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Xinhu Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Xinhu Zheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

LightVLN: Efficient Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Compact Memory and History-Guided Local Aggregation

Aerial vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables unmanned aerial vehicles to execute long-horizon natural-language instructions from visual observations in complex three-dimensional environments. However, recent aerial VLN models often rely on large-scale vision-language backbones and dense visual histories, imposing substantial computation and memory costs that hinder onboard deployment. We propose LightVLN, a lightweight history-aware aerial VLN framework that combines a compact 0.5B language backbone with compact representations of both historical and current observations. LightVLN compresses each historical frame into a single token using visual features already computed by the policy. It further introduces history- and instruction-conditioned local aggregation to reduce the current observation from 256 to 32 visual tokens while preserving navigation-relevant spatial information. With up to 16 historical frames, the policy uses at most 48 observation-derived tokens. On the public OpenFly dataset, LightVLN achieves 50.93% Test-Seen and 36.14% Test-Unseen success rates (SR), outperforming the evaluated 7B language-backbone baselines on most reported metrics. It also achieves 25.83% SR on AerialVLN-S Val-Seen. In a reconstructed unseen campus, we deploy LightVLN on a DJI M350 RTK with an external Jetson Orin NX 16 GB for closed-loop onboard-compute real-to-sim hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) evaluation, achieving 14.61 Hz model inference and 11.13 Hz end-to-end decision updates. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LightVLN for aerial navigation.

cs.CV↗

Efficient Multi-Modal Planning with Reward-Guided Preference Optimization for Autonomous Driving

Safe and efficient trajectory planning is essential in autonomous driving. However, existing end-to-end approaches often fall short in both computational efficiency and safety guarantees. Methods based on imitation learning suffer from causal confusion, while rule-based scoring approaches often incur heavy computational overhead and suffer from objective misalignment. Additionally, preference-based methods rely on strict pairwise annotations, limiting data utilization. To overcome these limitations, we propose EMPlan, an efficient multi-modal trajectory planning method powered by reward-guided fine-tuning. We design a hybrid architecture that combines sparse anchors with an offset refinement module for efficient multi-modal trajectory prediction. Sparse anchors provide coarse trajectory candidates with low latency, which are subsequently refined by the offset module for higher prediction accuracy. To enhance safety without incurring additional inference costs, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm consisting of pretraining and reward-guided fine-tuning. During fine-tuning, we leverage rule-based reward signals and unpaired preference supervision to refine the pretrained policy toward safer trajectory selection. We evaluate EMPlan on the non-reactive NAVSIM benchmark, where it strikes a favorable balance between planning accuracy and efficiency, demonstrating superior performance under real-time constraints.

cs.RO↗

SLIP-VLA: Single-Step Latent Imagination for Policy Learning in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models are increasingly effective for robotic manipulation, yet most predict actions directly from current observations without explicitly modeling future scene evolution. Recent methods introduce future prediction to improve action generation, but dense future modeling often requires expensive iterative denoising, while one-step alternatives can underperform their multi-step counterparts. To reconcile efficient future modeling with strong action performance, we present SLIP-VLA, a policy learning framework that equips VLA models with a Single-Step Latent Imagination for future-aware action prediction. SLIP-VLA obtains temporally dense future latent representations with a single denoising update, and we improve the perceptual sufficiency of these representations by aligning intermediate latents with future geometric and semantic features. We further improve their control sufficiency through action-conditioned latent world modeling and inverse dynamics modeling, explicitly coupling latent transitions with robot actions. SLIP-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks, while its single-step latent imagination takes only 12 ms.

cs.RO↗

Dynamic Task and Resource Scheduling Towards Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Network

In the context of 6G ubiquitous connectivity, the space-air-ground-sea integrated network (SAGSIN) emerges as a new paradigm for pervasive service provisioning. To support expanding maritime activities in infrastructure-scarce ocean areas, we propose an innovative dynamic task and resource scheduling approach for SAGSIN to deliver computing services for vessels. It integrates broad-coverage satellites, relay-capable high-altitude platform (HAP), energy-sufficient coastal base station (BS), and flexibly deployed uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) to accommodate wide-area, highly mobile, and sustained maritime services. To address the challenge of task scheduling across four layers, a dynamic task offloading algorithm is developed. It steers task flows toward servers with light loads, strong computing capabilities, and high-rate links based on real-time system states to reduce task execution delay, integrating an anticipatory satellite handover strategy to mitigate post-handover congestion and improving satellite resource utilization. Considering the limited endurance of UAVs, we impose residual energy constraints to ensure task backlog handover and safe return. Furthermore, the UAV-BS bandwidth allocation, UAV trajectories, and computing resource allocation are jointly optimized to enhance the connectivity among low-altitude devices and accelerate task completion. Simulation results validate the proposed method's superior adaptability to system resource variations during task execution in complex maritime environments, achieving at least a 23% reduction in average task delay over benchmarks.

cs.NI↗

Relative Mismatch: Local-Reference Calibration of Feature-Space Flows for Anomalous Sound Detection

Anomalous sound detection (ASD) has long been dominated by k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) based detectors, which essentially perform implicit likelihood estimation over normal samples. In this work, we investigate whether generative models can better serve this role. We propose Relative Mismatch, a generative ASD backend powered by flow matching, which learns a velocity field that transports Gaussian noise to a representative feature space of normality. During inference, it measures the mismatch between the oracle and predicted path velocities and aggregates them through a two-level design. To mitigate the inherent mismatch offsets incurred by domain shift, each query is further calibrated with the mismatch of its local normal reference, thereby exposing only its deviation beyond normality. Extensive experiments on DCASE 2020--2025 demonstrate that Relative Mismatch outperforms state-of-the-art backends with the highest score of 71.01, along with strong robustness and training stability. Furthermore, we show that curating a compact and discriminative feature space is the key to unleash the power of generative models for ASD.

cs.SD↗

ActiveScale: Scaling Active Perception for Robots across Model, Data, and Hardware

Active perception is essential for robotic manipulation when fixed viewpoints leave task-relevant information occluded or unobserved. However, enabling vision-language-action (VLA) models to reason across changing viewpoints and actively acquire informative observations remains challenging. We present ActiveScale, a framework that advances active perception through coordinated model, data, and hardware designs. Our model augments a VLA with historical video observations and explicit camera-pose supervision, using per-frame pose tokens and a lightweight prediction head to associate observations across viewpoints and support a coherent understanding of the scene. To learn from the camera motion naturally present in human activity, we introduce a scalable human--robot mid-training recipe using 1000 hours of egocentric and robotic data, adapting the model to temporal inputs and pose supervision. We further introduce Active-perception Mobile-manipulation Platform (AMP), a robotic platform that supports active perception and mobile manipulation through single-operator teleoperation, enabling scalable collection of demonstrations that coordinate viewpoint changes and manipulation. Experiments demonstrate improved success rates on active-perception tasks, while ablation studies validate the contributions of camera-pose-aware modeling and egocentric mid-training. Together, these components provide an integrated foundation for studying and developing active perception in robotic manipulation.

cs.RO↗

TransMeme: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cross-Cultural Meme Transcreation

Internet memes are a pervasive form of multimodal online communication; however, such communication often involves users from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, adapting memes across cultures and languages is a central challenge for enabling mutual understanding in online communication. Unlike ordinary translation or standalone text rewriting, cross-cultural meme transcreation must jointly preserve communicative intent, adapt culture-dependent meaning for the target audience, and maintain coherence between text and image. In this work, we first provide an explicit task analysis of cross-cultural meme transcreation and identify three core challenges: culture-specific knowledge understanding, intent and tone preservation, and multimodal consistency. Based on this analysis, we propose a multi-agent framework with specialized agents that are coordinated to address these challenges through cultural adaptation, target text rewriting, revision, and conditional visual adjustment. The framework strengthens target text adaptation with coordinated feedback to handle difficult cases that require deeper cultural or visual intervention. We evaluate the framework on bidirectional Chinese-English meme transcreation using both human evaluation and LLM-as-a-Judge. Our method consistently outperforms all baselines across both evaluation settings. In human evaluation, it achieves the best performance on all four dimensions and delivers a 33.1% average improvement over the strongest baseline, while in LLM-as-a-Judge, it attains the highest Top-1 ranking rate (60% versus 26% for the second-best baseline). Further analysis indicates that each component contributes to the performance. Our error analysis suggests that the remaining bottlenecks lie in humor reconstruction and image-text alignment rather than simple cultural knowledge gaps, pointing to future work on humor transfer.

cs.AI↗

Energy-Aware Wind-Resilient Routing for Truck-Assisted Multi-UAV Delivery under Wind Uncertainty

Energy feasibility under wind uncertainty is a critical safety issue for low-altitude air-ground delivery. In truck-UAV systems, UAVs complete assigned deliveries and safely return to a mobile truck or depot, while wind-induced propulsion costs vary online and are only partially observable. Existing routing methods often rely on static or deterministic energy models, which may underestimate headwind, crosswind, battery-voltage, and return-feasibility risks. This paper proposes Energy-Aware Wind-Resilient Routing (EWR), an online risk-sensitive planning framework for wind-aware and energy-safe UAV routing. The delivery environment is represented as a time-dependent directed energy graph whose edge costs are updated using delayed noisy wind estimates, payload states, and conservative uncertainty margins. Experiments using synthetic delivery graphs with replayed wind logs from a public truck-UAV delivery dataset show that EWR improves mission success rates and reduces wind-induced return failures.

eess.SY↗

LIRA: Local Cross-Layer Information Routing for Vision-Language-Action Decoding

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models transform representations from pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) into robot actions, yet the interface that routes intermediate VLM features into action decoders remains underexplored. Existing designs either expose only a narrow part of the representation hierarchy or rigidly match each decoder block to one VLM layer, restricting access to complementary task evidence across depths. We introduce LIRA, a local cross-layer action-conditioning mechanism that formulates VLM-to-action conditioning as depth-aware information routing. LIRA operates on task-token features and LIRA Query features derived from intermediate VLM states, then assigns each Parallel Fusion Block a depth-aligned local window centered on its corresponding VLM layer. Parallel Fusion Blocks aggregate neighboring LIRA Query features and integrate them with task-token features and proprioceptive inputs before action prediction. This routing interface leaves the backbone architecture, action decoder, and supervised training recipe unchanged. Across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, CALVIN ABC$\rightarrow$D, and real-world manipulation, LIRA improves the principal aggregate metrics over the VLA-Adapter baseline under the same 0.5B-parameter configuration. In zero-shot transfer to LIBERO-Plus, LIRA increases average success from 59.1% to 78.0%, an 18.9-point gain indicating improved robustness under controlled distribution shifts.

cs.RO↗

Diffusion-based 4D Trajectory Prediction and Distributed Control for UAV Swarms

Accurate 4D trajectory prediction and closed-loop tracking are essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms to achieve safe and efficient operations in complex low-altitude environments such as urban airspaces, industrial sites, and indoor facilities. However, this task remains challenging due to intrinsic nonlinearity of UAV swarm dynamics and strict real-time constraints of swarm formation control. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that couples coarse-to-fine trajectory forecasting with uncertainty-aware Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (DNMPC). Our approach features two key innovations: 1) a dimension-decoupled trajectory prediction module that reduces computational complexity by forecasting axis-wise motion, and 2) a diffusion-based residual dynamics refinement module that captures temporally correlated dynamic uncertainties. These refined predictions are then integrated into a DNMPC loop to ensure formation stability. We also introduce a synchronized multi-scenario 4D UAV swarm dataset spanning six representative airspace scenarios. The dataset contains over \textbf{7,900} frames of synchronized three-UAV trajectories with frame-level annotations of speed intention and target sector. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing trajectory tracking error by up to \textbf{10-15\%} and achieving sub-\textbf{0.07\,m} average tracking error in complex urban and industrial environments, while maintaining real-time inference speeds of 34 FPS (sub-30 ms latency) suitable for agile flight.

cs.RO↗

FISHER: A Foundation Model for Multi-Modal Industrial Signal Comprehensive Representation

Industrial signal analysis is hindered by severe data heterogeneity, which we characterize as the M5 problem. Existing solutions rely on specialized models that lack robustness and scalability, while large-scale pre-training has rarely been investigated in this area. In this work, we derive a prioritized roadmap for the M5 problem and propose FISHER, a Foundation model for multi-modal Industrial Signal compreHEnsive Representation. To address the foremost multi-sampling-rate problem, FISHER utilizes a novel sub-band modeling approach that treats sampling rate increments as concatenated sub-band information, enabling the adaptive usage of full signal bandwidth without resampling. FISHER is pre-trained by teacher-student self-distillation over external audio and music data. We also establish the RMIS benchmark, comprising 19 datasets across four modalities. In the experiment, FISHER outperforms 24 state-of-the-art series encoders (up to 2B) with much smaller sizes (up to 16x), showcasing groundbreaking diagnostic accuracy and remarkable versatility. We further demonstrate that 1) seamless adaptation to variable sampling rates is the key to generalization 2) audio and music data provide better temporal variability, which is essential for pre-training. Both FISHER and RMIS are open-sourced.

cs.LG↗

Beyond Waveform Robustness: Robust Feature-Vocoder Adversarial Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have become widely used for multilingual speech-to-text transcription. Their robustness to adversarial attacks has become an important topic for the community. Existing adversarial attacks directly add adversarial noise to the speech audio. However, prior work has shown that existing adversarial attacks face two limitations: they often transfer poorly to black-box ASR systems and are increasingly mitigated by defenses tailored to input-space perturbations. In this work, we propose a Clean-Referenced Feature-Vocoder Attack, a surrogate-based black-box attack that moves the adversarial search space from raw waveforms to self-supervised learning (SSL) representations. To address the transferability limitation, we perturb more generalizable acoustic-phonetic representations rather than low-level waveform samples, reducing dependence on surrogate-specific waveform gradients and encouraging adversarial perturbations that generalize across ASR systems. To bypass different defenses, we shift the adversarial signal from explicit additive waveform noise to SSL feature-space perturbations and reconstruct them through a vocoder into speech-like waveform adversarial signals, making the resulting samples less aligned with waveform-bounded defenses. Extensive experiments show that, when optimized only on raw Whisper-small as a public surrogate model, our attack transfers effectively to black-box ASR models with a +26.6 WER improvement over the SOTA baseline, while also remaining effective against multiple training defenses with a +36.2 WER improvement. These results reveal a blind spot in current ASR robustness evaluation.

cs.SD↗

PLAN-S: Bridging Planning with Latent Style Dynamics for Autonomous Driving World Models

Latent world models (LWMs) have strengthened end-to-end autonomous driving by forecasting compact scene dynamics for downstream planning. However, existing LWM-based planners usually generate trajectories directly from entangled latent representations. This compact latent-to-planner pathway lacks explicit modeling of risk, drivability, and diverse style preferences, making driving-style dynamics difficult to supervise, inspect, or modulate before a final trajectory is selected. We propose PLAN-S (PLANning with latent Style dynamics), a planner-facing bridge that addresses this compactness-controllability dilemma by decoding a style-conditioned, four-channel semantic cost map from the latent representation. The cost map is conditioned on ego state and driving style and is consumed up-stream of the planning decision through two host-side interfaces: attention-level fusion for regression planners and reward-level fusion for anchor-score planners. We validate PLAN-S on two architecturally distinct hosts, ResWorld on nuScenes and WoTE on NAVSIM, while keeping the host backbones frozen to isolate the contribution of the proposed bridge. On nuScenes, PLAN-S reduces L2 at every horizon over the baseline, with 0.55 m average L2 and a 42% relative reduction in the 3 s collision rate. On NAVSIM, the rule-cost variant reaches 89.4 Predictive Driver Model Score (PDMS), while the learned cost variant provides complementary gains on baseline-challenging scenes. Ablations show that the cost pathway contributes most directly to safer trajectory selection. Qualitative results further show that PLAN-S can produce diverse cost maps, with spatially consistent variations aligned to different driving styles.

cs.AI↗

Potential-Guided Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Policy Improvement

Large vision-language-action (VLA) policies are increasingly trained as conditional generative models over action chunks. Yet deployment produces mixed-quality experience-successful demonstrations, partial completions, recoverable mistakes, and failures-that is difficult to use with standard imitation. Full behavior cloning (BC) imitates failures, filtered BC discards useful sub-trajectories, and offline reinforcement learning adds a large critic. We introduce ForesightFlow, a self-guided flow-matching policy that augments each generated action chunk with a learned success-potential trajectory. The same flow proposes and scores candidate actions, enabling best-of-$K$ inference without an external critic. The key issue is that policy improvement and value calibration require different supervision: advantage weighting should emphasize high-quality actions, but applying the same weights to potential coordinates suppresses failure gradients and creates overconfident scores. We address this with decoupled advantage-weighted flow matching, applying exponentiated advantage weights only to action velocities while training potential velocities uniformly. We further derive a one-step boundary estimator for conditional flow matching, allowing advantage computation with a single stop-gradient forward pass. Across five BEHAVIOR-1K simulation tasks and five real-world bimanual tasks, ForesightFlow improves over imitation baselines, matches the strongest separate-critic baseline in simulation success, improves real-world success, and reduces training compute by $38\%$. Ablations show that decoupling prevents value hallucination, the one-step estimator preserves candidate-ranking fidelity, and self-guided sampling improves long-horizon execution.

cs.RO↗

Does Visual Information Play a Decisive Role in Vision-Language-Action Model Driving Behavior?

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising capability in autonomous driving, highlighting the potential of unified multimodal architectures for jointly modeling perception and planning. However, how current VLA-based driving behavior is grounded in visual information remains poorly understood. Existing evaluation protocols mainly focus on aggregate performance metrics, lacking structured and practical diagnostics to quantify visual-behavior dependency. In this work, we introduce a structured multi-level visual perturbation framework to analyze visual-behavior dependency in VLA-based driving models systematically. The framework organizes controlled visual perturbations along three complementary dimensions: channellevel degradation, information-level disruption, and structurelevel modification. We apply it to VLA-based driving systems and evaluate behavioral responses under both open-loop trajectory prediction and interactive closed-loop safety evaluation. Experimental results reveal evaluation-dependent dependency patterns and uneven visual grounding across abstraction levels. These findings call for more structured analyses and principled design of VLA driving models to better understand how visual information shapes behavior and develop safer, more robust systems.

cs.CV↗

Sequential Task Assignment and Resource Allocation in V2X-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing

Nowadays, the convergence of mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicular networks has emerged as a vital enabler for the ever-increasing intelligent onboard applications. This paper proposes a multi-tier task offloading mechanism for MEC-enabled vehicular networks leveraging vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. The study focuses on applications with sequential subtasks and explores the collaboration of two tiers. In the Vehicle Tier, the requesting vehicle (RV)-service vehicle (SV) matching scheme and the inter-vehicle collaborative computation are studied, with joint optimization of task offloading decision, communication, and computing resource allocation to minimize energy consumption while satisfying delay requirements. In the Roadside Unit (RSU) Tier, collaboration among RSUs is investigated to further address multi-access issues of uplink subchannels and computing resources for serving unmatched RVs. To tackle this intricate problem, a layered optimization framework is first proposed to obtain task offloading decisions and optimal continuous resource allocation, after which a subchannel allocation scheme is designed to recover the discrete solution with low complexity. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed method reduces average energy consumption by at least 15% compared with recent utility maximization and energy cost minimization benchmarks under varying task delay requirements and vehicle scales.

cs.NI↗

UniT: Unified Geometry Learning with Group Autoregressive Transformer

Recent feed-forward models have significantly advanced geometry perception for inferring dense 3D structure from sensor observations. However, its essential capabilities remain fragmented across multiple incompatible paradigms, including online perception, offline reconstruction, multi-modal integration, long-horizon scalability, and metric-scale estimation. We present UniT, a unified model built upon a novel Group Autoregressive Transformer, which reformulates these seemingly disparate capabilities within a single framework. The key idea is to treat groups of sensor observations as the basic autoregressive units and predict the corresponding point maps in an anchor-free and scale-adaptive manner. More specifically, diverse view configurations in both online and offline settings are naturally unified within a single group autoregression process. By varying the group size, online mode operates over multiple autoregressive steps with single-frame groups, whereas offline mode aggregates a multi-frame group in a single forward pass. Meanwhile, a queue-style KV caching mechanism ensures bounded autoregressive memory over long horizons. This is enabled by reducing long-range dependencies on early frames through anchor-free relational modeling, thereby allowing outdated memory to be discarded on the fly. To improve metric-scale generalization across scenes, a scale-adaptive geometry loss is further introduced within this framework. It couples relative geometric constraints with a partial absolute scale term, implicitly regularizing global scale and inducing a progressive transition from scale-invariant geometry to metric-scale solutions. Together with a dedicated modal attention module for integrating auxiliary modalities, UniT achieves state-of-the-art performance in unified geometry perception, as validated on ten benchmarks spanning seven representative tasks.

cs.CV↗

Escaping the Linearity Trap: Manifold Detours for Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Singing Audio Deepfake Detection

Recent Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) advances enable highly realistic but potentially malicious AI covers, making singing voice deepfake detection (SVDD) crucial. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL)-based detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance by fine-tuning speech SSL backbones to capture singing-specific spoof artifacts. Existing adversarial attacks often fail against SSL-SVDD, creating a false impression of inherent robustness. We reveal this stems from two challenges. First, at the objective level, attacks optimize cross-entropy on local surrogates, crossing surrogate-specific boundaries rather than suppressing shared spoof evidence. Second, at the method level, attacks follow the surrogate's dominant gradient direction. In SSL-SVDD, this aligns with fine-tuned artifact-sensitive directions, limiting transferability to unseen detectors - a geometric failure we term the Linearity Trap. To properly evaluate robustness, we propose MARS (Meta-Adversarial Regression of Semantics), a transfer-based black-box framework tailored to SSL-SVDD. Structurally, MARS shifts to hypothesis-evidence manipulation by constructing a natural semantic anchor from the pre-trained SSL space and an artifact anchor from the fine-tuned space. Algorithmically, MARS escapes the Linearity Trap via bi-level optimization: the inner stage induces tangential exploration, while the outer stage guides the audio toward the natural semantic manifold. Experiments on the CtrSVDD benchmark show MARS improves Attack Success Rate (ASR) in in-distribution transfer (13%), out-of-distribution transfer (10%), and cross-task evaluation (36%), highlighting the urgent need for robust SVDD systems.

cs.CR↗