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Xiang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Xiang Li.

At least 343 records · Page 19Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Mixture of Disentangled Experts with Missing Modalities for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) integrates multiple modalities to infer human sentiment, but real-world noise often leads to missing or corrupted data. However, existing feature-disentangled methods struggle to handle the internal variations of heterogeneous information under uncertain missingness, making it difficult to learn effective multimodal representations from degraded modalities. To address this issue, we propose DERL, a Disentangled Expert Representation Learning framework for robust MSA. Specifically, DERL employs hybrid experts to adaptively disentangle multimodal inputs into orthogonal private and shared representation spaces. A multi-level reconstruction strategy is further developed to provide collaborative supervision, enhancing both the expressiveness and robustness of the learned representations. Finally, the disentangled features act as modality experts with distinct roles to generate importance-aware fusion results. Extensive experiments on two MSA benchmarks demonstrate that DERL outperforms state-of-the-art methods under various missing-modality conditions. For instance, our method achieves improvements of 2.47% in Acc-2 and 2.25% in MAE on MOSI under intra-modal missingness.

cs.MM↗
arXiv2026

Enhancing Indoor Occupancy Prediction via Sparse Query-Based Multi-Level Consistent Knowledge Distillation

Occupancy prediction provides critical geometric and semantic understanding for robotics but faces efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. Current dense methods suffer computational waste on empty voxels, while sparse query-based approaches lack robustness in diverse and complex indoor scenes. In this paper, we propose DiScene, a novel sparse query-based framework that leverages multi-level distillation to achieve efficient and robust occupancy prediction. In particular, our method incorporates two key innovations: (1) a Multi-level Consistent Knowledge Distillation strategy, which transfers hierarchical representations from large teacher models to lightweight students through coordinated alignment across four levels, including encoder-level feature alignment, query-level feature matching, prior-level spatial guidance, and anchor-level high-confidence knowledge transfer and (2) a Teacher-Guided Initialization policy, employing optimized parameter warm-up to accelerate model convergence. Validated on the Occ-Scannet benchmark, DiScene achieves 23.2 FPS without depth priors while outperforming our baseline method, OPUS, by 36.1% and even better than the depth-enhanced version, OPUS†. With depth integration, DiScene† attains new SOTA performance, surpassing EmbodiedOcc by 3.7% with 1.62$\times$ faster inference speed. Furthermore, experiments on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark and in-the-wild scenarios demonstrate the versatility of our approach in various environments. Code and models can be accessed at https://github.com/getterupper/DiScene.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Point2RBox-v3: Self-Bootstrapping from Point Annotations via Integrated Pseudo-Label Refinement and Utilization

Driven by the growing need for Oriented Object Detection (OOD), learning from point annotations under a weakly-supervised framework has emerged as a promising alternative to costly and laborious manual labeling. In this paper, we discuss two deficiencies in existing point-supervised methods: inefficient utilization and poor quality of pseudo labels. Therefore, we present Point2RBox-v3. At the core are two principles: 1) Progressive Label Assignment (PLA). It dynamically estimates instance sizes in a coarse yet intelligent manner at different stages of the training process, enabling the use of label assignment methods. 2) Prior-Guided Dynamic Mask Loss (PGDM-Loss). It is an enhancement of the Voronoi Watershed Loss from Point2RBox-v2, which overcomes the shortcomings of Watershed in its poor performance in sparse scenes and SAM's poor performance in dense scenes. To our knowledge, Point2RBox-v3 is the first model to employ dynamic pseudo labels for label assignment, and it creatively complements the advantages of SAM model with the watershed algorithm, which achieves excellent performance in both sparse and dense scenes. Our solution gives competitive performance, especially in scenarios with large variations in object size or sparse object occurrences: 66.09%/56.86%/41.28%/46.40%/19.60%/45.96% on DOTA-v1.0/DOTA-v1.5/DOTA-v2.0/DIOR/STAR/RSAR.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Workflow-R1: Group Sub-sequence Policy Optimization for Multi-turn Workflow Construction

The rapid evolution of agentic workflows has demonstrated strong performance of LLM-based agents in addressing complex reasoning tasks. However, existing workflow optimization methods typically formulate workflow synthesis as a static, one-shot code-centric generation problem. This paradigm imposes excessive constraints on the model's coding capabilities and restricts the flexibility required for dynamic problem-solving. In this paper, we present Workflow-R1, a framework that reformulates workflow construction as a multi-turn, natural language-based sequential decision-making process. To resolve the optimization granularity mismatch inherent in such multi-turn interactions, we introduce Group Sub-sequence Policy Optimization (GSsPO). While explicitly tailored to align with the interleaved Think-Action dynamics of agentic reasoning, GSsPO fundamentally functions as a structure-aware RL algorithm generalizable to a broad class of multi-turn agentic sequential decision-making tasks. By recalibrating the optimization unit to the composite sub-sequence, specifically the atomic Think-Action cycle, it aligns gradient updates with the semantic boundaries of these interactions, ensuring robust learning in complex multi-turn reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments on multiple QA benchmarks, Workflow-R1 outperforms competitive baselines, validating GSsPO as a generalized solution for sequential reasoning and establishing Workflow-R1 as a promising new paradigm for automated workflow optimization.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

DISTINCT: A Description-Guided Branch-Consistency Analysis Framework for Non-Regressive Test Case Generation

Automated test-generation research overwhelmingly assumes the correctness of focal methods, yet practitioners routinely face non-regression scenarios where the focal method may be defective. A baseline evaluation of EVOSUITE and two leading Large Language Model (LLM)-based generators, namely CHATTESTER and CHATUNITEST, on defective focal methods reveals that, despite achieving up to 83% branch coverage, none of the generated tests expose defects, due to a lack of awareness of developer intent. To resolve this problem, we first construct two new benchmarks, namely Defects4J-Desc and QuixBugs-Desc, for experiments, where each focal method is equipped with an additional Natural Language Description (NLD) to support code functionality understanding. Subsequently, we propose DISTINCT, a description-guided branch-consistency analysis framework that transforms LLMs into fault-aware test generators. DISTINCT carries three iterative components: (1) a Generator that derives initial tests based on the NLDs and the focal method, (2) a Validator that iteratively fixes uncompilable tests using compiler diagnostics, and (3) an Analyzer that iteratively aligns test behavior with NLD semantics via branch-level analysis. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, DISTINCT achieves an average improvement of 14.64% in Compilation Success Rate (CSR), 6.66% in Passing Rate (PR), and particularly 95.22% in Defect Detection Rate (DDR) across both benchmarks. In terms of code coverage, DISTINCT improves Statement Coverage (SC) by an average of 3.77% and Branch Coverage (BC) by 5.36%. These results set a new baseline for non-regressive test generation and highlight how description-driven reasoning enables LLMs to move beyond coverage chasing toward effective defect detection.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

FLM-Audio: Natural Monologues Improves Native Full-Duplex Chatbots via Dual Training

Full-duplex dialog models aim to listen and speak simultaneously, delivering rapid responses to dynamic user input. Among different solutions to full-duplexity, a native solution merges multiple channels in each time step, achieving the lowest latency. However, prevailing designs break down the textual monologue sentences for word-level alignment with audio streams, which degrades language modeling abilities. To help address this issue, we introduce "contiguous monologues", which are composed by continuous sentences and "waiting" intervals, mimicking human-like cognitive behavior in dialogs. We find a proper training paradigm to be critical for semantically aligning contiguous monologues with audio. To this end, we develop a "dual" training paradigm that alternates the position of the monologues, either leading or trailing the audio, across different training stages. A combination of our contiguous monologue and dual training strategy is applied in developing FLM-Audio, our 7B spoken dialog chatbot with native full-duplexity. As confirmed by experimental results, FLM-Audio achieves superior response qualities and chatting experiences while requiring significantly less training data.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

EgoMem: Lifelong Memory Agent for Full-duplex Omnimodal Models

We introduce EgoMem, the first lifelong memory agent tailored for full-duplex models that process real-time omnimodal streams. EgoMem enables real-time models to recognize multiple users directly from raw audiovisual streams, to provide personalized response, and to maintain long-term knowledge of users' facts, preferences, and social relationships extracted from audiovisual history. EgoMem operates with three asynchronous processes: (i) a retrieval process that dynamically identifies user via face and voice, and gathers relevant context from a long-term memory; (ii) an omnimodal dialog process that generates personalized audio responses based on the retrieved context; and (iii) a memory management process that automatically detects dialog boundaries from omnimodal streams, and extracts necessary information to update the long-term memory. Unlike existing memory agents for LLMs, EgoMem relies entirely on raw audiovisual streams, making it especially suitable for lifelong, real-time, and embodied scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that EgoMem's retrieval and memory management modules achieve over 95% accuracy on the test set. When integrated with a fine-tuned RoboEgo omnimodal chatbot, the system achieves fact-consistency scores above 87% in real-time personalized dialogs, establishing a strong baseline for future research.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

GEPO: Group Expectation Policy Optimization for Stable Heterogeneous Reinforcement Learning

As single-center computing approaches power constraints, decentralized training becomes essential. However, traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, crucial for enhancing large model post-training, cannot adapt to decentralized distributed training due to the tight coupling between parameter learning and rollout sampling. For this, we propose HeteroRL, a heterogeneous RL architecture that decouples these processes, enabling stable training across geographically distributed nodes connected via the Internet. The core component is Group Expectation Policy Optimization (GEPO), an asynchronous RL algorithm robust to latency caused by network delays or heterogeneity in computational resources. Our study reveals that high latency significantly increases KL divergence, leading to higher variance of importance weights and training instability. GEPO mitigates this issue by using group expectation weighting to exponentially reduce the variance of importance weights, with theoretical guarantees. Experiments show GEPO achieves superior stability - only a 3% performance drop from online to 1800s latency-and reduces the best-to-last gap by 85% versus GSPO (1.8 vs. 12.0) while attaining the highest scores, highlighting its effectiveness in decentralized, resource-heterogeneous environments.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Symbolic Reduction of Multi-loop Feynman Integrals via Generating Functions

We introduce a novel, systematic method for the complete symbolic reduction of multi-loop Feynman integrals, leveraging the power of generating functions. The differential equations governing these generating functions naturally yield symbolic recurrence relations. We develop an efficient algorithm that utilizes these recurrences to reduce integrals to a minimal set of master integrals. This approach circumvents the exponential growth of traditional integration-by-parts relations, enabling the reduction of high-rank, multi-loop integrals critical for state-of-the-art calculations in perturbative quantum field theory.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

$π_\texttt{RL}$: Online RL Fine-tuning for Flow-based Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and perform complex tasks from multimodal input. Although recent work explores using reinforcement learning (RL) to automate the laborious data collection process in scaling supervised fine-tuning (SFT), applying RL to large-scale flow-based VLAs (\eg, $π_0$, $π_{0.5}$) remains challenging due to intractable action log-likelihoods raised from flow matching. We address this challenge with $π_{\texttt{RL}}$, featuring two technical approaches: (1) \textbf{Flow-Noise} models the denoising process as a discrete-time MDP with a learnable noise network for exact log-likelihood computation. (2) \textbf{Flow-SDE} integrates denoising with agent-environment interaction, formulating a two-layer MDP that employs ODE-to-SDE conversion for efficient RL exploration. We evaluate $π_{\texttt{RL}}$ across various benchmarks, with experiments demonstrating that RL yields significant performance improvements in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

The SAGES Critical View of Safety Challenge: A Global Benchmark for AI-Assisted Surgical Quality Assessment

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for surgical quality assessment promise to democratize access to expertise, with applications in training, guidance, and accreditation. This study presents the SAGES Critical View of Safety (CVS) Challenge, the first AI competition organized by a surgical society, using the CVS in laparoscopic cholecystectomy, a universally recommended yet inconsistently performed safety step, as an exemplar of surgical quality assessment. A global collaboration across 54 institutions in 24 countries engaged hundreds of clinicians and engineers to curate 1,000 videos annotated by 20 surgical experts according to a consensus-validated protocol. The challenge addressed key barriers to real-world deployment in surgery, including achieving high performance, capturing uncertainty in subjective assessment, and ensuring robustness to clinical variability. To enable this scale of effort, we developed EndoGlacier, a framework for managing large, heterogeneous surgical video and multi-annotator workflows. Thirteen international teams participated, achieving up to a 17% relative gain in assessment performance, over 80% reduction in calibration error, and a 17% relative improvement in robustness over the state-of-the-art. Analysis of results highlighted methodological trends linked to model performance, providing guidance for future research toward robust, clinically deployable AI for surgical quality assessment.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

GoalRank: Group-Relative Optimization for a Large Ranking Model

Mainstream ranking approaches typically follow a Generator-Evaluator two-stage paradigm, where a generator produces candidate lists and an evaluator selects the best one. Recent work has attempted to enhance performance by expanding the number of candidate lists, for example, through multi-generator settings. However, ranking involves selecting a recommendation list from a combinatorially large space. Simply enlarging the candidate set remains ineffective, and performance gains quickly saturate. At the same time, recent advances in large recommendation models have shown that end-to-end one-stage models can achieve promising performance with the expectation of scaling laws. Motivated by this, we revisit ranking from a generator-only one-stage perspective. We theoretically prove that, for any (finite Multi-)Generator-Evaluator model, there always exists a generator-only model that achieves strictly smaller approximation error to the optimal ranking policy, while also enjoying scaling laws as its size increases. Building on this result, we derive an evidence upper bound of the one-stage optimization objective, from which we find that one can leverage a reward model trained on real user feedback to construct a reference policy in a group-relative manner. This reference policy serves as a practical surrogate of the optimal policy, enabling effective training of a large generator-only ranker. Based on these insights, we propose GoalRank, a generator-only ranking framework. Extensive offline experiments on public benchmarks and large-scale online A/B tests demonstrate that GoalRank consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

RATE: Reviewer Profiling and Annotation-free Training for Expertise Ranking in Peer Review Systems

Reviewer assignment is increasingly critical yet challenging in the LLM era, where rapid topic shifts render many pre-2023 benchmarks outdated and where proxy signals poorly reflect true reviewer familiarity. We address this evaluation bottleneck by introducing LR-bench, a high-fidelity, up-to-date benchmark curated from 2024-2025 AI/NLP manuscripts with five-level self-assessed familiarity ratings collected via a large-scale email survey, yielding 1055 expert-annotated paper-reviewer-score annotations. We further propose RATE, a reviewer-centric ranking framework that distills each reviewer's recent publications into compact keyword-based profiles and fine-tunes an embedding model with weak preference supervision constructed from heuristic retrieval signals, enabling matching each manuscript against a reviewer profile directly. Across LR-bench and the CMU gold-standard dataset, our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong embedding baselines by a clear margin. We release LR-bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gnociew/LR-bench, and a GitHub repository at https://github.com/Gnociew/RATE-Reviewer-Assign.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Hamiltonian Decoded Quantum Interferometry for General Pauli Hamiltonians

In this work, we study the Hamiltonian Decoded Quantum Interferometry (HDQI) for the general Hamiltonians $H=\sum_ic_iP_i$ on an $n$-qubit system, where the coefficients $c_i\in \mathbb{R}$ and $P_i$ are Pauli operators. We show that, given access to an appropriate decoding oracle, there exist efficient quantum algorithms for preparing the state $ρ_{\mathcal P}(H) = \frac{\mathcal P^2(H)}{\text{Tr}[\mathcal P^2(H)]}$, where $\mathcal P(H)$ denotes the matrix function induced by a univariate polynomial $\mathcal P(x)$. Such states can be used to approximate the Gibbs states of $H$ for suitable choices of polynomials. We further demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are robust to imperfections in the decoding procedure. Our results substantially extend the scope of HDQI beyond stabilizer-like Hamiltonians, providing a method for Gibbs-state preparation and Hamiltonian optimization in a broad class of physically and computationally relevant quantum systems.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

LocoScooter: Designing a Stationary Scooter-Based Locomotion System for Navigation in Virtual Reality

Virtual locomotion remains a challenge in VR, especially in space-limited environments where room-scale walking is impractical. We present LocoScooter, a low-cost, deployable locomotion interface combining foot-sliding on a compact treadmill with handlebar steering inspired by scooter riding. Built from commodity hardware, it supports embodied navigation through familiar, physically engaging movement. In a within-subject study (N = 14), LocoScooter significantly improved immersion, enjoyment, and bodily involvement over joystick navigation, while maintaining comparable efficiency and usability. Despite higher physical demand, users did not report increased fatigue, suggesting familiar movements can enrich VR navigation.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

Gyral-Sulcal-Net: An Integrated Network Representation of Brain Folding Patterns

Our brain functions as a complex communication network, and studying it from a network perspective offers valuable insights into its organizational principles and links to cognitive functions and brain disorders. However, most current network studies typically use brain regions as nodes, often overlooking the intricate folding patterns of finer-scale anatomical landmarks within these regions. In this study, we introduce a novel approach to integrate the brain's two primary folding patterns - gyri and sulci - into a unified network termed the Gyral-Sulcal-Net (GS-Net), in which three different types of finer-scale landmarks have been successfully identified. We evaluated the proposed GS-Net across multiple datasets, comprising over 1,600 brains, spanning different age groups (from 34 gestational weeks to elderly adults) and cohorts (healthy brains and those with pathological conditions). The experimental results demonstrate that the GS-Net can effectively integrate and represent diverse cortical folding patterns from a network perspective. More importantly, this approach offers a promising way for integrating different folding patterns into a unified anatomical brain network, alongside structural and functional networks, providing a comprehensive framework for studying brain networks.

q-bio.NC↗
arXiv2026

A Scalable Pipeline for Enabling Non-Verbal Speech Generation and Understanding

Non-verbal Vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter and sighs, are vital for conveying emotion and intention in human speech, yet most existing speech systems neglect them, which severely compromises communicative richness and emotional intelligence. Existing methods for NVs acquisition are either costly and unscalable (relying on manual annotation/recording) or unnatural (relying on rule-based synthesis). To address these limitations, we propose a highly scalable automatic annotation framework to label non-verbal phenomena from natural speech, which is low-cost, easily extendable, and inherently diverse and natural. This framework leverages a unified detection model to accurately identify NVs in natural speech and integrates them with transcripts via temporal-semantic alignment method. Using this framework, we created and released \textbf{NonVerbalSpeech-38K}, a diverse, real-world dataset featuring 38,718 samples across 10 NV categories collected from in-the-wild media. Experimental results demonstrate that our dataset provides superior controllability for NVs generation and achieves comparable performance for NVs understanding.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Machine Learning Model Trading with Verification under Information Asymmetry

Machine learning (ML) model trading, known for its role in protecting data privacy, faces a major challenge: information asymmetry. This issue can lead to model deception, a problem that current literature has not fully solved, where the seller misrepresents model performance to earn more. We propose a game-theoretic approach, adding a verification step in the ML model market that lets buyers check model quality before buying. However, this method can be expensive and offers imperfect information, making it harder for buyers to decide. Our analysis reveals that a seller might probabilistically conduct model deception considering the chance of model verification. This deception probability decreases with the verification accuracy and increases with the verification cost. To maximize seller payoff, we further design optimal pricing schemes accounting for heterogeneous buyers' strategic behaviors. Interestingly, we find that reducing information asymmetry benefits both the seller and buyer. Meanwhile, protecting buyer order information doesn't improve the payoff for the buyer or the seller. These findings highlight the importance of reducing information asymmetry in ML model trading and open new directions for future research.

cs.GT↗