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Xu Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Zhang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

OATS: Online Data Augmentation for Time Series Foundation Models

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are a powerful paradigm for time series analysis and are often enhanced by synthetic data augmentation to improve the training data quality. Existing augmentation methods, however, typically rely on heuristics and static paradigms. Motivated by dynamic data optimization, which shows that the contribution of samples varies across training stages, we propose OATS (Online Data Augmentation for Time Series Foundation Models), a principled strategy that generates synthetic data tailored to different training steps. OATS leverages valuable training samples as principled guiding signals and dynamically generates high-quality synthetic data conditioned on them. We further design a diffusion-based framework to produce realistic time series and introduce an explore-exploit mechanism to balance efficiency and effectiveness. Experiments on TSFMs demonstrate that OATS consistently outperforms regular training and yields substantial performance gains over static data augmentation baselines across six validation datasets and two TSFM architectures. The code is available at the link https://github.com/microsoft/TimeCraft.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

UniPCB: A Generation-Assisted Vision-Based Measurement Framework for PCB Defect Inspection

Automated optical inspection (AOI) is a vision-based instrumentation process that detects and localizes physical defects on printed circuit boards (PCBs) from optically acquired images. Its reliability is often limited by scarce and class-imbalanced defect observations and by insufficient representation of small, low-contrast defects against dense circuit patterns. We propose UniPCB, a generation-assisted PCB inspection framework that combines controlled defect synthesis with task-specific detection. The generation branch derives heterogeneous edge, relative pseudo-depth, and text conditions from PCB images. A ScaleEncoder embeds the conditions at four U-Net resolutions, while a Condition Modulation block performs FiLM-style spatially adaptive fusion. The detection branch introduces an Inverted Residual Shift Attention block for joint global-local modeling and a Cross-level Complementary Fusion block for selective hierarchical feature integration. The generated images augment the detector training data and improve defect coverage without changing the online inspection path. Experiments using the corrected annotations of DsPCBSD+ yield an mAP@0.5 of 98.0% and an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 61.8%. Under the same generation-augmented training setting, these values exceed those of the RT-DETR baseline by 2.1 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively. The generation branch obtains an FID of 129.61 and an SSIM of 0.619. These results indicate the potential of structured synthetic data and PCB-oriented feature modeling for improving vision-based defect inspection. Code is available at https://github.com/House-yuyu/UniPCB.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Degradation-Guided Underwater Image Restoration with Task-Oriented Latent Control

Degradation information in underwater images plays a dual role: its spatial and spectral cues can guide adaptive restoration, while degradation-entangled features may be propagated without explicit regulation during decoding. Existing methods largely overlook this dual role, either underexploiting degradation cues or directly forwarding encoder features through skip connections. To address this issue, we propose PROTEUS, which couples degradation-guided feature adaptation with task?oriented latent control. PROTEUS tackles this problem from two complementary perspectives. At the feature level, the Guided Dynamic Feature Modulation Block exploits spatially varying degradation cues to adapt feature processing across network stages. At the representation level, the task-oriented latent controller learns a structured control code under discriminative regularisation and uses it for channel-wise modulation of skip features, without requiring the code to form a metrically cleaner embedding. Extensive experiments on five paired and four non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that PROTEUS achieves highly competitive restoration performance, with a favourable balance between restoration quality and computational cost.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

AdaDINO: Pair-Aware In-Backbone Adaptation of Frozen DINO for Efficient Remote Sensing Change Detection

Vision foundation models (VFMs) such as DINO are pretrained for single-image representation, whereas remote sensing change detection requires reasoning over a bi-temporal pair. Existing VFM-based methods usually encode the two images independently and compare them only afterward, leaving the VFM backbone unaware of cross-temporal relations. To bridge this mismatch, we present AdaDINO, a pair-aware in-backbone adaptation framework that equips a frozen DINO encoder with bi-temporal interaction for efficient change detection. Its core component, Change-aware Gated Local Adaptation (CGLA), couples the two streams after selected frozen blocks and injects a shared temporal residual into them with opposite signs, enhancing genuine change responses while preserving the pair midpoint. Batch-Shared Chunk Selection (BSCS) further reduces feed-forward network (FFN) computation by retaining a batch-shared subset of channel chunks that can be executed as a compact dense FFN. A CGLA-Prior-Guided Refinement (CPGR) decoder reuses encoder-side change responses for coarse-to-fine prediction. Experiments on four remote sensing change detection benchmarks show that AdaDINO achieves competitive or superior performance against VFM-based baselines, with the largest gain on the category-agnostic SYSU-CD dataset. With 62.5% of the FFN hidden width removed, AdaDINO still achieves an F1 score of 85.29% on SYSU-CD while delivering a 1.41$\times$ throughput speedup. The code will be released.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DARAD: Dual Adapters and Ranking-Aware Distillation for Continual Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval

With the rapid growth of Earth observation technologies, remote sensing archives are rapidly expanding, making remote sensing image-text retrieval (RS-ITR) increasingly important. However, continual RS-ITR remains challenging because scale variation and distribution shifts in RS aggravate cross-modal alignment space distortion, making it difficult for existing continual learning (CL) methods to support reliable continual retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose DARAD, a dual-adapter and ranking-aware distillation framework that preserves the historical cross-modal ranking structure while learning new visual and textual concepts from evolving archives. Specifically, the visual branch introduces a spatial fusion adapter, which integrates coarse regional cues and fine-grained patch cues to accommodate RS scale variation while anchoring visual updates to the pretrained alignment space. The textual branch employs multi-expert semantic routing, which separates shared textual semantics from semantically specialized residuals to absorb newly emerging descriptions while constraining global text embedding drift. Furthermore, bidirectional ranking distillation uses a frozen teacher model and historical anchors to preserve the historical cross-modal ranking structure, thereby mitigating alignment space distortion across continual stages. Experiments under a multi-stage continual retrieval protocol show that DARAD achieves superior performance over existing CL methods, improving adaptation to newly arrived data while maintaining effectiveness on historical data.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Faddeev equations for the $J/ψ\,NN$ and $ϕ\,NN$ three-body systems in momentum space

We construct Faddeev equations for the $J/ψ\,NN$ and $ϕ\,NN$ three-body systems in momentum space. The two-body subsystem $t$-matrix is obtained by solving the Lippmann-Schwinger equations. The $NN$ interactions are constructed using the Malfliet-Tjon potential. The $J/ψ\,N$ interaction potentials in the ${}^4S_{3/2}$ and ${}^2S_{1/2}$ channels are taken from HAL QCD. The $ϕ\,N$ interaction potential in the ${}^4S_{3/2}$ channel is also taken from HAL QCD. The ${}^2S_{1/2}$ $ϕN$ interaction is obtained from the combination of the $ϕp$ correlation function analysis and the HAL QCD results, as well as from the assumption that the spin-spin parts of the $ϕN$ and $J/ψN$ interactions are inversely proportional to the respective hadron masses. The Faddeev equations are solved to find bound states in the $J/ψ\,NN$ and $ϕ\,NN$ three-body systems. The numerical results suggest that there exist bound states in the $ϕ\,NN$ three-body system, while there is no bound state in the $J/ψ\,NN$ system.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

SpikeRestormer: Towards Energy-Efficient All-in-One Image Restoration via Unified Event Reasoning

ANN-based All-in-One image restoration (AiOIR) unifies diverse degradation handling but incurs high computational costs, limiting its real-time deployment. While Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a low-power alternative, applying them to static images remains challenging. This difficulty arises because explicit event signals are absent, and degradation cues are heavily entangled with scene structures, hindering the learning of reliable restoration-oriented spike events. To address these issues, we propose SpikeRestormer, an energy-efficient SNN for AiOIR that performs event reasoning over internally generated spike cues. Specifically, we propose a degradation-event perception process to extract spike-based degradation events through Subtractive Degradation Event Attention (SDEA). Moreover, we introduce Hierarchical Bayesian Skip Masking (HBSM) and Additive Restoration Event Attention (AREA) processes for event-reliability inference and restoration-event construction, respectively. By integrating these complementary processes, SpikeRestormer formulates restoration as a unified process of degradation-event perception, degradation-event reliability inference, and restoration-event construction, liberating the potential of SNNs for energy-efficient AiOIR. Extensive experiments show that SpikeRestormer delivers competitive performance against ANN-based methods and establishes new state-of-the-art results among SNN-based methods with significantly lower energy consumption.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Escaping Confidence Trap: Evolutionary Decoding for Mathematical Reasoning in Diffusion LLMs

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs, offering efficient generation through block-wise progressive unmasking. However, their strong general-purpose performance does not necessarily translate into reliable mathematical reasoning, where correctness depends on preserving coherent numerical-symbolic reasoning trajectories. In this work, we analyze the decoding trajectories of LLaDA 2.0 and identify a recurring diffusion confidence trap: local token confidence can become misaligned with global reasoning correctness during progressive block decoding. Our analysis reveals two representative failure regimes: sampling-sensitive failures, where correct paths exist but are unstable, and sampling-consistent failures, where repeated sampling converges to repetitive high-confidence but incorrect continuations. Motivated by this observation, we propose Evolutionary Decoding, a training-free test-time scaling framework that views diffusion decoding as an evolutionary process over candidate reasoning states. The framework combines step-wise selection, which preserves useful numerical-symbolic signals and suppresses repetitive patterns, with block-wise mutation, which introduces structured alternatives to escape incorrect high-confidence basins. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that Evolutionary Decoding improves LLaDA 2.0 over confidence-based decoding, leading to more reliable mathematical reasoning.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Qwen-UI-Agent Technical Report: Toward Next-Generation Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents

GUI agents have the potential to become a general purpose executor over existing digital devices. To advance them toward real-world use, we envision agents that operate reliably on real devices, execute workflows across platforms, combine GUI interaction with CLI execution, complete long-horizon tasks, proactively initiate useful services, and autonomously improve their capabilities with minimal human effort. Guided by this vision, we present Qwen-UI-Agent, a real-world centric foundation GUI agent spanning mobile, computer-use, web, and DeepSearch environments. Qwen-UI-Agent combines diverse sandbox environments with a large-scale real-device mobile runtime. Its unified action space interleaves GUI operations with CLI execution and generates batched actions in a single model turn. An AutoResearch-style data flywheel uses agents to construct tasks and environments, diagnose failures, and plan subsequent iterations. Online RL supports training on trajectories exceeding 100 turns, with over 10,000 concurrent environments accelerating rollout. A lightweight harness layer supports proactive service initiation and stateful workflows across mobile and computer. Across a broad suite of evaluations, Qwen-UI-Agent sets state-of-the-art performance on mobile-use benchmarks while delivering competitive performance on computer- and browser-use tasks against frontier models, including Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.6 Sol. On mobile use, it achieves 82.1% on MobileWorld, 92.2% on MobileWorld-Real, and 97.5% on AndroidDaily. On computer use, it achieves 79.5% on OSWorld-Verified and a 40.0% partial-progress score on OSWorld-v2. On browser use and GUI grounding, it achieves 73.6% on WebArena and 81.5% on ScreenSpot-Pro, respectively.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Optimal control problems for quasi-linear parabolic equations and their linear approximations

Motivated by thermal diffusion models, a controlled quasi-linear parabolic equation can be formally replaced by its linear approximation, when the initial datum, target and control actions are sufficiently small. This paper makes this approximation precise at the level of optimal control problems. First, we provide verification criteria which distinguish whether an optimal control is an interior point or a boundary point of the admissible control set. We then prove that the differences between the optimal controls and the corresponding optimal trajectories for the quasi-linear and linear parabolic equations are higher-order infinitesimals with respect to the small initial datum and target appearing in the cost functional. Consequently, for small data, the optimal control problem governed by the quasi-linear equation can be approximated by the corresponding linear problem. In the interior-point case, the resulting approximation order is sharp.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

The Second LoViF 2026 Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper presents a review of the second LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aims to advance unified image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provides a common benchmark for evaluating the restoration accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability of models across multiple degradation categories within a unified framework. The competition attracted 158 registered participants, and 20 teams were included in the final ranking after their submitted results were successfully reproduced and verified. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the submitted solutions and corresponding results, highlighting recent advances in real-world all-in-one image restoration. The summarized methods and empirical findings reveal effective design strategies and establish an updated benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ClusIR: Towards Cluster-Guided All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) aims to recover high-quality images from diverse degradations within a unified framework. However, existing methods often fail to explicitly model degradation types and struggle to adapt their restoration behavior to complex or mixed degradations. To address these issues, we propose ClusIR, a Cluster-Guided Image Restoration framework that explicitly models degradation semantics through learnable clustering and propagates cluster-aware cues across spatial and frequency domains for adaptive restoration. Specifically, ClusIR comprises two key components: a Probabilistic Cluster-Guided Routing Mechanism (PCGRM) and a Degradation-Aware Frequency Modulation Module (DAFMM). The proposed PCGRM disentangles degradation recognition from expert activation, enabling discriminative degradation perception and stable expert routing. Meanwhile, DAFMM leverages the cluster-guided priors to perform adaptive frequency decomposition and targeted modulation, collaboratively refining structural and textural representations for higher restoration fidelity. The cluster-guided synergy seamlessly bridges semantic cues with frequency-domain modulation, empowering ClusIR to attain remarkable restoration results across a wide range of degradations. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks validate that ClusIR reaches competitive performance under several scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Thresholded Cross-Attention for Reliable Intensity-Chromaticity Fusion in Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) requires a careful balance among noise suppression, color fidelity, and efficiency. Recent HVI-based methods alleviate color entanglement by decoupling intensity and chromaticity, yet how reliably the two streams are fused again is an overlooked factor that largely determines the final quality. We observe that the confidence of cross-stream attention is strongly layer-dependent, so the fixed-quota selection of Top-K sparse attention is mismatched to it, discarding informative dependencies in some layers while retaining noisy ones in others. Motivated by this observation, we propose TCA-Net, a network built around Thresholded Cross-Attention that targets reliable intensity-chromaticity fusion in the HVI space rather than introducing yet another color representation. At its core, TCA replaces the rigid Top-K quota with a fixed confidence threshold whose retained cardinality is input- and layer-adaptive, retaining only high-confidence cross-stream interactions while suppressing unreliable ones. Around this core, two complementary designs clean up the fusion before and after it: a Phase-guided Fourier Interaction Module provides a structure-aware brightness initialization for the intensity stream prior to fusion, and a Decoupled Dual-Stream Guidance Module constructs residual intensity features to suppress chromaticity leakage during reconstruction. A Scale-Aware Consistency Regularization further improves structural robustness under scale perturbations during training. Extensive experiments on LOL-v1, LOL-v2, Sony-Total-Dark, and LSRW-Huawei demonstrate that TCA-Net delivers competitive restoration accuracy, improved color fidelity, and a compact parameter size.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

An efficient method based on the evolutionary center algorithm for optimizing chemical-diffusive models for flame acceleration and DDT

This paper presents an efficient method based on Evolutionary Center Algorithm (ECA) for accurately and efficiently determining the optimal reaction and diffusion parameters for Chemical-Diffusive Models (CDM) to simulate flame acceleration (FA) and deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT). The proposed method leverages the global search capability of the ECA and the local optimization strength of the Nelder-Mead (NM) algorithm. The hybrid approach (ECA-NM) can efficiently optimize CDM parameters that are capable of accurately reproducing the major properties of combustion waves. The CDMs for premixed flames and detonations of hydrogen in air or oxygen were developed using the present ECA-NM method and validated against canonical tests of combustion waves and previous experiments of FA and DDT. The results show that the major flame and detonation properties calculated using the developed CDMs match those obtained from detailed chemical reaction mechanisms over a wide range of equivalence ratio. The simulated FA and DDT in a channel also agree qualitatively and quantitatively with experiments in terms of complex flame instabilities (e.g., tulip and distorted tulip flames), flame displacement speed, and detonation occurrence. In addition, detailed comparisons to the traditional genetic algorithm demonstrate that the developed ECA-NM method diminishes the global error by four orders of magnitude while reducing the computational cost by two orders of magnitude. This work provides a significantly efficient method for developing chemical-diffusive models that allows quantitative multi-scale simulations of transient flames and detonations in complex scenarios.

physics.chem-ph↗
arXiv2026

PIT-SUN: A Deployable Empirical Marginal Transform Framework with Expectation-Consistent Recovery for Regression in Recommender Systems

Estimating original-space conditional expectations is central to value-driven recommender systems, including dwell time, GMV, and LTV forecasting. Standard MSE is expectation-consistent in principle, but its gradients become unstable on heavy-tailed, zero-inflated, and multimodal targets, causing mean collapse and tail shrinkage. Target transformation alleviates this scale conflict, yet any useful nonlinear marginal transform loses expectation consistency under direct inversion. This is not an implementation oversight: a direct inverse-transform estimator is universally expectation-consistent only when the inverse transform is affine, which cannot simultaneously provide bounded tail compression. Existing conditionally linear recovery methods restore expectation consistency, but still leave open which coordinate, inverse lookup, recovery base, and deployment monitor should be selected for sparse complex marginals. We propose \textbf{P}robability-\textbf{I}ntegral-\textbf{TranS}formed \textbf{Un}biased recovery (\textbf{PIT-SUN}), a deployable empirical marginal recovery framework. PIT-SUN uses one empirical marginal table to define a bounded normal-score coordinate, its inverse-quantile lookup, a variance-controlled recovery base, and drift monitoring, then applies multiplicative SUN recovery to estimate the original-space expectation instead of directly inverting transformed predictions. Experiments on synthetic distributions, public benchmarks, large-scale industrial datasets, and online deployment show robust improvements in point accuracy, calibration, and ranking quality with lightweight deployment overhead.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

What Memory Do GUI Agents Really Need? From Passive Records to Active Task-Driving States

Mobile GUI agents increasingly face long-horizon tasks that require reading, updating, and reusing task-relevant data across pages and applications. Existing methods treat memory largely as passive storage, where past observations are accumulated and retrieved when needed. Yet retrieving a value does not reveal its current role in the workflow. The agent must still infer from accumulated records whether the value should be used now, has already been used, or must wait for a later dependency. This implicit reconstruction becomes unreliable in long trajectories with repeated values, distractors, and outdated states, causing repeated or missed operations. To address this, we propose Active Task Driving Memory (ATMem), which shifts GUI-agent memory from passive storage to an actively maintained execution state. ATMem maintains task-relevant information as a continually updated execution state that links each value to its role and current status, enabling action selection based on the current workflow state. While supervised fine-tuning enables the agent to construct ATMem, it does not teach when ATMem is beneficial. We therefore introduce STR-GRPO, an online reinforcement learning method that encourages selective use of ATMem based on its contribution to task completion. STR-GRPO contrasts memory-on and memory-off rollouts to estimate when memory use improves execution, while memory-cost-aware reward discourages costly memory usage that does not improve execution. To evaluate whether agents can complete all in-scope work while avoiding out-of-scope actions, we build a challenging mobile benchmark. From a list of near identical entries, agents must act on every entry that satisfies the instruction and reject entries that violate its constraints. We further introduce App-Level Progress and Scope-Aware F1 to measure these two dimensions separately.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Diff-MN: Diffusion Parameterized MoE-NCDE for Continuous Time Series Generation with Irregular Observations

Time series generation (TSG) is widely used across domains, yet most existing methods assume regular sampling and fixed output resolutions. These assumptions are often violated in practice, where observations are irregular and sparse, while downstream applications require continuous and high-resolution TS. Although Neural Controlled Differential Equation (NCDE) is promising for modeling irregular TS, it is constrained by a single dynamics function, tightly coupled optimization, and limited ability to adapt learned dynamics to newly generated samples from the generative model. We propose Diff-MN, a continuous TSG framework that enhances NCDE with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) dynamics function and a decoupled architectural design for dynamics-focused training. To further enable NCDE to generalize to newly generated samples, Diff-MN employs a diffusion model to parameterize the NCDE temporal dynamics parameters (MoE weights), i.e., jointly learn the distribution of TS data and MoE weights. This design allows sample-specific NCDE parameters to be generated for continuous TS generation. Experiments on ten public and synthetic datasets demonstrate that Diff-MN consistently outperforms strong baselines on both irregular-to-regular and irregular-to-continuous TSG tasks. The code is available at the link https://github.com/microsoft/TimeCraft/tree/main/Diff-MN.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Uniqueness of bound states for sublinear elliptic equations

We investigate the uniqueness of radial bound state solutions to the sublinear elliptic equation \[ \begin{cases} -Δu - u + |u|^{q-2}u = 0 & \text{in } \mathbb{R}^n,\cr u(x) \to 0 & \text{as } |x| \to \infty, \end{cases} \] where $q\in(1,2)$ and $n\geq 2$. A distinctive feature of this problem is the non-Lipschitz singularity of the nonlinearity at the origin, which gives rise to compactly supported ground states and bound states. Using a shooting argument together with a detailed analysis of the linearized variation with respect to the initial value, we prove that for every prescribed integer $k\geq 1$, the equation admits exactly one radial bound state solution with $k$ simple zeros, up to sign reflection and spatial translation. In addition, our analysis yields a classification of radial solutions according to the initial value and describes their behavior near the finite support boundary.

math.AP↗