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Zhihao Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zhihao Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

CARM: Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking for Reliable Scientific Super-Resolution

Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) can reconstruct fine-scale Earth-observation fields from coarse observations, but reconstruction accuracy alone does not provide a calibrated rule for identifying reliable spatial regions. Conformal Mask Calibration (CMC), built on conformal risk control, converts a spatial uncertainty score into a trust mask and controls the expected worst-case local distortion under exchangeability. However, its fixed threshold can become miscalibrated in Earth-observation streams affected by seasonality and episodic events. We propose $\textit{CARM}$ (Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking), a statistical framework for adaptive spatial risk control under temporal distribution shift. CARM maintains experts with heterogeneous update rates and aggregates their threshold proposals online using an asymmetric surrogate loss, balancing rapid adaptation to distribution changes against stability during relatively stationary periods. All updates are causal and use only mature feedback available after a fixed delay, allowing CARM to operate with any SR model that provides a spatial uncertainty score. We prove that the time-averaged mask-conditioned risk converges to at most $α$ at an $O(1/T)$ rate, without distributional assumptions and for any choice of aggregation weights across experts. On a daily South China Sea chlorophyll-$\textit{a}$ SR stream, CARM reduces the empirical violation rate from $43.49\%$ to $9.38\%$ and the moving-average exceedance frequency from $47.29\%$ to $1.22\%$ at $α=0.10$, while retaining a non-trivial trusted region. Experiments on ERA5 wind and OSTIA sea-surface temperature further show consistent relative improvements across multiple SR backbones.

cs.AI↗

Cache Engineering for Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents can handle increasingly complex tasks, navigating long trajectories of observations and actions. As these trajectories grow, key-value (KV) cache I/O and storage become the dominant cost. Trajectories can also exceed the LLM's maximum context length, requiring control over active cache growth. Prior work uses context engineering to reduce cache size by trimming or summarizing history. However, modifying the trajectory prefix invalidates subsequent cached states and triggers costly re-prefilling of retained context. Task accuracy can also suffer when too little context is retained to limit re-prefill costs. We propose cache engineering as a new scheme. It allows agents to directly control their active KV cache without modifying the trajectory or re-prefilling retained context. Specifically, agents can proactively use drop to exclude selected cache from future attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings. We formalize these cache operations and identify history dependence as a serving challenge: identical token sequences can yield different cache states under different cache operation sequences, making prefix matching insufficient for correct cache reuse. Thus, we co-design the AKV serving engine. It provides a stateless interface compatible with existing serving APIs, while internally managing stateful cache reuse, eviction, and restoration. Experiments show that a tool-response rolling-drop cache policy improves average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and reduces average cost by 27.7%, compared with conventional threshold-triggered summarization. With AKV, it achieves up to 1.2x the output throughput and a 1.5x speedup in P95 request latency. Recursive self-improvement of cache policies further reduces cost by 7.1% over expert design. Our code is at https://github.com/thu-nics/AKV.

cs.CL↗

Coverage-Preserving Self-Healing in Partially Observable 3D UAV Swarm Networks via an Advection-Diffusion Graph Transformer

This paper investigates the resilience and self-healing of unmanned aerial vehicle swarm communication networks under severe network partitioning in complex and adversarial environments. To address limited global observability after damage, we develop a damage-state inference mechanism that enables the ground control station (GCS) to infer global failures from sparse local reports without transmitting location-sensitive coordinates. To recover multi-cluster partitioned topologies, we then propose AdDiff-GT, a physics-inspired graph Transformer that incorporates advection-diffusion dynamics into a node-supernode hybrid graph. Local message propagation captures intra-cluster structural relationships, while global attention models inter-cluster interactions. A weighted composite loss jointly considers connectivity restoration, maneuvering cost, motion consistency, inter-cluster coordination, and spatial preservation during model training. We further develop a meta-learning strategy for transferable initialization across damage patterns and swarm scales, enabling efficient online GCS adaptation and distributed airborne inference. Simulations on 8,000 partitioned scenarios, including 5,000 large-scale cases, show that AdDiff-GT achieves effective topology recovery and spatial preservation over six representative baselines. Meta-learning reduces online planning overhead with a minor increase in recovery steps, balancing prior knowledge transfer and online adaptation.

cs.NI↗

A Compact Explicit 4D Representation for Dynamic Scenes

A compact dynamic-scene representation must retain both the surfaces seen over time and the appearance needed to render them from new viewpoints. We present Sparc4D, a feed-forward autoencoder that encodes a monocular video with known cameras into a sparse 4D scene state. Static features are shared across the clip, while spatially anchored temporal slots store time-varying features with a median $5.0\times$ fewer values than per-frame storage and negligible change in the complete model's novel-view quality. A sparse decoder produces 2D Gaussian surfels, while stored source pixels preserve fine texture through geometric re-projection. The state includes one full source frame and dynamic-region pixels sampled every fourth frame, alongside learned features and sparse occupancy. For a 32-frame MultiCamVideo clip, it averages 0.67M 32-bit-equivalent values on random windows and 0.66M on the first-32 protocol. On first-32, Sparc4D reaches 21.97 dB, compared with 20.40 dB for MoVieS. On randomly placed windows, their PSNR scores are comparable. Without fine-tuning on real data, Sparc4D transfers to DyCheck and Neu3D, where stored texture improves LPIPS while slightly reducing PSNR. Frozen Sparc4D features also support a manipulation policy that reaches 81.3% success on ManiSkill3 StackCube from 1,000 demonstrations.

cs.CV↗

Channel Match: Calibrating Shape Latents for Few-Step 3D Generation

Recent native 3D generators achieve high-quality asset creation by modeling structured 3D latents with flow-based transformers, but their high-resolution generation remains computationally expensive due to costly iterative sampling. In this work, we introduce a few-step distillation framework for native 3D generation, enabled by continuous self-consistency training with a custom JVP FlashAttention kernel and an analytic velocity regression objective for sparse structured 3D latents. To stabilize joint optimization, we further introduce an adaptive loss weighting strategy that automatically balances them without manual tuning. Beyond acceleration, we reveal a previously overlooked failure mode of few-step native 3D generation: sampling-induced latent distribution drift preserves geometric correctness but disrupts downstream PBR texture synthesis, causing texture artifacts on geometrically valid assets. To address this issue, we propose Channel Match, a training-free adaptive per-channel latent calibration method that restores the latent distribution without modifying either generator. We validate our approach on TRELLIS.2 at the $1024^3$ resolution setting. Our two-step model achieves $4.5\times$ faster geometry sampling while maintaining geometry quality comparable to the many-step teacher, and Channel Match further improves rendering quality by recovering the latent interface between geometry and appearance generation.

cs.CV↗

VN-GraphGG: von Neumann--Mullins--based graph grain growth simulation

Efficient simulations of grain growth are essential for investigating the process-structure-property relationships in polycrystalline materials. We introduce a two-dimensional von Neumann-Mullins-based graph grain growth simulation (VN-GraphGG), which couples the grain-scale kinetics with microstructure reconstruction. The polycrystalline microstructure is represented as a graph with grain and junction nodes. The grain-area evolution on the grain graph is governed by the von Neumann--Mullins (VN) law, while a graph neural network is trained to reconstruct the microstructure from the graph. This separation allows kinetic coefficients to be varied without retraining the neural reconstruction model. Topological changes during grain growth such as disappearance of grains and changes in neighbor relations are handled straightforwardly through reconstruction and postprocessing. Simulations demonstrate accurate predictions of VN kinetics and coarsening statistics, and significant speedup over the phase-field simulations. The proposed method provides a foundation for efficient grain growth simulation based on grain-scale kinetics, opening the way to incorporate a broader range of physical mechanisms. An application example is presented for abnormal grain growth, in which kinetic heterogeneity significantly influences the grain microstructure evolution.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

MeshRepair: Autoregressive Topology Repair for Generated Artisan Meshes

Recent artisan mesh generation methods produce meshes whose topology comes close to the preferences of human artists. But gaps to artist quality remain because generated meshes commonly contain holes, stray faces, and duplicated faces. Regenerating a mesh from scratch is costly, and a new draw may change the preferred topology entirely or introduce errors elsewhere. In this work we study artisan topology correction. The task is to correct the topology of a generated mesh (the draft) in place, toward the layout an artist would make. We propose a method for this task. It is a face-level correction network based on a prefix-LM. It reads the mesh bidirectionally and emits an edit sequence autoregressively. The sequence consists of a deletion phase followed by an addition phase. We propose the novel formulation of the deletion head which picks faces to delete autoregressively and the addition head that selects vertices to form a face to add. The addition head also adds vertices when needed. Untouched faces pass through unchanged, so the corrected mesh keeps the vertices and the layout of the draft. The draft enters as a prefix and only the edits are generated. A correction therefore takes far fewer decoding steps than generating every face again with an autoregressive mesh generator. We benchmark our method against repair tools on scripted defects and on held-out drafts from two mesh generators. Across both scripted defects and generated drafts, our method improves the quad-equivalent face F1, removes non-manifold faces, and cleans up the topology.

cs.GR↗

MeshCarve: Artisan Mesh Generation with Flow Matching in Compact Latent Spaces

Prior artisan mesh generation works largely predict face tokens autoregressively, which makes inference slow. Recent methods instead flow match continuous latents built by Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), but reconstruction quality drops significantly when geometry and topology are jointly encoded, and further when the latent space is compressed. We present MeshCarve, a flow matching method that generates entirely in compact latent spaces, generating vertex positions and edge connections separately and sidestepping the difficulty of a joint compact latent. To shorten the token sequence, we propose a hierarchical sparse transformer backbone, instantiated as VertexVAE and EdgeVAE. Instead of encoding fields over the surface voxels, both VAEs anchor on discrete vertices in their latent spaces, which drastically reduces the token sequence length, and our spatial-aware compression shortens it further without costing reconstruction. VertexVAE directly encodes vertex occupancy. For connectivity, we propose vertex-link encoding, which turns arbitrary connectivity between vertices into fixed-length continuous per-vertex embeddings and recovers complex artistic topology faithfully. MeshCarve combines these VAEs with an anchor generator and flow matches on the shortened token sequences. It shows advantages over state-of-the-art autoregressive and flow matching methods on Objaverse and generalizes to Toys4K. To the best of our knowledge, it is among the first artisan mesh generation methods whose every generative stage runs in a spatially compressed latent, with a token sequence only a fraction of the most compressed previous autoregressive and flow matching works.

cs.CV↗

Beyond Point-Attached Semantics: Stable Object-Centric Semantic Fields for Robust Manipulation

Robotic manipulation often requires identifying functional parts, such as a mug handle or a hammer head. However, features attached to observed 3D points can vary with viewpoint and sensor noise, giving a policy inconsistent representations of the same part. We propose an object-centric semantic field to provide more consistent part-aware features for manipulation. We use the observed object cloud to build a continuous field, then read features from this field at 3D locations independently resampled from the cloud. Each feature uses the sampled object support as context, rather than directly reusing an individual point descriptor. Part classification distinguishes functional regions, cross-instance alignment brings corresponding part features together, and perturbation consistency encourages similar features under observation changes. The queried coordinates and features form semantic point clouds that are supplied to a DP3-based policy. We evaluate the approach on four RoboTwin simulation tasks and four real-world bimanual tasks, achieving average success rates of 69.3\% and 67.5\%, respectively. These improve on Utonia Point-wise by 7.0 and 32.5 percentage points, respectively, with real-world tests on held-out objects. A point-wise control with matched part supervision scores 63.5\% in simulation, compared with our 69.3\%. These results highlight the value of stable, object-conditioned semantic fields for manipulation across object instances and varying observations. Project Page: \href{https://zainzh.github.io/beyond-point-attached-semantics}{https://zainzh.github.io/beyond-point-attached-semantics}.

cs.RO↗

KryptoPilot: An Open-World Knowledge-Augmented LLM Agent for Automated Cryptographic Exploitation

Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions play a central role in modern cybersecurity as a platform for training practitioners and evaluating offensive and defensive techniques derived from real-world vulnerabilities. Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs), existing LLM-based agents remain ineffective on high-difficulty cryptographic CTF challenges, which require precise cryptanalytic knowledge, stable long-horizon reasoning, and disciplined interaction with specialized toolchains. Through a systematic exploratory study, we show that insufficient knowledge granularity, rather than model reasoning capacity, is a primary factor limiting successful cryptographic exploitation: coarse or abstracted external knowledge often fails to support correct attack modeling and implementation. Motivated by this observation, we propose KryptoPilot, an open-world knowledge-augmented LLM agent for automated cryptographic exploitation. KryptoPilot integrates dynamic open-world knowledge acquisition via a Deep Research pipeline, a persistent workspace for structured knowledge reuse, and a governance subsystem that stabilizes reasoning through behavioral constraints and cost-aware model routing. This design enables precise knowledge alignment while maintaining efficient reasoning across heterogeneous subtasks. We evaluate KryptoPilot on two established CTF benchmarks and in six real-world CTF competitions. KryptoPilot achieves a complete solve rate on InterCode-CTF, solves between 56 and 60 percent of cryptographic challenges on the NYU-CTF benchmark, and successfully solves 26 out of 33 cryptographic challenges in live competitions, including multiple earliest-solved and uniquely-solved instances. These results demonstrate the necessity of open-world, fine-grained knowledge augmentation and governed reasoning for scaling LLM-based agents to real-world cryptographic exploitation.

cs.CR↗

DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale

Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation requirements, retain state across long interactions, and draw from large image corpora with limited reuse. Supporting them therefore requires an elastic execution platform rather than a single sandbox runtime. This report presents DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec), a production sandbox platform that exposes FnCall, container, microVM, and full-VM sandbox backends through a unified SDK. DSec coordinates placement and lifecycle management across the cluster, composes environments from independently versioned layers, combines memory sharing, reclamation, and CPU scheduling for high-density execution, and loads image data on demand from Fire-Flyer File System (3FS), a cluster-wide distributed filesystem. DSec is co-designed with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, decouples stateful rollout execution from preemptible GPU training, coordinates sandbox lifecycle with training to preserve rollout state while reclaiming idle resources, and mitigates agent misbehavior such as reward hacking. A single production-scale unit of DSec spans around 160 nodes, serving about 3 million sandboxes per day; in production, it supports over 380,000 concurrent sandboxes and sustains over 5,000 sandbox creations per second. Our evaluation and deployment experience show that these mechanisms reduce environment setup and image-distribution overhead, improve memory efficiency, and preserve latency-sensitive performance under high-density overcommit.

cs.DC↗

Video Models as Native 4D Renderers: World-Grounded Conditioning from Animated Mesh

Pretrained video diffusion models can act as renderers when the desired scene state is already specified by an animated mesh, a camera trajectory, and a reference image. This 4D generative rendering setting raises a representation question: what image-format condition lets a video backbone obey both camera motion and scene-internal animation? We propose DAR, a reference-guided renderer that extends Wan2.2 camera control from Plücker rays alone to a joint camera-plus-geometry interface. DAR projects a neural 4D G-buffer (tracking, world position, and normal) from the animated mesh and injects it through a widened control adapter while preserving the pretrained image-to-video prior. The central design choice is the pair of tracking and world position. Tracking identifies the persistent surface element that should carry appearance; world position gives its current scene-coordinate state; normal supplies local shape. Depth plus calibrated rays can recover 3D in principle, but depth is a camera-dependent chart in which camera and object motion are mixed. On the 68-case DAR-4D benchmark, LoRA DAR reaches PSNR 23.22, SSIM 0.895, and LPIPS 0.134, improving over off-the-shelf Wan2.2-Depth by 1.54 dB PSNR; a full fine-tune reaches PSNR 25.36 and SSIM 0.917. Matched ablations show that replacing world position by depth reduces PSNR by 1.26--1.55 dB at every checkpoint, supporting tracking+world-position correspondence as a practical 4D rendering condition.

cs.CV↗

Agogic: Performance-Timed Music Tokens for LLM-Native Text-to-Symbolic-Music Generation

Text-to-music language models begin with a choice usually made by default: how to tokenize music. Normally entangled with backbone, data, and recipe, its effect has never been measured in isolation. We fix pretrained Qwen3.5 (0.8B-27B), data, budget, and decoding, and swap only the representation across seven tokenizations, anchoring texture metrics to each representation's model-free ceiling. The ordering is clean and surprising: representation, not model size, is the binding variable for distributional fidelity. Scaling the backbone 34x barely moves Frechet Music Distance (FMD), whereas switching representation halves it. PMT, a performance-resolution stream we release (10 ms timing, per-note velocity, multi-track texture; 609 symbols), reaches FMD 159 at 0.8B against 272-286 for beat grids (1.7-1.8x lower, up to 2.8x elsewhere; non-overlapping bootstrap CIs), so a 0.8B performance-resolution model beats a 27B beat grid. It reappears on a 26M from-scratch backbone and a second performance-resolution tokenizer: a property of the class, not one lucky vocabulary. Nor is it a finer-lattice artifact: snapping PMT's onsets to the beat grids' resolution still leaves it 67-129 FMD ahead of both (n=500). The effect is distributional; whether it is audible is a separate question, left open by our probe, with a human study pre-registered. Native caption adherence is weak but separable: a lightweight decode-time constraint doubles instrument-F1 (.28 to .60) and Correct-Key (.16 to .35) at no distributional cost. We release the harness, 25+ checkpoints, two corpora (86.6k aligned across caption/MIDI/ABC/audio; 6.25M captioned, the largest for music), and an imprinting diagnostic: published text-to-MIDI systems reproduce their training distribution near-invariant to the caption (72% vs. 71% chord-time on disjoint domains). The field's next representation claim can now be measured, not asserted.

cs.SD↗

GO-PRE: Goal-Oriented Next-Best-View Selection via Predictive Rendering Entropy for Active 3D Reconstruction

Active 3D reconstruction relies on active view selection to maximize reconstruction fidelity under limited capture budgets. However, most existing methods rely on surrogate signals such as parameter uncertainty or geometric heuristics, but these signals are often misaligned with the ultimate goal: the fidelity of rendered predictions. We propose GO-PRE, a goal-oriented next-best-view selection framework that explicitly targets information gain in the prediction space. Specifically, we formulate the objective as maximizing the reduction of the average marginal predictive entropy over a user-specified target view manifold. GO-PRE supports interactive goal specification and yields an efficient acquisition rule that enables real-time computation of information gain. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that GO-PRE consistently improves active reconstruction performance and provides more reliable uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

Bunraku: Turning a Single Illustration into an Editable Live2D Character

Live2D is the dominant 2D character-animation format for anime characters and virtual avatars, representing each character as a stack of RGBA layers driven by per-layer mesh deformation. Despite its wide use in virtual streaming, mobile games, and interactive characters, authoring a Live2D model still demands weeks of manual layer separation, occlusion completion, mesh placement, and keyframing, and no prior generative method produces such a structured asset end-to-end. We present the first system that, from a single illustration, generates all the structured information a Live2D runtime consumes: ordered RGBA layers, a deformation mesh per layer, and the parameter-driven keypose vertex offsets that make the character move. Stage 1 casts layered decomposition as a layered diffusion process under a Live2D-aware organ-level taxonomy, producing an ordered RGBA stack with hidden-region completion. Stage 2 builds a content-conforming triangle mesh for each layer from its alpha channel alone, then predicts the keypose displacement field of all layers jointly: every vertex of every layer is one token, self-attention spans layer boundaries, and each displacement is factorised into a bounded direction and a log-magnitude. Joint rather than independent prediction is what makes the result a coherent character instead of separately plausible parts, and is our largest gain; scaling the network 112x yields none. On 50 held-out characters, under true generation with no teacher forcing, Stage 2 attains a per-vertex direction cosine of 0.768 (median 0.828). Because a layer's mesh derives from its alpha channel, a clothing layer can be re-textured from a natural-language instruction while the mesh and predicted animation are reused byte-for-byte. We further contribute Live2D-Bench, the first standardized benchmark for the task, and an 8,884-model Live2D corpus with layer and animation supervision.

cs.CV↗

AsySplat: Efficient Asymmetric 3D Gaussian Splatting for Long-Sequence Scene Modeling

Recent generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting models have advanced long-sequence novel view synthesis (NVS), but at the cost of substantial redundant computation. We identify that the redundancy can be mitigated based on two observations: (i) high-precision geometry is not strictly required for high-quality NVS; (ii) appearance learning is generally easier than geometry recovery. Motivated by these insights, we propose an asymmetric architecture that decouples geometry and appearance modeling. The geometry branch processes coarse-grained tokens with most of the parameters for multi-view reconstruction, while the appearance branch operates on fine-grained tokens to capture details using significantly fewer parameters. The two branches interact through bilateral connections, enabling mutual guidance for their respective tasks. This task-aware asymmetry reduces the computational redundancy and allocates the computation more judiciously, thereby increasing parameter efficiency and enabling smaller models to achieve strong performance. On 32-view 960P inputs, our model matches optimization-based methods while delivering nearly 800x speedup, and surpasses the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art generalizable models with markedly fewer parameters and reduced training/inference overhead, achieving an overall efficiency improvement.

cs.CV↗

One Video, One World: Turning Monocular Video into Physical 4D Scenes

We introduce \textbf{OVOW}, the first training-free system that reconstructs \emph{instance-level, simulation-ready} 4D mesh scenes from a single monocular video. Recent 4D reconstruction achieves impressive rendering quality, but its outputs (\eg, implicit fields, Gaussian primitives, or point clouds) lack the watertight topology, instance separation, and standardized physical interfaces required by physics simulators and embodied AI. OVOW closes this gap with a four-stage pipeline: a vision-language model discovers, labels, and motion-classifies all instances; category-aware reconstruction yields per-instance meshes for rigid objects and topology-consistent mesh sequences for deformable ones; an iterative render-match-optimize procedure recovers metric scale and 6-DoF pose trajectories; and physics-grounded assembly enforces ground contact and inter-object support. Crucially, we model all motion, rigid and non-rigid, through direct vertex deformation without category-specific priors or skeleton rigging, producing watertight mesh scenes ready for downstream physics simulation and editing. We further establish the first benchmark for \emph{structured Video-to-4D} evaluation, with metrics for geometric correctness, instance separation, and physical plausibility beyond visual fidelity; the same pipeline doubles as a scalable engine for \emph{synthesizing} paired video-to-4D simulation data for future 4D world models and embodied AI. Across two synthetic benchmarks (static and 4D), OVOW attains the best overall layout and geometry accuracy and the lowest photometric and semantic error among all baselines, and on monocular video runs one to two orders of magnitude faster than the baselines, while downstream physics simulation confirms its physical stability.

cs.CV↗

Full spectrum Unlearnable Examples via Spectral Equalization

Unlearnable examples (UEs) protect training data by injecting imperceptible perturbations so that models fail to extract exploitable representations. In this paper, we reveal that existing UEs exhibit a critical failure once low-pass filtering is applied, indicating that the effective perturbation signals for unlearnability concentrate predominantly in high frequencies. Hence, we argue that reliable UEs should remain effective across the full spectrum. To this end, we propose Full-spectrum Unlearnable examples via Spectral Equalization (FUSE), which aims to generate spectrum-agnostic perturbations by equalizing the contributions from different bands and enforcing cross-band consistency. Specifically, FUSE adopts a Random Spectral Masking (RSM) strategy during generator training, which randomly removes a contiguous frequency band, forcing the remaining bands to maintain unlearnability. In addition, FUSE further integrates Cross-Band Guidance (CBG), which enforces mutual consistency between high- and low-frequency components, thereby further enhancing low-frequency unlearnability and regulating high-frequency perturbations to preserve the semantic fidelity of images. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, architectures, and spectral filtering demonstrate the strong protection achieved by FUSE.

cs.CV↗