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Zihao Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Zihao Zheng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Beyond Triplet Plausibility: Relation Set Completion in Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) organize real-world knowledge as triplets and underpin many downstream applications. Due to their inherent incompleteness, knowledge graph completion (KGC) is widely studied and is typically formulated as triplet prediction, with link prediction as the dominant paradigm. However, this formulation focuses on the incompleteness of triplet-wise information and overlooks the incompleteness of entity-relation compatibility information. To address this limitation, we introduce a relation set completion task (RSC), which complements the link prediction task and aims to reason about missing relations that are semantically compatible with a given entity. We further propose a Relation Set Embedding model (RelSetE), which models latent patterns among the observed relations of entities to infer missing ones. To evaluate RelSetE, we derive three benchmark datasets from standard KG benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RelSetE effectively captures entity-relation compatibility patterns and performs favorably in inferring missing relations of entities. Code and data are publicly available.

cs.AI↗

EcoVideo: Entropy-Orchestrated Video Generation Paradigm in Cloud-Edge Dynamics

DiT video generation is latency-intensive due to iterative full-frame denoising, while prior cloud-edge methods largely rely on static inter-step decoupling and cannot leverage inter-frame similarity or adapt to system dynamics. We propose EcoVideo, an entropy-orchestrated framework for dynamic inter-frame decoupling: early-stage self-attention entropy provides a training-free estimate of frame-wise information density for frame selection; a cloud large model denoises sparse high-entropy keyframes; and an edge lightweight model reconstructs the remaining frames via motion-aware interpolation with refinement for temporal stability. EcoVideo further adapts the keyframe budget and edge refinement depth to real-time bandwidth and compute availability, optimizing end-to-end latency under constraints. Experiments on representative DiT video generators show improved quality--efficiency trade-offs and up to 2.9x end-to-end speedup in low-bandwidth, compute-limited edge settings. Code is available at https://github.com/IF-LAB-PKU/EcoVideo.

cs.CV↗

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

cs.CV↗

HeRo: Adaptive Orchestration of Agentic RAG on Heterogeneous Mobile SoC

With the increasing computational capability of mobile devices, deploying agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) locally on heterogeneous System-on-Chips (SoCs) has become a promising way to enhance LLM-based applications. However, agentic RAG induces multi-stage workflows with heterogeneous models and dynamic execution flow, while mobile SoCs exhibit strong accelerator affinity, shape sensitivity, and shared-memory bandwidth contention, making naive scheduling ineffective. We present HeRo, a heterogeneous-aware framework for low-latency agentic RAG on mobile SoCs. HeRo builds profiling-based performance models for each sub-stage and model-PU configuration, capturing latency, workload shape, and contention-induced slowdown, and leverages them in a lightweight online scheduler that combines shape-aware sub-stage partitioning, criticality-based accelerator mapping, and bandwidth-aware concurrency control. Experiments on commercial mobile devices show that HeRo reduces end-to-end latency by up to $10.94\times$ over existing deployment strategies, enabling practical on-device agentic RAG.

cs.DC↗

DynaGraph: Lightweight Multi-Model Interaction Framework via Dynamic Topological Reconfiguration

Tackling complex reasoning tasks typically relies on massive monolithic LLMs, which suffer from severe computational redundancy. While task decomposition through structured pipelines or multi-agent collaborations offers an alternative, these approaches inevitably fall into a critical dilemma: predefined static topologies are highly vulnerable to cascading errors, whereas unconstrained dynamic agents suffer from trajectory divergence and unpredictable memory bloat. To address this, we present DynaGraph, a lightweight multi-model framework driven by dynamic topological reconfiguration. At the execution level, DynaGraph multiplexes time-division PEFT adapters over a shared base model, enabling both full system training and inference deployment on a single consumer-grade GPU. At the routing level, the Evaluator continuously monitors execution confidence to trigger hierarchical self-healing: Fine-grained Patching for localized data gaps and Subgraph Reconstruction for severe logical ruptures. Experiments on StrategyQA, MATH, and FinQA demonstrate our 8B model closely approximates the reasoning capabilities of a 72B monolithic model (e.g., 87.6% on StrategyQA, 82.7% on MATH). Furthermore, it reduces latency by up to 68.1% and token consumption by 68.6% compared to unconstrained dynamic architectures.

cs.MA↗

Bilevel Optimization over Saddle Points of Zero-Sum Markov Games

Reinforcement learning (RL) often has a hierarchical structure, where an upper-level (UL) learner selects model parameters and a lower-level (LL) decision-making process responds, naturally leading to a bilevel optimization problem. Most existing bilevel RL methods assume a single-policy LL Markov decision process (MDP), and therefore fail to capture competitive structures arising in applications such as incentive design, where multiple policies interact. We study bilevel optimization problems in which the LL problem is a regularized min-max zero-sum Markov game and the UL objective is optimized through the saddle-point equilibrium induced by the LL game. In this work, we propose penalty-augmented Nikaido-Isoda descent-ascent (PANDA), a penalty-based first-order policy-gradient method based on the Nikaido-Isoda function. By exploiting the min-max game structure, PANDA avoids computing UL hypergradients and does not require second-order information. We prove that PANDA converges to stationary points without convexity assumptions on either the UL or LL objectives. Moreover, PANDA reaches an $ε$-stationary point in $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-1})$ iterations with sample complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-3})$, matching the best-known rates for bilevel RL with single-policy LL MDPs. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance of PANDA over closely related baselines.

cs.LG↗

Pyramid Forcing: Head-Aware Pyramid KV Cache Policy for High-Quality Long Video Generation

Autoregressive video generation enables streaming and open-ended long video synthesis, but still suffers from long-term degradation caused by accumulated errors. Existing KVCache strategies usually apply unified historical-frame retention, implicitly assuming homogeneous historical dependencies across attention heads. We revisit historical-frame attention and reveal three distinct head types: Anchor Heads require broad long-range context, Wave Heads exhibit periodic temporal dependencies, and Veil Heads focus on initial and adjacent frames. Based on this finding, we propose Pyramid Forcing, a head-aware pyramidal KVCache framework that identifies head types offline, assigns behavior-specific cache policies, and supports heterogeneous cache lengths via efficient ragged-cache attention. Experiments on Self Forcing and Causal Forcing show that Pyramid Forcing consistently improves long-horizon generation quality on VBench-Long, increasing the 60-second Self Forcing score from 77.87 to 81.21 while enhancing motion dynamics, visual fidelity, and semantic consistency. Project: https://if-lab-pku.github.io/Pyramid-Forcing/.

cs.CV↗

VLN-Cache: Enabling Token Caching for VLN Models with Visual/Semantic Dynamics Awareness

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) increasingly relies on large vision-language models, but their inference cost conflicts with real-time deployment. Token caching is a promising training-free strategy that avoids redundant computation by reusing stable visual tokens across frames. However, existing methods assume a static camera and fixed semantic focus, assumptions that VLN fundamentally violates. We identify two failure modes: (1) visual dynamics, where viewpoint shift displaces token positions across frames, causing position-wise matching to pair misaligned content; (2) semantic dynamics, where token relevance shifts across task stages as navigation progresses, making cached states stale. We propose VLN-Cache, a visual-dynamic-aware and semantic-dynamic-aware caching framework that introduces view-aligned remapping to recover geometric correspondences and a task-relevance saliency filter to veto reuse at semantic transitions. A layer-adaptive entropy policy further balances the per-layer reuse budget. Experiments on the R2R-CE simulation benchmark show up to 1.52x speedup while maintaining competitive navigation success rates.

cs.RO↗

KERV: Kinematic-Rectified Speculative Decoding for Embodied VLA Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models build a token-domain robot control paradigm, yet suffer from low speed. Speculative Decoding (SD) is an optimization strategy that can boost inference speed. Two key issues emerge when integrating VLA and SD: first, SD relies on re-inference to address token errors, which is computationally expensive; second, to mitigate token errors, the acceptance threshold in SD requires careful adjustment. Existing works fail to address the above two issues effectively. Meanwhile, as the bridge between AI and the physical world, existing embodied intelligence has overlooked the application of robotic kinematics. To address these issues, we innovatively combine token-domain VLA models with kinematic-domain prediction for SD, proposing a kinematic-rectified SD framework named KERV. We employ a kinematics-based Kalman Filter to predict actions and compensate for SD errors, avoiding costly re-inference. Moreover, we design a kinematics-based adjustment strategy to dynamically rectify the acceptance threshold, addressing the difficulty of threshold determination. Experimental results across diverse tasks and environments demonstrate that KERV achieves 27%~37% acceleration with nearly no Success Rate loss.

cs.RO↗

HeiSD: Hybrid Speculative Decoding for Embodied Vision-Language-Action Models with Kinematic Awareness

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models have become the mainstream solution for robot control, but suffer from slow inference speeds. Speculative Decoding (SD) is a promising acceleration method which can be divided into two categories: drafter-based SD and retrieval-based SD. Each of the two methods demonstrates complementary advantages and limitations when applied to VLA models, leading to the hypothesis that a hybrid approach integrating these two methods will yield better performance. In this paper, we first conduct a series of detailed analyses to reveal the advantages and feasibility of hybrid utilization. However, even with the aforementioned key insights, implementing hybrid SD in VLA models presents several challenges: (1) draft rejection and persistent errors in retrieval-based SD; (2) difficulty in determining the hybrid boundary. To address these, we propose the HeiSD framework. We propose a retrieval-based SD optimization method in HeiSD, which contains a verify-skip mechanism and a sequence-wise relaxed acceptance strategy. Moreover, we proposed a kinematic-based fused metric in HeiSD to automatically determine the hybrid boundary. Experimental results demonstrate that HeiSD attains a speedup of up to 2.45x in simulation benchmarks and 2.06x~2.41x in real-world scenarios, while sustaining a high task success rate.

cs.RO↗

RoboECC: Multi-Factor-Aware Edge-Cloud Collaborative Deployment for VLA Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are mainstream in embodied intelligence but face high inference costs. Edge-Cloud Collaborative (ECC) deployment offers an effective fix by easing edge-device computing pressure to meet real-time needs. However, existing ECC frameworks are suboptimal for VLA models due to two challenges: (1) Diverse model structures hinder optimal ECC segmentation point identification; (2) Even if the optimal split point is determined, changes in network bandwidth can cause performance drift. To address these issues, we propose a novel ECC deployment framework for various VLA models, termed RoboECC. Specifically, we propose a model-hardware co-aware segmentation strategy to help find the optimal segmentation point for various VLA models. Moreover, we propose a network-aware deployment adjustment approach to adapt to the network fluctuations for maintaining optimal performance. Experiments demonstrate that RoboECC achieves a speedup of up to 3.28x with only 2.55%~2.62% overhead.

cs.DC↗

FreqCache: Accelerating Embodied VLN Models with Adaptive Frequency-Guided Token Caching

Vision-Language-Navigation (VLN) models exhibit excellent navigation accuracy but incur high computational overhead. Token caching has emerged as a promising training-free strategy to reduce this cost by reusing token computation results; however, existing token caching approaches rely on visual domain methods for cacheable token selection, leading to challenges when adapted to VLN models. 1) Visual domain methods become invalid when there is viewpoint migration. 2) Visual domain methods neglect critical edge information without the aid of additional algorithms. 3) Visual domain methods overlook the temporal variation of scenarios and lack adjustability in cache budgets. In this paper, we develop detailed analyses and find that the impacts of these challenges exhibit invariance and analyzability in the frequency domain. Based on these, we propose a frequency-guided token caching framework, called FreqCache. Utilizing the inherent properties of the frequency domain, FreqCache achieves optimal token cache establishment, refreshment, and adaptive adjustment. Experiments show that FreqCache achieves 1.59x speedup with ignorable overhead, showing the effect of integrating frequency domain methods in VLN token caching.

cs.RO↗

2D or 3D: Who Governs Salience in VLA Models? -- Tri-Stage Token Pruning Framework with Modality Salience Awareness

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as the mainstream of embodied intelligence. Recent VLA models have expanded their input modalities from 2D-only to 2D+3D paradigms, forming multi-visual-modal VLA (MVLA) models. Despite achieving improved spatial perception, MVLA faces a greater acceleration demand due to the increased number of input tokens caused by modal expansion. Token pruning is an effective optimization methods tailored to MVLA models. However, existing token pruning schemes are designed for 2D-only VLA models, ignoring 2D/3D modality salience differences. In this paper, we follow the application process of multi-modal data in MVLA models and develop a tri-stage analysis to capture the discrepancy and dynamics of 2D/3D modality salience. Based on these, we propose a corresponding tri-stage token pruning framework for MVLA models to achieve optimal 2D/3D token selection and efficient pruning. Experiments show that our framework achieves up to a 2.55x inference speedup with minimal accuracy loss, while only costing 5.8% overhead. Our Code is coming soon.

cs.MM↗

DIRECT: Video Mashup Creation via Hierarchical Multi-Agent Planning and Intent-Guided Editing

Video mashup creation represents a complex video editing paradigm that recomposes existing footage to craft engaging audio-visual experiences, demanding intricate orchestration across semantic, visual, and auditory dimensions and multiple levels. However, existing automated editing frameworks often overlook the cross-level multimodal orchestration to achieve professional-grade fluidity, resulting in disjointed sequences with abrupt visual transitions and musical misalignment. To address this, we formulate video mashup creation as a Multimodal Coherency Satisfaction Problem (MMCSP) and propose the DIRECT framework. Simulating a professional production pipeline, our hierarchical multi-agent framework decomposes the challenge into three cascade levels: the Screenwriter for source-aware global structural anchoring, the Director for instantiating adaptive editing intent and guidance, and the Editor for intent-guided shot sequence editing with fine-grained optimization. We further introduce Mashup-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with tailored metrics for visual continuity and auditory alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIRECT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both objective metrics and human subjective evaluation. Project page and code: https://github.com/AK-DREAM/DIRECT

cs.CV↗

A Self-Rotating Tri-Rotor UAV for Field of View Expansion and Autonomous Flight

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) perception relies on onboard sensors like cameras and LiDAR, which are limited by the narrow field of view (FoV). We present Self-Perception INertial Navigation Enabled Rotorcraft (SPINNER), a self-rotating tri-rotor UAV for the FoV expansion and autonomous flight. Without adding extra sensors or energy consumption, SPINNER significantly expands the FoV of onboard camera and LiDAR sensors through continuous spin motion, thereby enhancing environmental perception efficiency. SPINNER achieves full 3-dimensional position and roll--pitch attitude control using only three brushless motors, while adjusting the rotation speed via anti-torque plates design. To address the strong coupling, severe nonlinearity, and complex disturbances induced by spinning flight, we develop a disturbance compensation control framework that combines nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) with incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion. Experimental results demonstrate that SPINNER maintains robust flight under wind disturbances up to 4.8 \,m/s and achieves high-precision trajectory tracking at a maximum speed of 2.0\,m/s. Moreover, tests in parking garages and forests show that the rotational perception mechanism substantially improves FoV coverage and enhances perception capability of SPINNER.

cs.RO↗

CAST-TTS: A Simple Cross-Attention Framework for Unified Timbre Control in TTS

Current Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems typically use separate models for speech-prompted and text-prompted timbre control. While unifying both control signals into a single model is desirable, the challenge of cross-modal alignment often results in overly complex architectures and training objective. To address this challenge, we propose CAST-TTS, a simple yet effective framework for unified timbre control. Features are extracted from speech prompts and text prompts using pre-trained encoders. The multi-stage training strategy efficiently aligns the speech and projected text representations within a shared embedding space. A single cross-attention mechanism then allows the model to use either of these representations to control the timbre. Extensive experiments validate that the unified cross-attention mechanism is critical for achieving high-quality synthesis. CAST-TTS achieves performance comparable to specialized single-input models while operating within a unified architecture. The demo page can be accessed at https://HiRookie9.github.io/CAST-TTS-Page.

cs.SD↗

Diversity or Precision? A Deep Dive into Next Token Prediction

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space defined by the pre-trained model's token-output distribution. In this paper, we revisit the standard cross-entropy loss, interpreting it as a specific instance of policy gradient optimization applied within a single-step episode. To systematically study how the pre-trained distribution shapes the exploration potential for subsequent RL, we propose a generalized pre-training objective that adapts on-policy RL principles to supervised learning. By framing next-token prediction as a stochastic decision process, we introduce a reward-shaping strategy that explicitly balances diversity and precision. Our method employs a positive reward scaling factor to control probability concentration on ground-truth tokens and a rank-aware mechanism that treats high-ranking and low-ranking negative tokens asymmetrically. This allows us to reshape the pre-trained token-output distribution and investigate how to provide a more favorable exploration space for RL, ultimately enhancing end-to-end reasoning performance. Contrary to the intuition that higher distribution entropy facilitates effective exploration, we find that imposing a precision-oriented prior yields a superior exploration space for RL.

cs.CL↗

RAPID: Redundancy-Aware and Compatibility-Optimal Edge-Cloud Partitioned Inference for Diverse VLA Models

Vision Language Action (VLA) models are mainstream in embodied intelligence but face high inference costs. Edge-Cloud Collaborative (ECC) inference offers an effective fix by easing edge-device computing pressure to meet real-time needs. However, existing ECC frameworks are suboptimal for VLA models due to two challenges: (1) Mainstream environment-oriented edge-cloud partitioning methods are susceptible to interference from visual noise; (2) Existing edge-cloud partitioning methods overlook the step-wise redundancy unique to embodied tasks, thereby disrupting the physical continuity of motion. To address these issues, we propose a novel ECC inference framework, termed RAPID. Specifically, we developed an implementation tailored to the proposed framework. Experiments demonstrate this achieves a speedup of up to 1.73x with only 5%~7% overhead.

cs.DC↗