arXiv subjects

Yang Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Tang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Industrial Agentic AI: LLM-Driven New-Generation Agents for Smart Manufacturing

Large language models (LLMs) are enabling agents to move beyond predefined workflows toward autonomous planning and execution, creating new opportunities for smart manufacturing. However, dynamic environments, complex physical constraints, and stringent reliability requirements hinder the direct deployment of general-purpose agents in smart manufacturing. This article presents a systematic overview of LLM-driven industrial agents. First, we analyze five key challenges and discuss the concept and core characteristics of industrial agents. We then establish a unified taxonomy covering application scenarios, embodiment forms, and five capability levels. Next, we propose a four-layer system architecture and detail its core modules and operational mechanisms for closed-loop task execution. Finally, we review representative applications across the industrial lifecycle and outline future research directions. This article provides a structured reference for the design, development, and application of industrial agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Submodular Multi-Agent Policy Learning for Online Distributed Task Allocation in Open Multi-Agent Systems

This paper studies multi-agent reinforcement learning with submodular team utilities for online distributed task allocation. In this setting, each agent selects one action from a local categorical policy, so feasible joint actions form a partition matroid over agent-action pairs. Classical multilinear extensions use independent Bernoulli sampling and therefore do not match the categorical policies executed by decentralized agents. To address this mismatch, we introduce the Partition Multilinear Extension (PME), a continuous relaxation whose value equals the expected team utility under factorized categorical policies. We prove that submodular difference rewards provide unbiased PME marginal-gradient information and yield a stagewise score-function policy-gradient estimator. Based on this connection, we propose SubMAPG, a centralized-training decentralized-execution policy-gradient framework with masked categorical policies and submodular difference-reward training signals. For the associated PME marginal-space projected stochastic-gradient dynamics, we prove a stagewise 1/2-approximation guarantee and sublinear dynamic regret in slowly varying environments, measured by the path length of the optimal PME marginals. To handle open systems with time-varying agents and targets, we instantiate SubMAPG with graph neural network policies. Experiments on multi-robot coverage and multi-target tracking show that SubMAPG outperforms local greedy and shared-reward baselines and is competitive with centralized myopic greedy strategies.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Stability of Multi-Dimensional Switched Systems with an Application to Open Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-dimensional switched system or multi-mode multi-dimensional ($M^3D$) system extends the classic switched system by allowing different subsystem dimensions. The stability problem of the $M^3D$ system, whose state transitions at switching instants can be discontinuous due to the dimension-varying feature, is studied. The discontinuous state transition is formulated by an affine map that captures both the dimension variations and the state impulses, with no extra constraint imposed. In the presence of unstable subsystems, the general criteria featuring a series of Lyapunov-like conditions for the practical and asymptotic stability properties of the $M^3D$ system are provided under the proposed slow/fast transition-dependent average dwell time framework. Then, by considering linear subsystems, we propose a class of parametric multiple Lyapunov functions to verify the obtained Lyapunov-like stability conditions and explicitly reveal a connection between the practical/asymptotic stability property and the non-vanishing/vanishing property of the impulsive effects in the state transition process. Further, the obtained stability results for the $M^3D$ system are applied to the consensus problem of the open multi-agent system (MAS), whose network topology can be switching and size-varying due to the migrations of agents. It shows that through a proper transformation, the seeking of the (practical) consensus performance of the open MAS with disconnected digraphs boils down to that of the (practical) stability property of an $M^3D$ system with unstable subsystems.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

DRAN: A Distribution and Relation Adaptive Network for Spatio-temporal Forecasting

Spatio-temporal forecasting remains challenging under non-stationary environments because both data distributions and spatial relations evolve over time. Temporal normalization and de-normalization are widely used to mitigate distribution shifts, but they may distort inter-node relationships and thereby impair spatial dependency modeling. To address these issues, we propose the Distribution and Relation Adaptive Network (DRAN) for spatio-temporal forecasting. DRAN incorporates a Spatial Factor Learner (SFL) module, which enables effective normalization and de-normalization while preserving spatial dependencies in spatio-temporal systems. To model evolving spatial interactions, DRAN further proposes the Dynamic-Static Fusion Learner (DSFL) module. DSFL decomposes features into static and dynamic components and adaptively fuses them according to input variability. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that DRAN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Additional analyses demonstrate that SFL consistently reduces spatial-relation distortion across multiple normalization schemes, whereas DSFL captures complementary static and dynamic dependencies and adjusts their contributions according to temporal variability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Event-triggered Control and Online Learning for Networked Systems under Computational Delays

Online learning-based control is a promising approach to control uncertain systems, where unknown components are identified during operation to improve control performance. However, resource-intensive online learning algorithms introduce non-negligible computational delays, especially when executed on systems with limited local computational resources. To mitigate this, an in-network online learning-based control structure is employed by deploying the learning-based controller on a remote computation node and connecting it via a communication channel. In this paper, control performance guarantee is first established by deriving tracking error bound for the in-network control architecture, while accounting for computational delays. The derived tracking error bound allows for diverse communication and computation strategies under a specific condition, including time-/event-triggered mechanisms. Additionally, the trade-off between communication and computation performances is shown for a given desired control performance. Furthermore, to enhance the efficiency in both communication and computation, an efficient control framework with an asynchronous event-triggered mechanism in both control and online learning is devised under the existence of computational delay. The proposed event-triggered strategy is proven to achieve the same control performance as time-triggered scenario while excluding Zeno behavior. Finally, we derive an explicit expression of the proposed event-trigger condition for exponentially stabilizable systems, and demonstrate its effectiveness through simulations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Global Scalars: Synergizing Token-Level Statistics and Deep Semantics for Adversarial AIGC Text Detection

The rapid evolution of large language models necessitates robust machine-generated text detection. Existing paradigms typically follow two isolated tracks. Training-free methods rely on global statistical scalars such as perplexity, while training-based methods utilize semantic hidden states. Both approaches exhibit fundamental vulnerabilities in adversarial scenarios. Global scalars act as lossy compressions that obscure local probabilistic burstiness in interleaved texts, whereas pure semantic models overfit to specific fingerprints and remain susceptible to spoofing. To expose these flaws, we introduce MOSAIC, a comprehensive adversarial benchmark comprising 16000 samples across a full-granularity attack spectrum. To address these challenges, we propose NeuroStat, an end-to-end framework bridging the statistical and semantic gap. NeuroStat captures uncompressed token-level probabilistic logits alongside deep semantic hidden states from a single causal language model backbone. We fuse these heterogeneous signals through Macro-State Residual Modulation, which adaptively calibrates local convolutional features using global uncertainty indicators. Orthogonal and contrastive losses further ensure the learning of complementary representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuroStat maintains exceptional robustness on MOSAIC compared to the severe degradation of state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new standard for adversarial text detection. Code and the MOSAIC benchmark are available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/NeuroStat.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Entity Representation Learning Through Onsite-Offsite Graph for Pinterest Ads

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been extensively applied to industry recommendation systems, as seen in models like GraphSage\cite{GraphSage}, TwHIM\cite{TwHIM}, LiGNN\cite{LiGNN} etc. In these works, graphs were constructed based on users' activities on the platforms, and various graph models were developed to effectively learn node embeddings. In addition to users' onsite activities, their offsite conversions are crucial for Ads models to capture their shopping interest. To better leverage offsite conversion data and explore the connection between onsite and offsite activities, we constructed a large-scale heterogeneous graph based on users' onsite ad interactions and opt-in offsite conversion activities. Furthermore, we introduced TransRA (TransR\cite{TransR} with Anchors), a novel Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) model, to more efficiently integrate graph embeddings into Ads ranking models. However, our Ads ranking models initially struggled to directly incorporate Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), and only modest gains were observed during offline experiments. To address this challenge, we employed the Large ID Embedding Table technique and innovated an attention based KGE finetuning approach within the Ads ranking models. As a result, we observed a significant AUC lift in Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction models. Moreover, this framework has been deployed in Pinterest's Ads Engagement Model and contributed to $2.69\%$ CTR lift and $1.34\%$ CPC reduction. We believe the techniques presented in this paper can be leveraged by other large-scale industrial models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Submodular Policy Learning for Distributed Task Allocation in Open Multi-Agent Systems

This paper studies policy learning for distributed task allocation in open multi-agent systems, where agents may join and leave in a time-varying fashion, with submodular stage team utilities. At each time, the active agents select actions from local categorical policies such that the feasible joint agent-action pairs form a partition matroid. Standard continuous relaxations of submodular set functions are based on independent Bernoulli sampling, making them inconsistent with agents' policies.To solve this mismatch, we propose the \emph{partition multilinear extension} (PME), a policy-based relaxation whose continuous support matches feasible actions under categorical policies.We prove that the marginal gains of the stage utility provide an unbiased estimator of the gradient of the PME and that maximizing the PME over action distributions is equivalent to maximizing the stage utilities over agent actions, which are critical to devise principled policy gradient.Building on this, we design \emph{SubMAPL}, a centralized-training decentralized-execution KL-mirror policy-learning method that uses local marginal gains as stochastic PME gradients during training. KL-mirror updates preserve categorical feasibility without Euclidean projection.In the case where agents run tabular-softmax policies, we introduce open policy migration and an open-system KL tracking variation to handle agent arrivals and departures. Using dynamic regret analysis, we establish a lower bound on the cumulative utility which accounts for the openness of the environment and for the gap between optimal stage-wise and global utilities. Simulations on multi-agent coverage demonstrate that SubMAPL outperforms policy-gradient and online-learning baselines.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Conan-embedding-v3: Fusing Modality-Specific Models for Omni-Modal Embedding

Omni-modal retrieval promises a single embedding space for text, image, video, document, and audio inputs, but building such a unified retriever is difficult since these modalities differ in data distribution, architecture, and optimization dynamics. In this work, we present Conan-embedding-v3, a decouple--fuse--recover framework for omni-modal retrieval. Conan-embedding-v3 first trains modality specialists independently and fuses their task vectors into a single dense backbone, a strategy we call Decoupled Specialist Fusion. We show that this fusion composes visual, video, and document retrieval capabilities, but also exposes a failure mode for projector-based modalities: when audio is attached through an external encoder and projector, fusing the backbone leaves the projector calibrated to the audio-specialist backbone, causing a large audio retrieval regression despite copying all audio-specific modules unchanged. We call this failure Projector Drift. To repair it, Conan-embedding-v3 applies Projector Recovery (i.e., full-parameter fine-tuning of the projector while keeping the backbone frozen) followed by balanced multi-modal rehearsal. The resulting model supports these retrieval pathways in one backbone, achieving 74.9 scores on MMEB while obtaining 55.61 on the 30-task MAEB audio suite.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

Diffusion-Guided Uncertainty-Aware Delayed Policy Optimization

Reinforcement learning in real world environments often suffers from severe performance degradation due to delayed feedback. Existing approaches typically mitigate performance degradation caused by observation delays by constructing augmented states or predicting the true states. However, these methods often overlook the inherent discrepancy between delayed state and true states induced by stochastic MDP. We theoretically prove the existence of such a discrepancy and show that it leads to the degradation of the optimal policy. To address this challenge, we propose Diffusion Guided Uncertainty Aware Delayed Policy Optimization (DUPO). Our method explicitly models the relationship between delayed state message and the current state using a diffusion model, and leverages the resulting discrepancy estimates to weight delayed policies. Extensive experiments on continuous robotic control tasks with multiple stochastic delays demonstrate that DUPO consistently outperforms existing methods and remains effective even under long and random delay scenarios.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

ProLaViT: Learning Progressive Latent Visual Thoughts in Structured Latent Space

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress but still struggle with complex visual reasoning tasks requiring multi-step perception and logical deduction. While explicit visual generation incurs prohibitive computational costs, existing latent approaches often rely on external experts or lack rigorous cognitive logic. In this paper, we introduce ProLaViT (Progressive Latent Visual Thought), a framework empowering MLLMs to perform structured visual derivation in the continuous latent space. Unlike works dependent on heterogeneous external models, ProLaViT leverages an endogenous self-distillation mechanism, utilizing the model's own visual encoder to supervise latent thoughts. To facilitate this, we construct a scalable programmatic synthesis pipeline enabling the model to internalize algorithmic precision without inference time tools. We design two reasoning paradigms: (1) Coarse-to-Fine Causal Chain for spatial tasks, guiding attention from global context to local targets. (2) Dialectical Reasoning Chain for logical tasks, incorporating counter-factual thinking for verification. Furthermore, we propose a Distance-Weighted Diversity Loss to impose topology-aware constraints, preventing feature degeneration by enforcing semantic distinctiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProLaViT outperforms baselines on vision-centric benchmarks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability with high efficiency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Scalable and General Whole-Body Control for Cross-Humanoid Locomotion

Learning-based whole-body controllers have become a key driver for humanoid robots, yet most existing approaches require robot-specific training. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-embodiment humanoid control and show that a single policy can robustly generalize across a wide range of humanoid robot designs with one-time training. We introduce XHugWBC, a novel cross-embodiment training framework that enables generalist humanoid control through: (1) physics-consistent morphological randomization, (2) semantically aligned observation and action spaces across diverse humanoid robots, and (3) effective policy architectures modeling morphological and dynamical properties. XHugWBC is not tied to any specific robot. Instead, it internalizes a broad distribution of morphological and dynamical characteristics during training. By learning motion priors from diverse randomized embodiments, the policy acquires a strong structural bias that supports zero-shot transfer to previously unseen robots. Experiments on twelve simulated humanoids and seven real-world robots demonstrate the strong generalization and robustness of the resulting universal controller.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Causal Semantic Alignment for LLM-based Time Series Forecasting

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for time series forecasting by enabling alignment between temporal patterns and pretrained word embeddings. However, most LLM-based methods overlook the heterogeneous nature of time series, where dynamic fluctuations and invariant semantics are entangled. This entanglement introduces spurious correlations during the alignment, as dynamic components act as confounders by simultaneously influencing invariant components and the resulting aligned embeddings. To address this issue, a variable-level alignment framework CVAformer is proposed. CVAformer explicitly disentangles each variable into invariant and dynamic components just before alignment, and applies causal intervention to mitigate the confounding effect of the dynamics. To better support variable-level alignment, CVAformer replaces the standard causal attention in LLMs with a non-causal attention mechanism that captures interactions among variables at each time step. Extensive experiments across long-term, short-term, few-shot, and zero-shot forecasting settings indicate that CVAformer matches or exceeds state-of-the-art performance on most datasets, and in some cases achieves notably better accuracy. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of variable-level alignment and dynamic disentanglement in CVAformer, offering a new perspective for LLM-based time series tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Aligning Deep Implicit Preferences by Learning to Reason Defensively

Personalized alignment is crucial for enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to engage effectively in user-centric interactions. However, current methods face a dual challenge: they fail to infer users' deep implicit preferences (including unstated goals, semantic context and risk tolerances), and they lack the defensive reasoning required to navigate real-world ambiguity. This cognitive gap leads to responses that are superficial, brittle and short-sighted. To address this, we propose Critique-Driven Reasoning Alignment (CDRA), which reframes alignment from a scalar reward-matching task into a structured reasoning process. First, to bridge the preference inference gap, we introduce the DeepPref benchmark. This dataset, comprising 3000 preference-query pairs across 20 topics, is curated by simulating a multi-faceted cognitive council that produces critique-annotated reasoning chains to deconstruct query semantics and reveal latent risks. Second, to instill defensive reasoning, we introduce the Personalized Generative Process Reward Model (Pers-GenPRM), which frames reward modeling as a personalized reasoning task. It generates a critique chain to evaluate a response's alignment with user preferences before outputting a final score based on this rationale. Ultimately, this interpretable, structured reward signal guides policy model through Critique-Driven Policy Alignment, a process-level online reinforcement learning algorithm integrating both numerical and natural language feedback. Experiments demonstrate that CDRA excels at discovering and aligning with users' true preferences while executing robust reasoning. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Zephyrian-Hugh/Deep-pref.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Render-of-Thought: Rendering Textual Chain-of-Thought as Images for Visual Latent Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead. Recent works often focus exclusively on outcome alignment and lack supervision on the intermediate reasoning process. These deficiencies obscure the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. To address these challenges, we introduce Render-of-Thought (RoT), the first framework to reify the reasoning chain by rendering textual steps into images, making the latent rationale explicit and traceable. Specifically, we leverage the vision encoders of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) as semantic anchors to align the vision embeddings with the textual space. This design ensures plug-and-play implementation without incurring additional pre-training overhead. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4x token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT. Furthermore, it maintains competitive performance against other methods, validating the feasibility of this paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/RoT

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Universal Skeleton Understanding via Differentiable Rendering and MLLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong visual-language reasoning, yet cannot process structured, non-visual data such as human skeletons. Existing methods either compress skeleton dynamics into lossy feature vectors for text alignment, or quantize motion into discrete tokens that generalize poorly across heterogeneous skeleton formats. We present SkeletonLLM, which achieves universal skeleton understanding by translating arbitrary skeleton sequences into the MLLM's native visual modality. At its core is DrAction, a differentiable, format-agnostic renderer that converts skeletal kinematics into compact image sequences. Because the pipeline is end-to-end differentiable, MLLM gradients can directly guide the rendering to produce task-informative visual tokens. To further enhance reasoning capabilities, we introduce a cooperative training strategy: Causal Reasoning Distillation transfers structured, step-by-step reasoning from a teacher model, while Discriminative Finetuning sharpens decision boundaries between confusable actions. SkeletonLLM demonstrates strong generalization \revise{in open-vocabulary action recognition, while its learned reasoning capabilities naturally extend to motion captioning and question answering across heterogeneous skeleton formats} -- suggesting a viable path for applying MLLMs to non-native modalities. Code: https://github.com/wangzy01/SkeletonLLM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Distributed Task Allocation for Multi-Agent Systems: A Submodular Optimization Approach

This paper addresses dynamic task allocation in resource-constrained multi-agent systems (MASs) with sequentially updated assignments. We develop a submodular maximization framework integrated with $q$-independence systems, demonstrating greater flexibility than conventional matroid-based constraints for modeling heterogeneous resource limitations. The proposed distributed greedy bundles algorithm (DGBA) addresses communication limitations in MASs while providing rigorous approximation guarantees for submodular maximization under a $q$-independence system constraint, ensuring low computational complexity. DGBA achieves feasible task allocation in polynomial time with reduced space complexity compared to existing methods. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations in a micro-satellite observation scenario demonstrate that DGBA consistently outperforms benchmark algorithms in total utility, resource efficiency, and assignment stability, while maintaining real-time computational feasibility.

cs.MA↗