arXiv subjects

Yifan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Yifan Yang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RAPIDMap: Rapid Multi-Agent Pipeline for Interpretable Disaster Mapping from Satellite and Street-view Imagery

Rapid and reliable disaster mapping of impacted areas, damaged infrastructure, and affected populations is essential for emergency response and recovery. However, existing AI-based approaches often require extensive manual annotation, lack cross-hazard generalization, and rely on single-modal observations. To address these challenges, this paper proposes RAPIDMap, a rapid multi-agent pipeline for zero-shot interpretable disaster mapping from satellite and street-view imagery. The framework integrates four intelligent agents: Disaster Perception Agent (DPA), Image Restoration Agent (IRA), Damage Recognition Agent (DRA), and Disaster Mapping Agent (DMA). By combining remote sensing and street-view data, RAPIDMap eliminates the need for manual fine-tuning, generalizes across multiple disaster categories, and generates structured, map-ready disaster intelligence with recovery recommendations.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

RACE: Scalable Statistical Estimation of Functional Consistency in LLM Neurons

Discovering stable neuron behavior across entire domains remains a challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Existing methods often rely on instance-level point estimates or computationally expensive procedures, which either obscure population-level variability or limit scalable domain-wide analysis. We present RACE (Residual Alignment for Consistency Estimation), a forward-pass statistical framework that evaluates the domain-wide functional consistency of Transformer neurons. Compared with gradient-based point estimates, RACE produces neuron rankings that yield more domain-specific effects under perturbation. Token-distribution shifts support the connection between the selected neurons and the target domain, while scoring requires roughly one-hundredth of the computational overhead of the gradient-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Nexround/RACE.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

BEACON: Behavioral and Semantic Enrichment of AlphaEarth Embeddings through Tri-Modal Contrastive Learning

Geospatial foundation models such as the AlphaEarth Foundation produce compact and globally consistent representations of the Earth's surface that transfer effectively to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, because these models are trained primarily on Earth-observation imagery, their embeddings mainly capture physical and spectral characteristics while encoding human activity and urban function only weakly. To address this limitation, we propose BEACON, a tri-modal contrastive learning framework that aligns three complementary views of urban space: physical representations from AE embeddings, semantic representations from point-of-interest (POI) text, and human behavioral representations from hourly POI visitation, while keeping the deployed representation image-only. Using the Houston Metropolitan Area as a case study area, we evaluated the performance of the BEACON framework on nine downstream tasks, including seven regression and two classification tasks against six baselines (raw coordinates, Space2Vec, SatCLIP, TESSERA, Clay and AlphaEarth), using frozen linear and MLP probes over five seeds. Under a linear probe, BEACON improves relative R^2 over AlphaEarth by up to 43% for obesity prevalence, 34% for poor mental health, and 22% for median household income, while remaining competitive in the prediction of physical and environmental variables. These findings highlight the value of augmenting geospatial foundation models with semantic and behavioral signals, extending their applicability from physical Earth observation to human-centered urban analytics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

GRZO: Group-Relative Zeroth-Order Optimization for Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a memory-efficient alternative to backpropagation for fine-tuning large language models, but its deployment is limited by the high variance of gradient estimation. We propose GRZO, a Group-Relative Zeroth-Order optimizer that draws one pseudo-independent perturbation per mini-batch example and aggregates the per-example losses through group-relative normalization, raising the effective gradient-direction count from one to the batch size at no additional forward cost while preserving inference-level memory. We prove that GRZO is directionally unbiased with variance shrinking proportionally to the batch size, yielding a tighter nonconvex convergence bound than MeZO. Across RoBERTa-large, Llama3-8B, and OPT-13B over multiple tasks, GRZO improves average accuracy on Llama3-8B by $+3.0$ over MeZO at $23\%$ lower peak GPU memory; as a drop-in replacement for the MeZO core, it lifts sparse, low-rank, and quantized ZO variants by $+6.0$ on average.

cs.LG↗