity samples, offering a robust framework for unsupervised AD. In this survey, we comprehensively review anomaly detection and generation with diffusion models (ADGDM), presenting a tutorial-style analysis of the theoretical foundations and practical implementations and spanning images, videos, time series, tabular, and multimodal data. Crucially, unlike existing surveys that often treat anomaly detection and generation as separate problems, we highlight their inherent synergistic relationship. We reveal how DMs enable a reinforcing cycle where generation techniques directly address the fundamental challenge of anomaly data scarcity, while detection methods provide critical feedback to improve generation fidelity and relevance, advancing both capabilities beyond their individual potential. A detailed taxonomy categorizes ADGDM methods based on anomaly scoring mechanisms, conditioning strategies, and architectural designs, analyzing their strengths and limitations. We final discuss key challenges including scalability and computational efficiency, and outline promising future directions such as efficient architectures, conditioning strategies, and integration with foundation models (e.g., visual-language models and large language models). By synthesizing recent advances and outlining open research questions, this survey aims to guide researchers and practitioners in leveraging DMs for innovative AD solutions across diverse applications.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

CoMemNet: A Continual Memory Network with Drift-Aware Sampling for Traffic Prediction

Traffic sensor networks evolve as sensors are added and traffic distributions change, whereas most forecasting models assume a fixed node set and repeatedly retrain on all available data. We propose CoMemNet, a Continual Memory Network for efficient prediction over evolving traffic sensor networks. CoMemNet uses an Online branch to adapt to the current period and an exponential-moving-average Target branch as a stable feature reference. A Wasserstein-based Drift Sampler compares node-wise Online-Target feature distributions and selects a limited set of drift-sensitive nodes for updating. A lightweight Node-Adaptive Temporal Memory Replay Buffer (TMRB-N) retains compact temporal states without repeatedly traversing all historical training data. The prediction backbone does not consume an adjacency matrix; sensor adjacency is used only to construct data and optionally expand the selected update set to a limited neighborhood. Experiments on three multi-period PeMS datasets include three-seed evaluation, strong static retraining and continual baselines, controlled sampling strategies, continual-learning metrics, robustness tests, and resource accounting. The results show that CoMemNet maintains stable prediction accuracy and efficient adaptation under bounded shared-node selection, achieving a better balance between historical knowledge preservation and current-period prediction performance. Meanwhile, as the evolving network expands, CoMemNet shows clearer accuracy and cumulative training-time advantages over current-period retraining baselines. The code is available at:https://meiwu5.github.io/CoMemNet.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

SoK: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Emulation-Based Dynamic Analysis Research for ARM Cortex-M Firmware (Extended Version)

Microcontroller (MCU)-based devices are increasingly pervasive, making efficient, scalable firmware security analysis critical. Recent firmware re-hosting work enables automated vulnerability assessment, yet two gaps remain. First, existing tools are evaluated on limited, heavily overlapping datasets, undermining the generalizability of reported results. Second, prior research advances the state of the art along isolated dimensions, such as emulation, fuzzing, or bug diagnosis, without a holistic understanding of how these components interact and complement one another in dynamic analysis workflows. Building on recently released large-scale MCU firmware datasets from OTACAP and FirmLine, we present an empirical study of 24 emulation-based firmware analysis tools published in top conferences and journals. We position these tools within a unified automated analysis pipeline: emulation configuration reconnaissance, emulation, bug finding, and diagnosis. At each stage, we evaluate whether a tool's output provides sufficient information to enable the subsequent stage, using a deduplicated and validated subset of 4,571 ARM-based firmware samples. Only 1,580 samples (34.5%) can be successfully fuzzed, even counting a sample successful if at least one existing tool can fuzz it. Among these, fuzzing results are generally poor, with average code coverage of only 10% and many false crashes/hangs. Through a systematic analysis of failed fuzzing attempts and false-positive cases, we expose fundamental challenges and methodological limitations in current approaches. These findings highlight critical gaps in the state of the art and provide actionable insights to guide future research in emulation-based firmware analysis.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

An Energy-Based Framework for Transient Stability of Grid-Forming Converter Networks With Current Limiting

Existing analyses for the transient stability of grid-forming (GFM) converters under current limiting mainly address single-converter systems, while network-level transient stability analysis remains challenging. This paper develops a network energy construction that incorporates current limiting while retaining a provable dissipation property. This structure enables Lyapunov-based analysis consistent with classical direct method for synchronous-machine based systems, without switching between mode-dependent energy functions. A two-GFM example using a reactive circular current limiter and impedance insertion illustrates the proposed framework. Electromagnetic transient simulations support the theoretical results.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2026

BeatDance: Generating Beat-Consistent 3D Dance with Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Modeling

Generating realistic 3D dance from music is a challenging task that requires accurate synchronization with musical rhythms while capturing the spatial complexity of human motion. Although existing methods can generate physically plausible dance motions, they often struggle to achieve precise alignment with music, such as the beat. To address this limitation, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework, BeatDance, with two components: 1) We present a Hierarchical Decoupled Attention (HDA) module, which first disentangles the learning of human pose and temporal dynamics. A hierarchical structure is then employed to capture both short-term and long-term dependencies, thereby enhancing spatial-temporal modeling. 2) We adopt cycle-consistent learning by introducing an auxiliary dance-to-music module. During training, discrepancies between the reconstructed and original music induce a stronger loss signal, effectively encouraging the consistency property between the music and dance motion. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms recent competitive methods on two benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗