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Yuhao Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yuhao Wang.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Toward Universal Laws of Outlier Propagation

When a variety of anomalous features motivate flagging different samples as outliers, Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) offers a principled way to unify them in terms of a sample's randomness deficiency. Subject to the algorithmic Markov condition on a causal Bayesian network, we show that the randomness deficiency of a joint sample decomposes into a sum of randomness deficiencies at each causal mechanism. Consequently, anomalous observations can be attributed to their root causes, i.e., the mechanisms that behaved anomalously. As an extension of Levin's law of randomness conservation, we show that weak outliers cannot cause strong ones. We show how these information theoretic laws clarify our understanding of outlier detection and attribution, in the context of more specialized outlier scores from prior literature.

cs.LG↗

Snap-Through Thermomechanical Metamaterials for High-Performance Thermal Rectification

Thermal diodes that enable directional heat transport are essential for advanced thermal management in microelectronics, energy systems, and thermal logic devices. However, existing designs based on phase-change materials, nanostructures, or interfacial engineering suffer from limited rectification performance, configurational inflexibility, and poor scalability. Here, we present a thermomechanical metamaterial-based thermal diode that combines temperature-responsive actuation with structural bistability to achieve high-efficiency, nonreciprocal thermal transport. The device integrates shape memory alloy (SMA) springs with pre-buckled copper strips that undergo snap-through transitions in response to thermal gradients. This reconfiguration enables contact-based conduction in the forward mode and suppresses reverse heat flow via radiative isolation. We develop a coupled analytical model combining Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and a thermal resistance network, and validate the system through finite element (FE) simulations and experiments. The device achieves a thermal rectification ratio exceeding 900, with robust cycling stability and structural integrity. A modular stacking strategy further enhances scalability without compromising performance. This work establishes a new design framework for high-performance, passive thermal rectifiers that bridge mechanical metamaterials and advanced thermal engineering.

physics.app-ph↗

AG-VPReID 2025: Aerial-Ground Video-based Person Re-identification Challenge Results

Person re-identification (ReID) across aerial and ground vantage points has become crucial for large-scale surveillance and public safety applications. Although significant progress has been made in ground-only scenarios, bridging the aerial-ground domain gap remains a formidable challenge due to extreme viewpoint differences, scale variations, and occlusions. Building upon the achievements of the AG-ReID 2023 Challenge, this paper introduces the AG-VPReID 2025 Challenge - the first large-scale video-based competition focused on high-altitude (80-120m) aerial-ground ReID. Constructed on the new AG-VPReID dataset with 3,027 identities, over 13,500 tracklets, and approximately 3.7 million frames captured from UAVs, CCTV, and wearable cameras, the challenge featured four international teams. These teams developed solutions ranging from multi-stream architectures to transformer-based temporal reasoning and physics-informed modeling. The leading approach, X-TFCLIP from UAM, attained 72.28% Rank-1 accuracy in the aerial-to-ground ReID setting and 70.77% in the ground-to-aerial ReID setting, surpassing existing baselines while highlighting the dataset's complexity. For additional details, please refer to the official website at https://agvpreid25.github.io.

cs.CV↗

Towards Provable (In)Secure Model Weight Release Schemes

Recent secure weight release schemes claim to enable open-source model distribution while protecting model ownership and preventing misuse. However, these approaches lack rigorous security foundations and provide only informal security guarantees. Inspired by established works in cryptography, we formalize the security of weight release schemes by introducing several concrete security definitions. We then demonstrate our definition's utility through a case study of TaylorMLP, a prominent secure weight release scheme. Our analysis reveals vulnerabilities that allow parameter extraction thus showing that TaylorMLP fails to achieve its informal security goals. We hope this work will advocate for rigorous research at the intersection of machine learning and security communities and provide a blueprint for how future weight release schemes should be designed and evaluated.

cs.CR↗

EfficientVLA: Training-Free Acceleration and Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, particularly diffusion-based architectures, demonstrate transformative potential for embodied intelligence but are severely hampered by high computational and memory demands stemming from extensive inherent and inference-time redundancies. While existing acceleration efforts often target isolated inefficiencies, such piecemeal solutions typically fail to holistically address the varied computational and memory bottlenecks across the entire VLA pipeline, thereby limiting practical deployability. We introduce EfficientVLA, a structured and training-free inference acceleration framework that systematically eliminates these barriers by cohesively exploiting multifaceted redundancies. EfficientVLA synergistically integrates three targeted strategies: (1) pruning of functionally inconsequential layers from the language module, guided by an analysis of inter-layer redundancies; (2) optimizing the visual processing pathway through a task-aware strategy that selects a compact, diverse set of visual tokens, balancing task-criticality with informational coverage; and (3) alleviating temporal computational redundancy within the iterative diffusion-based action head by strategically caching and reusing key intermediate features. We apply our method to a standard VLA model CogACT, yielding a 1.93X inference speedup and reduces FLOPs to 28.9%, with only a 0.6% success rate drop in the SIMPLER benchmark.

cs.CV↗

Debiased regression adjustment in completely randomized experiments with moderately high-dimensional covariates

Completely randomized experiment is the gold standard for causal inference. When the covariate information for each experimental candidate is available, one typical way is to include them in covariate adjustments for more accurate treatment effect estimation. In this paper, we investigate this problem under the randomization-based framework, i.e., that the covariates and potential outcomes of all experimental candidates are assumed as deterministic quantities and the randomness comes solely from the treatment assignment mechanism. Under this framework, to achieve asymptotically valid inference, existing estimators usually require either (i) that the dimension of covariates $p$ is much smaller than the sample size $n$; or (ii) certain sparsity constraints on the linear representations of potential outcomes constructed via possibly high-dimensional covariates. In this paper, we consider the moderately high-dimensional regime where $p$ is allowed to be in the same order of magnitude as $n$. We develop a novel debiased estimator with a corresponding inference procedure and establish its asymptotic normality under mild assumptions. Our estimator is model-free and does not require any sparsity constraint on potential outcome's linear representations. We also discuss its asymptotic efficiency improvements over the unadjusted treatment effect estimator under different dimensionality constraints. Numerical analysis confirms that compared to other regression adjustment based treatment effect estimators, our debiased estimator performs well in moderately high dimensions.

stat.ME↗

SOVA-Bench: Benchmarking the Speech Conversation Ability for LLM-based Voice Assistant

Thanks to the steady progress of large language models (LLMs), speech encoding algorithms and vocoder structure, recent advancements have enabled generating speech response directly from a user instruction. However, benchmarking the generated speech quality has been a neglected but critical issue, considering the shift from the pursuit of semantic accuracy to vivid and spontaneous speech flow. Previous evaluation focused on the speech-understanding ability, lacking a quantification of acoustic quality. In this paper, we propose Speech cOnversational Voice Assistant Benchmark (SOVA-Bench), providing a comprehension comparison of the general knowledge, speech recognition and understanding, along with both semantic and acoustic generative ability between available speech LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, SOVA-Bench is one of the most systematic evaluation frameworks for speech LLMs, inspiring the direction of voice interaction systems.

cs.SD↗

Episodic Bayesian Optimal Control with Unknown Randomness Distributions

Stochastic optimal control with unknown randomness distributions has been studied for a long time, encompassing robust control, distributionally robust control, and adaptive control. We propose a new episodic Bayesian approach that incorporates Bayesian learning with optimal control. In each episode, the approach learns the randomness distribution with a Bayesian posterior and subsequently solves the corresponding Bayesian average estimate of the true problem. The resulting policy is exercised during the episode, while additional data/observations of the randomness are collected to update the Bayesian posterior for the next episode. We show that the resulting episodic value functions and policies converge almost surely to their optimal counterparts of the true problem if the parametrized model of the randomness distribution is correctly specified. We further show that the asymptotic convergence rate of the episodic value functions is of the order $O(N^{-1/2})$, where $N$ is the number of episodes given that only one data point is collected in each episode. We develop an efficient computational method based on stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) for a class of problems that have convex cost functions and linear state dynamics. Our numerical results on a classical inventory control problem verify the theoretical convergence results, and numerical comparison with two other methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Bayesian approach.

math.OC↗

ImageRAG: Enhancing Ultra High Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Analysis with ImageRAG

Ultra High Resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery (RSI) (e.g. 100,000 $\times$ 100,000 pixels or more) poses a significant challenge for current Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models (RSMLLMs). If choose to resize the UHR image to standard input image size, the extensive spatial and contextual information that UHR images contain will be neglected. Otherwise, the original size of these images often exceeds the token limits of standard RSMLLMs, making it difficult to process the entire image and capture long-range dependencies to answer the query based on the abundant visual context. In this paper, we introduce ImageRAG for RS, a training-free framework to address the complexities of analyzing UHR remote sensing imagery. By transforming UHR remote sensing image analysis task to image's long context selection task, we design an innovative image contextual retrieval mechanism based on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique, denoted as ImageRAG. ImageRAG's core innovation lies in its ability to selectively retrieve and focus on the most relevant portions of the UHR image as visual contexts that pertain to a given query. Fast path and slow path are proposed in this framework to handle this task efficiently and effectively. ImageRAG allows RSMLLMs to manage extensive context and spatial information from UHR RSI, ensuring the analysis is both accurate and efficient. Codebase will be released in https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ImageRAG

cs.CV↗

Unveiling Knowledge Utilization Mechanisms in LLM-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Considering the inherent limitations of parametric knowledge in large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely employed to expand their knowledge scope. Since RAG has shown promise in knowledge-intensive tasks like open-domain question answering, its broader application to complex tasks and intelligent assistants has further advanced its utility. Despite this progress, the underlying knowledge utilization mechanisms of LLM-based RAG remain underexplored. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of the intrinsic mechanisms by which LLMs integrate internal (parametric) and external (retrieved) knowledge in RAG scenarios. Specially, we employ knowledge stream analysis at the macroscopic level, and investigate the function of individual modules at the microscopic level. Drawing on knowledge streaming analyses, we decompose the knowledge utilization process into four distinct stages within LLM layers: knowledge refinement, knowledge elicitation, knowledge expression, and knowledge contestation. We further demonstrate that the relevance of passages guides the streaming of knowledge through these stages. At the module level, we introduce a new method, knowledge activation probability entropy (KAPE) for neuron identification associated with either internal or external knowledge. By selectively deactivating these neurons, we achieve targeted shifts in the LLM's reliance on one knowledge source over the other. Moreover, we discern complementary roles for multi-head attention and multi-layer perceptron layers during knowledge formation. These insights offer a foundation for improving interpretability and reliability in retrieval-augmented LLMs, paving the way for more robust and transparent generative solutions in knowledge-intensive domains.

cs.CL↗

The Geography of Transportation Cybersecurity: Visitor Flows, Industry Clusters, and Spatial Dynamics

The rapid evolution of the transportation cybersecurity ecosystem, encompassing cybersecurity, automotive, and transportation and logistics sectors, will lead to the formation of distinct spatial clusters and visitor flow patterns across the US. This study examines the spatiotemporal dynamics of visitor flows, analyzing how socioeconomic factors shape industry clustering and workforce distribution within these evolving sectors. To model and predict visitor flow patterns, we develop a BiTransGCN framework, integrating an attention-based Transformer architecture with a Graph Convolutional Network backbone. By integrating AI-enabled forecasting techniques with spatial analysis, this study improves our ability to track, interpret, and anticipate changes in industry clustering and mobility trends, thereby supporting strategic planning for a secure and resilient transportation network. It offers a data-driven foundation for economic planning, workforce development, and targeted investments in the transportation cybersecurity ecosystem.

cs.CY↗

Residual permutation test for regression coefficient testing

We consider the problem of testing whether a single coefficient is equal to zero in linear models when the dimension of covariates $p$ can be up to a constant fraction of sample size $n$. In this regime, an important topic is to propose tests with finite-sample valid size control without requiring the noise to follow strong distributional assumptions. In this paper, we propose a new method, called residual permutation test (RPT), which is constructed by projecting the regression residuals onto the space orthogonal to the union of the column spaces of the original and permuted design matrices. RPT can be proved to achieve finite-population size validity under fixed design with just exchangeable noises, whenever $p < n / 2$. Moreover, RPT is shown to be asymptotically powerful for heavy tailed noises with bounded $(1+t)$-th order moment when the true coefficient is at least of order $n^{-t/(1+t)}$ for $t \in [0,1]$. We further proved that this signal size requirement is essentially rate-optimal in the minimax sense. Numerical studies confirm that RPT performs well in a wide range of simulation settings with normal and heavy-tailed noise distributions.

math.ST↗

Learning High-dimensional Gaussians from Censored Data

We provide efficient algorithms for the problem of distribution learning from high-dimensional Gaussian data where in each sample, some of the variable values are missing. We suppose that the variables are missing not at random (MNAR). The missingness model, denoted by $S(y)$, is the function that maps any point $y$ in $R^d$ to the subsets of its coordinates that are seen. In this work, we assume that it is known. We study the following two settings: (i) Self-censoring: An observation $x$ is generated by first sampling the true value $y$ from a $d$-dimensional Gaussian $N(μ*, Σ*)$ with unknown $μ*$ and $Σ*$. For each coordinate $i$, there exists a set $S_i$ subseteq $R^d$ such that $x_i = y_i$ if and only if $y_i$ in $S_i$. Otherwise, $x_i$ is missing and takes a generic value (e.g., "?"). We design an algorithm that learns $N(μ*, Σ*)$ up to total variation (TV) distance epsilon, using $poly(d, 1/ε)$ samples, assuming only that each pair of coordinates is observed with sufficiently high probability. (ii) Linear thresholding: An observation $x$ is generated by first sampling $y$ from a $d$-dimensional Gaussian $N(μ*, Σ)$ with unknown $μ*$ and known $Σ$, and then applying the missingness model $S$ where $S(y) = {i in [d] : v_i^T y <= b_i}$ for some $v_1, ..., v_d$ in $R^d$ and $b_1, ..., b_d$ in $R$. We design an efficient mean estimation algorithm, assuming that none of the possible missingness patterns is very rare conditioned on the values of the observed coordinates and that any small subset of coordinates is observed with sufficiently high probability.

cs.LG↗

Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle: Empowering Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models

Sequential Recommendation (SR) aims to leverage the sequential patterns in users' historical interactions to accurately track their preferences. However, the primary reliance of existing SR methods on collaborative data results in challenges such as the cold-start problem and sub-optimal performance. Concurrently, despite the proven effectiveness of large language models (LLMs), their integration into commercial recommender systems is impeded by issues such as high inference latency, incomplete capture of all distribution statistics, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle (PAD) framework to enhance SR models with LLMs. In particular, we initially pre-train both the SR and LLM models to obtain collaborative and textual embeddings. Subsequently, we propose a characteristic recommendation-anchored alignment loss using multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy with Gaussian kernels. Lastly, a triple-experts architecture, comprising aligned and modality-specific experts with disentangled embeddings, is fine-tuned in a frequency-aware manner. Experimental results on three public datasets validate the efficacy of PAD, indicating substantial enhancements and compatibility with various SR backbone models, particularly for cold items. The code and datasets are accessible for reproduction at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/PAD.

cs.IR↗

VocalNet: Speech LLM with Multi-Token Prediction for Faster and High-Quality Generation

Speech large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a prominent research focus in speech processing. We introduce VocalNet-1B and VocalNet-8B, a series of high-performance, low-latency speech LLMs enabled by a scalable and model-agnostic training framework designed for real-time voice interaction. Central to our contribution is the first application of multi-token prediction (MTP) to speech LLMs. This approach represents a paradigm shift from standard next-token prediction (NTP), offering simultaneous improvements in generation speed and quality. Informed by analysis of MTP's effect on speech generation and experimental comparisons, we designed a straightforward and highly effective MTP implementation. Experiments demonstrate that VocalNet performs on par with mainstream Omni LLMs even with limited training data, and significantly surpasses existing open-source speech LLMs. To foster reproducibility and community advancement, all model weights, inference code, training data, and framework implementations have been made publicly available at https://github.com/SJTU-OmniAgent/VocalNet

cs.CL↗

Gaussian Mean Testing under Truncation

We consider the task of Gaussian mean testing, that is, of testing whether a high-dimensional vector perturbed by white noise has large magnitude, or is the zero vector. This question, originating from the signal processing community, has recently seen a surge of interest from the machine learning and theoretical computer science community, and is by now fairly well understood. What is much less understood, and the focus of our work, is how to perform this task under truncation: that is, when the observations (i.i.d.\ samples from the underlying high-dimensional Gaussian) are only observed when they fall in an given subset of the domain $\R^d$. This truncation model, previously studied in the context of learning (instead of testing) the mean vector, has a range of applications, in particular in Economics and Social Sciences. As our work shows, sample truncations affect the complexity of the testing task in a rather subtle and surprising way.

math.ST↗

Deep learning for state estimation of commercial sodium-ion batteries using partial charging profiles: validation with a multi-temperature ageing dataset

Accurately predicting the state of health for sodium-ion batteries is crucial for managing battery modules, playing a vital role in ensuring operational safety. However, highly accurate models available thus far are rare due to a lack of aging data for sodium-ion batteries. In this study, we experimentally collected 53 single cells at four temperatures (0, 25, 35, and 45 °C), along with two battery modules in the lab. By utilizing the charging profiles, we were able to predict the SOC, capacity, and SOH simultaneously. This was achieved by designing a new framework that integrates the neural ordinary differential equation and 2D convolutional neural networks, using the partial charging profile as input. The charging profile is partitioned into segments, and each segment is fed into the network to output the SOC. For capacity and SOH prediction, we first aggregated the extracted features corresponding to segments from one cycle, after which an embedding block for temperature is concatenated for the final prediction. This novel approach eliminates the issue of multiple outputs for a single target. Our model demonstrated an $R^2$ accuracy of 0.998 for SOC and 0.997 for SOH across single cells at various temperatures. Furthermore, the trained model can be employed to predict single cells at temperatures outside the training set and battery modules with different capacity and current levels. The results presented here highlight the high accuracy of our model and its capability to predict multiple targets simultaneously using a partial charging profile.

cs.LG↗

ECKGBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models in E-commerce Leveraging Knowledge Graph

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capabilities across various NLP tasks. Their potential in e-commerce is also substantial, evidenced by practical implementations such as platform search, personalized recommendations, and customer service. One primary concern associated with LLMs is their factuality (e.g., hallucination), which is urgent in e-commerce due to its significant impact on user experience and revenue. Despite some methods proposed to evaluate LLMs' factuality, issues such as lack of reliability, high consumption, and lack of domain expertise leave a gap between effective assessment in e-commerce. To bridge the evaluation gap, we propose ECKGBench, a dataset specifically designed to evaluate the capacities of LLMs in e-commerce knowledge. Specifically, we adopt a standardized workflow to automatically generate questions based on a large-scale knowledge graph, guaranteeing sufficient reliability. We employ the simple question-answering paradigm, substantially improving the evaluation efficiency by the least input and output tokens. Furthermore, we inject abundant e-commerce expertise in each evaluation stage, including human annotation, prompt design, negative sampling, and verification. Besides, we explore the LLMs' knowledge boundaries in e-commerce from a novel perspective. Through comprehensive evaluations of several advanced LLMs on ECKGBench, we provide meticulous analysis and insights into leveraging LLMs for e-commerce.

cs.CL↗