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Yifan Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Yifan Xu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

SyncBreaker:Stage-Aware Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation

Diffusion-based audio-driven talking-head generation enables realistic portrait animation, but also introduces risks of misuse, such as fraud and misinformation. Existing protection methods are largely limited to a single modality, and neither image-only nor audio-only attacks can effectively suppress speech-driven facial dynamics. To address this gap, we propose SyncBreaker, a stage-aware multimodal protection framework that jointly perturbs portrait and audio inputs under modality-specific perceptual constraints. Our key contributions are twofold. First, for the image stream, we introduce nullifying supervision with Multi-Interval Sampling (MIS) across diffusion stages to steer the generation toward the static reference portrait by aggregating guidance from multiple denoising intervals. Second, for the audio stream, we propose Cross-Attention Fooling (CAF), which suppresses interval-specific audio-conditioned cross-attention responses. Both streams are optimized independently and combined at inference time to enable flexible deployment. We evaluate SyncBreaker in a white-box proactive protection setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncBreaker more effectively degrades lip synchronization and facial dynamics than strong single-modality baselines, while preserving input perceptual quality and remaining robust under purification. Code: https://github.com/kitty384/SyncBreaker.

cs.CV↗

Identifying common backbones of interactions underlying food webs via non-deterministic alignments

Climate change reshapes food webs by altering species distributions and interactions, making it essential to identify structural backbones of interactions that persist across ecosystems. Deterministic alignment methods are computationally slow and restricted to one-to-one correspondences. We introduce a scalable, non-deterministic alignment framework inspired by optimal transport that captures overlapping species roles via many-to-many mappings. Framed via motif-role profiles as a Gromov-Wasserstein transport problem, our method is both efficient and interpretable. We apply the proposed method to a large continental-scale data set of 129 mammal food webs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Pairwise alignments are identified, and we uncover robust backbones with greater connectivity and transitivity than those expected under null models. The proposed approach provides a formal, reproducible tool for forecasting ecosystem reorganization and conservation efforts.

q-bio.PE↗

SafeCRS: Personalized Safety Alignment for LLM-Based Conversational Recommender Systems

Current LLM-based conversational recommender systems (CRS) primarily optimize recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction. We identify an underexplored vulnerability in which recommendation outputs may negatively impact users by violating personalized safety constraints, when individualized safety sensitivities -- such as trauma triggers, self-harm history, or phobias -- are implicitly inferred from the conversation but not respected during recommendation. We formalize this challenge as personalized CRS safety and introduce SafeRec, a new benchmark dataset designed to systematically evaluate safety risks in LLM-based CRS under user-specific constraints. To further address this problem, we propose SafeCRS, a safety-aware training framework that integrates Safe Supervised Fine-Tuning (Safe-SFT) with Safe Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (Safe-GDPO) to jointly optimize recommendation quality and personalized safety alignment. Extensive experiments on SafeRec demonstrate that SafeCRS reduces safety violation rates by up to 96.5% relative to the strongest recommendation-quality baseline while maintaining competitive recommendation quality. Warning: This paper contains potentially harmful and offensive content.

cs.CL↗

VTM-Nav: Harnessing Cross-Episode Experience for Object-Goal Navigation with Hierarchical Visual-Topological Memory

Training-free ObjectNav agents increasingly use vision-language models (VLMs), yet typically discard acquired scene knowledge after each request. We study cross-episode ObjectNav, where each request is an independently initialized, single-goal episode and only self-acquired, scene-scoped memory persists across episodes. We ask whether an agent with fixed model parameters and navigation components can reuse such experience without retraining or oracle information. We introduce \method, a training-free framework with a persistent Hierarchical Visual-Topological Memory (VTM). VTM uses a coarse room topology to index room-owned visual memories, distinguishes in-room from remote-visible evidence, and retains successful approach cues. For each request, VTM-Nav re-localizes the agent in accumulated scene structure, retrieves target-relevant records from plausible rooms, and grounds memory guidance in candidates derived from the current observation. A conservative execution guard further handles local failures. Under matched 40-step comparisons, VTM-Nav exceeds the memory-reset WMNav control by 4.6, 2.0, and 0.8 SR points on HM3D v0.1, HM3D v0.2, and MP3D, respectively, with comparable or higher SPL. On HM3D, it also exceeds WMNav harnessed by textual memory by 3.1 and 5.5 SR points. These results demonstrate effective reuse of cross-episode scene experience through hierarchical visual-topological memory.

cs.CV↗

Re-Sonance: A Dysarthric Asynchronous Real-Time Speech Conversion System Based on a Three-Stage Cascaded ASR-LLM-TTS Architecture

Individuals with dysarthria face significant challenges in professional speaking scenarios such as conferences, presentations, and meetings, where real-time communication is crucial. While existing Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems provide basic support, they often fail to meet the demands of professional speaking environments due to high latency and unnatural speech patterns. This paper presents Re-Sonance, a novel LLM-enhanced speech-driven AAC system designed for real-time professional speaking scenarios. By integrating Whisper ASR, Qwen LLM, and CosyVoice TTS, Re-Sonance achieves improved speech intelligibility and naturalness while maintaining real-time performance. Both subjective and objective evaluations using a Mandarin dysarthric speech dataset demonstrate that our speech reconstruction approach significantly improved intelligibility while preserving semantic coherence for speakers with mild to moderate dysarthria. Although performance remains limited for severe dysarthria cases, our findings validate the potential of LLM-based methods for enhancing speech-driven AAC systems, paving the way for more effective and accessible communication technologies.

cs.SD↗

Towards Domain-Generalized Open-Vocabulary Object Detection: A Progressive Domain-invariant Cross-modal Alignment Method

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) has achieved remarkable success in generalizing to novel categories. However, this success often rests on the implicit assumption of domain stationarity. In this work, we revisit the OVOD paradigm and study a key vulnerability: the fragile coupling between visual manifolds and textual embeddings under distribution shifts. We first formulate Domain-Generalized Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (DG-OVOD) as an evaluation protocol for open-vocabulary recognition under visual shifts. Through empirical analysis, we observe that visual shifts can destabilize the latent cross-modal space, causing novel-category visual signals to drift away from their semantic anchors. Motivated by these observations, we propose Progressive Domain-invariant Cross-modal Alignment (PICA). PICA departs from uniform training by introducing a multi-level curriculum based on ambiguity and signal strength. It constructs a quality-adjusted curriculum over pseudo-word prototypes, refined by sample reliability and visual consistency, to encourage more stable cross-domain modality alignment. Our findings suggest that OVOD robustness under domain shifts is closely linked to the stability of the latent cross-modal alignment space. Our work provides a DG-OVOD evaluation protocol and a practical perspective on building more generalizable open-vocabulary systems beyond static laboratory conditions.

cs.CV↗

SolarChain-Eval: A Physics-Constrained Benchmark for Trustworthy Economic Agents in Decentralized Energy Markets

As agentic AI systems are increasingly applied to cyber-physical environments, their evaluation requires assessment of both task performance and trustworthiness. In decentralized energy markets, autonomous agents may improve market utility, but may also exploit invalid physical data, create artificial liquidity, and produce unstable governance decisions. Therefore, we propose SolarChain-Eval, a physics-constrained benchmark for evaluating trustworthy economic agents. It formulates market governance as a Gymnasium-compatible Markov Decision Process, where agents make hourly decisions. SolarChain-Eval evaluates each policy across multiple dimensions, including market utility, physical safety, slippage, action smoothness, spatial fairness, and auditability. To support agentic evaluation, SolarChain-Eval incorporates an LLM-based Planner/Auditor layer. The Planner defines episode-level action bounds and audit rules, while the Auditor reviews and revises high-risk actions. All interventions are recorded through structured logs, including trigger signals, proposed actions, revised actions, and audit rationales. Experiments with static, random, myopic, RL, and RL+LLM policies reveal a clear utility-safety trade-off. RL agents improve market utility but can still produce unsafe behavior. When the physics penalty is removed, reward-maximizing agents exploit invalid generation and increase artificial liquidity. The LLM Planner/Auditor improves auditability and mitigates selected risks, but it cannot fully compensate for a misspecified reward function. These results indicate that trustworthy agentic AI evaluation requires both physical constraints and transparent intervention traces. We release data and code as open access on GitHub for replicability.

cs.AI↗

Measurement of solar $pp$ neutrino flux with the new PandaX-4T data

We report a new measurement of the solar proton--proton ($pp$) neutrino flux via neutrino--electron elastic scattering using the PandaX-4T Run 2 data set collected between 2024 and 2026, corresponding to an exposure of 1.9 tonne$\cdot$yr. Before Run 2 data taking, the detector underwent a series of upgrades to improve its response and background conditions. Time variations of radioactive noble-gas impurities are constrained using the physics data themselves, complemented by measurements from the gas-assay system. The analysis introduced improvements in the data processing chain, detector response characterization, and background models. A blind spectral analysis was then performed on the electronic-recoil data across a wide energy range from 20 to 1000 keV. In combination with the Run 0 data published earlier, the fitted $pp$ flux is $(8.5 \pm 3.5)\times 10^{10}$ $\mathrm{cm^{-2}s^{-1}}$, consistent with the prediction of the Standard Solar Model. With a statistical significance of $2.2σ$ above background, this marks the first positive indication of solar $pp$ neutrino--electron scattering below an electronic-recoil energy of 165 keV.

hep-ex↗

Decoupled Vision-Language System for Multimodal Understanding and Generation

We introduce a new architecture design for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), Libra, capable of both multimodal understanding and generation. Libra architecture contains one vision system and one language system, connected by cross-modal bridges. This design decouples self-modal modeling and cross-modal interaction, enabling each modality to learn its unique representations while maintaining effective cross-modal comprehension. The decoupling is mainly achieved in a switch attention module and a switch FFN module, which dynamically routes the computation flow for self-modal modeling and cross-modal interaction scenarios. We evaluate the effectiveness in two important settings: \textbf{Libra-1} for the understanding-only image-to-text setting, and \textbf{Libra-2} for unified image-to-text understanding and text-to-image generation. In addition to the architecture design, we discuss various improvements on tokenization, positional encoding, and supervision. Experiments demonstrate that the dedicated Libra design enables mutual improvements on multimodal understanding and generation, achieving strong performance on both understanding and generation benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

TeleStyle V2: Beyond Content-Preserving Style Transfer with Self-Distillation and Distribution-Matching-Distillation

Given a content reference and a style reference, content-preserving style transfer requires the model to generate stylized outputs with content and style consistency. We introduced TeleStyle V1 to tackle this problem. However, TeleStyle V1 is trained with photorealistic content reference and artistic style reference, which makes it incapable to cope with artistic content reference and realistic style reference in most cases. In this paper, we designed a Self-Distillation data synthesis strategy to construct such triplets from TeleStyle V1. Trained with such self-distilled triplets, our TeleStyle V2 supports Content-Style references in the forms of Realistic-and-Realistic (RnR), Realistic-and-Stylized (RnS), Stylized-and-Realistic (SnR), Stylized-and-Stylized (SnS). In addition, we found Distribution Matching Distillation could preserve the general text-guided image editing capability of the foundation model and fix the content consistency degradation caused by SFT process. Through quantitative evaluations, our TeleStyleV2-QIE-2509-DMD performs at least on par with Qwen-Image-Edit-2509-DMD, demonstrating strong general image editing skills beyond content-preserving style transfer. We observed the content/style reference order confusion problem in TeleStyle V1 and further introduced prompt enhancer to solve it. TeleStyle V2 uses Qwen-Image-Edit's VLM encoder, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, to generate content prompt and style prompt for free. TeleStyle V2 could achieve comparable style transfer performance with state-of-the-art commercial model, gemini-3-pro-image-preview.

cs.CV↗

MotionEnhancer: Leveraging Video Diffusion for Motion-Enhanced Vision-Language Models

The new era has witnessed a remarkable capability to extend Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for tackling tasks of video understanding. While current VLMs excel at event- or story-level understanding, their ability to capture fine-grained motion details remains limited, primarily due to their focus on high-level static semantic structures and macro-event logic. In contrast, Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) are adept at modeling dynamic motion patterns, benefiting from large-scale video data and the intrinsic requirement of temporal generation. In this paper, we introduce MotionEnhancer, a novel approach that leverages motion priors distilled from a powerful video diffusion model as auxiliary supervision to enhance the motion understanding capability of a VLM via attention alignment. MotionEnhancer comprises two simple parameter-free modules, Motion-sensitive Head Selection (MHS) and Motion-salient Text Token Identification (MTTI), to directly extract and optimize motion-related attentions from the VDM in a computation-only manner. MotionEnhancer provides a scalable solution for motion understanding without additional training parameters, modifications to existing architectures, or tool calling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionEnhancer can achieve consistent improvements over state-of-the-art VLMs on two motion-level video understanding benchmarks, especially on motion-related metrics.

cs.CV↗

DOME: Learning Transferable Domain Variables from Sparse Supervision for Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to align a model to shifting test domains using only unlabeled streaming data. Most existing methods implicitly infer a single global domain distribution, ignoring the multidimensional and sample-specific nature of real-world domain shifts, leading to fragile adaptation. We propose DOME, an effective domain encoder that explicitly models each sample's domain in a zero-shot manner. DOME leverages vision-language pretraining to extract dense, continuous representations, parameterizes domains as distributional variables, and introduces a momentum-updated sparse domain bank for disentangled supervision. By injecting these explicit domain cues into downstream models, even a basic entropy-minimization TTA strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance across ImageNet-C, ImageNet-R, and ImageNet-Sketch, outperforming complex TTA approaches. Our results demonstrate that robust adaptation stems not from intricate adaptation algorithms, but from explicit, structured domain representation.

cs.CV↗

EVA: Accelerating LLM Decoding via an Efficient Vector Quantization Architecture

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse domains but remain inefficient during the autoregressive decoding phase. Unlike the prefill stage, which employs compute-bound GEMM operations, decoding executes a sequence of small GEMV-like computations that are memory-bound and underutilize modern accelerators. Weight-only vector quantization (VQ) has emerged as an effective compression technique that clusters model weights into a shared codebook and replaces the original weight matrix with low-precision indices, enabling 2-bit-level weight compression. While this approach substantially reduces model size and memory bandwidth, it still suffers from two critical inefficiencies: the low utilization of GEMV computation and frequent memory conflicts during codebook lookups. This paper presents EVA, an efficient vector-quantization-based architecture that addresses both computational and memory bottlenecks in LLM decoding. EVA builds on a simple yet effective insight that combines input-codebook computation with conflict-free memory access. Instead of reconstructing quantized weights from indices, EVA directly performs dot products between input vectors and the weight codebook, transforming LLM decoding from GEMV to GEMM computation. It then performs structured lookups from an intermediate output buffer, eliminating memory bank conflicts. We further design a hardware-software co-optimized architecture specialized for LLM decoding while remaining compatible with conventional prefill execution. Evaluations show that EVA achieves up to 11.17$\times$ speedup and 7.17$\times$ higher energy efficiency compared with the SOTA lookup-based architecture, while preserving arithmetic precision after vector quantization. Our code is available at https://github.com/dbw6/Eva.git.

cs.AR↗

Probing scalar-neutrino and scalar-dark-matter interactions with PandaX-4T

Scalar-mediated interactions may exist among neutrinos, dark matter particles, or between the two. Double $β$-decay experiments provide a powerful tool to probe such exotic interactions. Using $^{136}$Xe double $β$-decay data from PandaX-4T, we perform the first direct spectral search in the energy range of 20 to 2800~keV, setting the most stringent limits to date on scalar-mediated neutrino self-interactions for mediator masses below 2~MeV$/c^2$. These results place significant constraints on models invoking such interactions to alleviate the Hubble Tension. Assuming the same scalar also mediates dark matter self-interactions, constraints on the dark matter-scalar interactions can be placed in conjunction with cosmological constraints.

hep-ex↗

From swept contact to pose: Probe-aware registration via complementary-shape docking

Accurate registration between a prior model and the real scene is essential for high-precision robotic manipulation, yet optical methods suffer from long calibration chains, line-of-sight constraints, and fabrication errors. We propose a calibration-free alternative that reformulates contact registration as complementary-shape docking between the object and the probe's swept volume, explicitly accounting for probe geometry and leveraging both contact and non-contact evidence. Our solver integrates a global-to-local search via 3D FFT correlation over low-discrepancy SO(3) samples, then followed by continuous SE(3) refinement using Lie-algebra updates and analytic contact sensitivities. This pipeline yields efficient exploration and metric-grade convergence without fragile point correspondences. Simulation across free-form meshes achieved sub-0.04 mm and sub-0.4° accuracy and robustness to pose noise and contact loss. On a tooth-preparation robot, our method attained 0.42 mm and 3.75°, outperforming an optical tracker registration while requiring no external sensors. These results demonstrate a practical and precise registration strategy for surgical and industrial robots.

cs.RO↗

LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advances in integrating visual and linguistic information, yet their ability to reason about complex and real-world scenarios remains limited. The existing benchmarks are usually constructed in the task-oriented manner without guarantee that different task samples come from the same data distribution, thus they often fall short in evaluating the synergistic effects of lower-level perceptual capabilities on higher-order reasoning. To lift this limitation, we contribute Lens, a multi-level benchmark with 3.4K contemporary images and 60K+ human-authored questions covering eight tasks and 12 daily scenarios, forming three progressive task tiers, i.e., perception, understanding, and reasoning. One feature is that each image is equipped with rich annotations for all tasks. Thus, this dataset intrinsically supports to evaluate MLLMs to handle image-invariable prompts, from basic perception to compositional reasoning. In addition, our images are manully collected from the social media, in which 53% were published later than Jan. 2025. We evaluate 15+ frontier MLLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B, InternVL3-78B, GPT-4o and two reasoning models QVQ-72B-preview and Kimi-VL. These models are released later than Dec. 2024, and none of them achieve an accuracy greater than 60% in the reasoning tasks. Project page: https://github.com/Lens4MLLMs/lens. ICCV 2025 workshop page: https://lens4mllms.github.io/mars2-workshop-iccv2025/

cs.CV↗

GLM-5V-Turbo: Toward a Native Foundation Model for Multimodal Agents

We present GLM-5V-Turbo, a step toward native foundation models for multimodal agents. As foundation models are increasingly deployed in real environments, agentic capability depends not only on language reasoning, but also on the ability to perceive, interpret, and act over heterogeneous contexts such as images, videos, webpages, documents, GUIs. GLM-5V-Turbo is built around this objective: multimodal perception is integrated as a core component of reasoning, planning, tool use, and execution, rather than as an auxiliary interface to a language model. This report summarizes the main improvements behind GLM-5V-Turbo across model design, multimodal training, reinforcement learning, toolchain expansion, and integration with agent frameworks. These developments lead to strong performance in multimodal coding, visual tool use, and framework-based agentic tasks, while preserving competitive text-only coding capability. More importantly, our development process offers practical insights for building multimodal agents, highlighting the central role of multimodal perception, hierarchical optimization, and reliable end-to-end verification.

cs.CV↗

How You Begin is How You Reason: Driving Exploration in RLVR via Prefix-Tuned Priors

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) recently thrives in large language model (LLM) reasoning tasks. However, the reward sparsity and the long reasoning horizon make effective exploration challenging. In practice, this challenge manifests as the \emph{entropy collapse} phenomenon, where RLVR improves single-rollout accuracy but fails to expand coverage on successful reasoning trajectories. Passive exploration techniques like entropy regularization tend to dismiss generation quality, resulting in noisy rollouts. In response to this issue, we propose an Information-Maximizing Augmented eXploration (IMAX) framework to train a pool of soft prefixes that reshapes the base model's prior over reasoning trajectories. Rather than relying on RL to incentivize exploration on top of the base model, each prefix acts as a trainable control knob that induces a distinct rollout distribution from the same backbone model. To encourage discovery of diverse and task-relevant reasoning behaviors, we derive an Information Maximization (InfoMax) reward to complement the verifiable rewards for RL training. IMAX is in general algorithm-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing RLVR pipelines. Experiment results have shown that across three backbone scales, IMAX consistently improves reasoning performance over standard RLVR, with gains up to 11.60\% in Pass@4 and 10.57\% in Avg@4.

cs.AI↗