论文检索

Applications · Robotics

Shanshan Li, Da Huang, Yu He, Yanwei Fu, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiangyang Xue

In daily life, people often move through spaces to find objects that meet their needs, posing a key challenge in embodied AI. Traditional Demand-Driven Navigation (DDN) handles one need at a time but does not reflect the complexity of real-world tasks involving multiple needs and personal choices. To bridge this gap, we introduce Task-Preferenced Multi-Demand-Driven Navigation (TP-MDDN), a new benchmark for long-horizon navigation involving multiple sub-demands with explicit task preferences. To solve TP-MDDN, we propose AWMSystem, an autonomous decision-making system composed of three key modules: BreakLLM (instruction decomposition), LocateLLM (goal selection), and StatusMLLM (task monitoring). For spatial memory, we design MASMap, which combines 3D point cloud accumulation with 2D semantic mapping for accurate and efficient environmental understanding. Our Dual-Tempo action generation framework integrates zero-shot planning with policy-based fine control, and is further supported by an Adaptive Error Corrector that handles failure cases in real time. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both perception accuracy and navigation robustness.

Applications · Robotics

Ling Niu, Xiaoji Zheng, han wang, Ziyuan Yang, Chen Zheng, Bokui Chen, Jiangtao Gong

In recent years, vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a new paradigm. However, popular end-to-end approaches typically rely on visual feature extraction networks trained under label supervision. This limited supervision framework restricts the generality and applicability of driving models. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm termed $E^{3}AD$, which advocates for comparative learning between visual feature extraction networks and the general EEG large model, in order to learn latent human driving cognition for enhancing end-to-end planning. In this work, we collected a cognitive dataset for the mentioned contrastive learning process. Subsequently, we investigated the methods and potential mechanisms for enhancing end-to-end planning with human driving cognition, using popular driving models as baselines on publicly available autonomous driving datasets. Both open-loop and closed-loop tests are conducted for a comprehensive evaluation of planning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the $E^{3}AD$ paradigm significantly enhances the end-to-end planning performance of baseline models. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of driving cognition and the effectiveness of comparative learning process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate human driving cognition for improving end-to-end autonomous driving planning. It represents an initial attempt to incorporate embodied cognitive data into end-to-end autonomous driving, providing valuable insights for future brain-inspired autonomous driving systems. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/AIR-DISCOVER/E-cubed-AD.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Danni Yang, Zhikang Chen, Sen Cui, Mengyue Yang, Ding Li, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Haoxuan Li, Jinke Ren, Mingming Gong

Federated continual learning (FCL) has garnered increasing attention for its ability to support distributed computation in environments with evolving data distributions. However, the emergence of new tasks introduces both temporal and cross-client shifts, making catastrophic forgetting a critical challenge. Most existing works aggregate knowledge from clients into a global model, which may not enhance client performance since irrelevant knowledge could introduce interference, especially in heterogeneous scenarios. Additionally, directly applying decentralized approaches to FCL suffers from ineffective group formation caused by task changes. To address these challenges, we propose a decentralized dynamic cooperation framework for FCL, where clients establish dynamic cooperative learning coalitions to balance the acquisition of new knowledge and the retention of prior learning, thereby obtaining personalized models. To maximize model performance, each client engages in selective cooperation, dynamically allying with others who offer meaningful performance gains. This results in non-overlapping, variable coalitions at each stage of the task. Moreover, we use coalitional affinity game to simulate coalition relationships between clients. By assessing both client gradient coherence and model similarity, we quantify the client benefits derived from cooperation. We also propose a merge-blocking algorithm and a dynamic cooperative evolution algorithm to achieve cooperative and dynamic equilibrium. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to various baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/ydn3229/DCFCL.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency and Interpretability

Johanna Vielhaben, Dilyara Bareeva, Jim Berend, Wojciech Samek, Nils Strodthoff

Measuring the alignment between representations lets us understand similarities between the feature spaces of different models, such as Vision Transformers trained under diverse paradigms. However, traditional measures for representational alignment yield only scalar values that obscure how these spaces agree in terms of learned features. To address this, we combine alignment analysis with concept discovery, allowing a fine-grained breakdown of alignment into individual concepts. This approach reveals both universal concepts across models and each representation’s internal concept structure. We introduce a new definition of concepts as non-linear manifolds, hypothesizing they better capture the geometry of the feature space. A sanity check demonstrates the advantage of this manifold-based definition over linear baselines for concept-based alignment. Finally, our alignment analysis of four different ViTs shows that increased supervision tends to reduce semantic organization in learned representations.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Sounak Banerjee, Daphne Cornelisse, Deepak Gopinath, Emily Sumner, Jonathan DeCastro, Guy Rosman, Eugene Vinitsky, Mark Ho

People's goal-directed behaviors are influenced by their cognitive biases, and autonomous systems that interact with people should be aware of this. For example, people's attention to objects in their environment will be biased in a way that systematically affects how they perform everyday tasks such as driving to work. Here, building on recent work in computational cognitive science, we formally articulate the \textit{attention-aware inverse planning problem}, in which the goal is to estimate a person's attentional biases from their actions. We demonstrate how attention-aware inverse planning systematically differs from standard inverse reinforcement learning and how cognitive biases can be inferred from behavior. Finally, we present an approach to attention-aware inverse planning that combines deep reinforcement learning with computational cognitive modeling. We use this approach to infer the attentional strategies of RL agents in real-life driving scenarios selected from the Waymo Open Dataset, demonstrating the scalability of estimating cognitive biases with attention-aware inverse planning.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Sung-Hoon Yoon, Minghan Li, Gaspard Beaudouin, Congcong Wen, Muhammad Rafay Azhar, Mengyu Wang

Rectified flow models have become a $\textit{de facto}$ standard in image generation due to their stable sampling trajectories and high-fidelity outputs. Despite their strong generative capabilities, they face critical limitations in image editing tasks: inaccurate inversion processes for mapping real images back into the latent space, and gradient entanglement issues during editing often result in outputs that do not faithfully reflect the target prompt. Recent efforts have attempted to directly map source and target distributions via ODE-based approaches without inversion; however, these methods still yield suboptimal editing quality. In this work, we propose a flow decomposition-and-aggregation framework built upon an inversion-free formulation to address these limitations. Specifically, we semantically decompose the target prompt into multiple sub-prompts, compute an independent flow for each, and aggregate them to form a unified editing trajectory. While we empirically observe that decomposing the original flow enhances diversity in the target space, generating semantically aligned outputs still requires consistent guidance toward the full target prompt. To this end, we design a projection and soft-aggregation mechanism for flow, inspired by gradient conflict resolution in multi-task learning. This approach adaptively weights the sub-target velocity fields, suppressing semantic redundancy while emphasizing distinct directions, thereby preserving both diversity and consistency in the final edited output. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot editing approaches in terms of semantic fidelity and attribute disentanglement. The code is available at https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/SplitFlow.

Applications

Chengpeng Li, Zhengyang Tang, Ziniu Li, Mingfeng Xue, Keqin Bao, Tian Ding, Ruoyu Sun, Benyou Wang, Xiang Wang, Junyang Lin 等

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have shown impressive capabilities in natural language reasoning. However, these models frequently demonstrate inefficiencies or inaccuracies when tackling complex mathematical operations. While integrating computational tools such as Code Interpreters (CIs) offers a promising solution, it introduces a critical challenge: a conflict between the model's internal, probabilistic reasoning and the external, deterministic knowledge provided by the CI, which often leads models to unproductive deliberation. To overcome this, we introduce CoRT (Code-Optimized Reasoning Training), a post-training framework designed to teach LRMs to effectively utilize CIs. We propose **Hint-Engineering**, a new data synthesis strategy that strategically injects diverse hints at optimal points within reasoning paths. This approach generates high-quality, code-integrated reasoning data specifically tailored to optimize LRM-CI interaction. Using this method, we have synthesized 30 high-quality samples to post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters through supervised fine-tuning. CoRT further refines the multi-round interleaving of external CI usage and internal thinking by employing rejection sampling and reinforcement learning. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate CoRT's effectiveness, yielding absolute improvements of 4\% and 8\% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, respectively, across five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets. Moreover, CoRT significantly enhances efficiency, reducing token usage by approximately 30\% for the 32B model and 50\% for the 1.5B model compared to pure natural language reasoning baselines. The models and code are available at: [this url](https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/CoRT).

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Boyang Wang, Xuweiyi Chen, Matheus Gadelha, Zezhou Cheng

Controllability, temporal coherence, and detail synthesis remain the most critical challenges in video generation. In this paper, we focus on a commonly used yet underexplored cinematic technique known as Frame In and Frame Out. Specifically, starting from image-to-video generation, users can control the objects in the image to naturally leave the scene or provide breaking new identity references to enter the scene, guided by a user-specified motion trajectory. To support this task, we introduce a new dataset that is curated semi-automatically, an efficient identity-preserving motion-controllable video Diffusion Transformer architecture, and a comprehensive evaluation protocol targeting this task. Our evaluation shows that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines.

Jiabin Tang, Lianghao Xia, Zhonghang Li, Chao Huang

The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated. Our framework seamlessly orchestrates the complete research pipeline--from literature review and hypothesis generation to algorithm implementation and publication-ready manuscript preparation--with minimal human intervention. To rigorously assess autonomous research capabilities, we develop Scientist-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising state-of-the-art papers across diverse AI research domains, featuring both guided innovation and open-ended exploration tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AI-Researcher achieves remarkable implementation success rates and produces research papers that approach human-level quality. This work establishes new foundations for autonomous scientific innovation that can complement human researchers by systematically exploring solution spaces beyond cognitive limitations.

Computer Vision · Everything Else

Lin Zhu, Tengyu Long, Xiao Wang, Lizhi Wang, Hua Huang

Event cameras provide asynchronous, low-latency, and high-dynamic-range visual signals, making them ideal for real-time perception tasks such as object detection. However, effectively modeling the temporal dynamics of event streams remains a core challenge. Most existing methods follow frame-based detection paradigms, applying temporal modules only at high-level features, which limits early-stage temporal modeling. Transformer-based approaches introduce global attention to capture long-range dependencies, but often add unnecessary complexity and overlook fine-grained temporal cues. In this paper, we propose a CNN-RNN hybrid framework that rethinks temporal modeling for event-based object detection. Our approach is based on two key insights: (1) introducing recurrent modules at lower spatial scales to preserve detailed temporal information where events are most dense, and (2) utilizing Decoupled Deformable-enhanced Recurrent Layers specifically designed according to the inherent motion characteristics of event cameras to extract multiple spatiotemporal features, and performing independent downsampling at multiple spatiotemporal scales to enable flexible, scale-aware representation learning. These multi-scale features are then fused via a feature pyramid network to produce robust detection outputs. Experiments on Gen1, 1 Mpx and eTram dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves superior accuracy over recent transformer-based models, highlighting the importance of precise temporal feature extraction in early stages. This work offers a new perspective on designing architectures for event-driven vision beyond attention-centric paradigms. Code: https://github.com/BIT-Vision/SATE.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Kai Zheng, Jianxin Wang, Jinhui Xu

Graph self-supervised learning (GSL) is essential for processing graph-structured data, reducing the need for manual labeling. Traditionally, this paradigm has extensively utilized Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) as its primary loss function. Despite its widespread application, the theoretical analysis of its node relations evaluation have remained largely unexplored. This paper employs recent advancements in latent hyperbolic geometry to deepen our understanding of node relationships from a graph-theoretical perspective. We analyze BPR’s limitations, particularly its reliance on local connectivity through 2-hop paths, which overlooks global connectivity and the broader topological structure. To address these shortcomings, we purpose a novel loss function, BPR+, designed to encompass even-hop paths and better capture global connectivity and topological nuances. This approach facilitates a more detailed measurement of user-item relationships and improves the granularity of relationship assessments. We validate BPR+ through extensive empirical testing across five real-world datasets and demonstrate its efficacy in refining graph self-supervised learning frameworks. Additionally, we explore the application of BPR+ in drug repositioning, highlighting its potential to support pharmaceutical research and development. Our findings not only illuminate the success factors of previous methodologies but also offer new theoretical insights into this learning paradigm.

Applications · Robotics

Shuyao Shang, Yuntao Chen, Yuqi Wang, Yingyan Li, ZHAO-XIANG ZHANG

End-to-end autonomous driving has substantially progressed by directly predicting future trajectories from raw perception inputs, which bypasses traditional modular pipelines. However, mainstream methods trained via imitation learning suffer from critical safety limitations, as they fail to distinguish between trajectories that appear human-like but are potentially unsafe. Some recent approaches attempt to address this by regressing multiple rule-driven scores but decoupling supervision from policy optimization, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose DriveDPO, a Safety Direct Preference Optimization Policy Learning framework. First, we distill a unified policy distribution from human imitation similarity and rule-based safety scores for direct policy optimization. Further, we introduce an iterative Direct Preference Optimization stage formulated as trajectory-level preference alignment. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that DriveDPO achieves a new state-of-the-art PDMS of 90.0. Furthermore, qualitative results across diverse challenging scenarios highlight DriveDPO’s ability to produce safer and more reliable driving behaviors.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Rongyao Fang, Chengqi Duan, Kun Wang, Linjiang Huang, Hao Li, Hao Tian, Shilin Yan, Weihao Yu, Xingyu Zeng, Jifeng Dai 等

Current image generation and editing methods primarily process textual prompts as direct inputs without explicit reasoning about visual composition or operational steps. We present Generation Chain-of-Thought (GoT), a novel paradigm that empowers a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to first generate an explicit, structured reasoning chain in natural language—detailing semantic relationships, object attributes, and, crucially, precise spatial coordinates—before any image synthesis occurs. This intermediate reasoning output directly guides the subsequent visual generation or editing process. This approach transforms conventional text-to-image generation and editing into a reasoning-guided framework that analyzes semantic relationships and spatial arrangements. We define the formulation of GoT and construct large-scale GoT datasets containing over \textbf{9M} samples with detailed reasoning chains capturing semantic-spatial relationships. To leverage the advantages of GoT, we implement a unified framework that integrates Qwen2.5-VL for reasoning chain generation with an end-to-end diffusion model enhanced by our novel Semantic-Spatial Guidance Module. Experiments show our GoT framework achieves excellent performance on both generation and editing tasks, with significant improvements over baselines. Additionally, our approach enables interactive visual generation, allowing users to explicitly modify reasoning steps for precise image adjustments. GoT pioneers a new direction for reasoning-driven visual generation and editing, producing images that better align with human intent. We will release our datasets and models to facilitate future research.

Computer Vision · Segmentation

Guilin Zhu, Runmin Wang, Yuanjie Shao, Wei dong Yang, Nong Sang, Changxin Gao

Class incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) enables a model to continually segment new classes from non-stationary data while preserving previously learned knowledge. Recent top-performing approaches are prototype-based methods that assign a prototype to each learned class to reproduce previous knowledge. However, modeling each class distribution relying on only a single prototype, which remains fixed throughout the incremental process, presents two key limitations: (i) a single prototype is insufficient to accurately represent the complete class distribution when incoming data stream for a class is naturally multimodal; (ii) the features of old classes may exhibit anisotropy during the incremental process, preventing fixed prototypes from faithfully reproducing the matched distribution. To address the aforementioned limitations, we propose a Continual Gaussian Mixture Distribution (CoGaMiD) modeling method. Specifically, the means and covariance matrices of the Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are estimated to model the complete feature distributions of learned classes. These GMMs are stored to generate pseudo-features that support the learning of novel classes in incremental steps. Moreover, we introduce a Dynamic Adjustment (DA) strategy that utilizes the features of previous classes within incoming data streams to update the stored GMMs. This adaptive update mitigates the mismatch between fixed GMMs and continually evolving distributions. Furthermore, a Gaussian-based Representation Constraint (GRC) loss is proposed to enhance the discriminability of new classes, avoiding confusion between new and old classes. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and ADE20K show that our method achieves superior performance compared to previous methods, especially in more challenging long-term incremental scenarios.

Optimization

Zeyuan Ma, Yue-Jiao Gong, Hongshu Guo, Wenjie Qiu, Sijie Ma, Hongqiao Lian, Jiajun Zhan, Kaixu Chen, Chen Wang, Zhiyang Huang 等

Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) streamlines the automation of optimization algorithm design through meta-learning. It typically employs a bi-level structure: the meta-level policy undergoes meta-training to reduce the manual effort required in developing algorithms for low-level optimization tasks. The original MetaBox (2023) provided the first open-source framework for reinforcement learning-based single-objective MetaBBO. However, its relatively narrow scope no longer keep pace with the swift advancement in this field. In this paper, we introduce MetaBox-v2 (\url{https://github.com/MetaEvo/MetaBox}) as a milestone upgrade with four novel features: 1) a unified architecture supporting RL, evolutionary, and gradient-based approaches, by which we reproduce $23$ up-to-date baselines; 2) efficient parallelization schemes, which reduce the training/testing time by $10-40$x; 3) a comprehensive benchmark suite of $18$ synthetic/realistic tasks ($1900$+ instances) spanning single-objective, multi-objective, multi-model, and multi-task optimization scenarios; 4) plentiful and extensible interfaces for custom analysis/visualization and integrating to external optimization tools/benchmarks. To show the utility of MetaBox-v2, we carry out a systematic case study that evaluates the built-in baselines in terms of the optimization performance, generalization ability and learning efficiency. Valuable insights are concluded from thorough and detailed analysis for practitioners and those new to the field.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Mustafa Shukor, Louis Bethune, Dan Busbridge, David Grangier, Enrico Fini, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Pierre Ablin

Large foundation models are typically trained on data from multiple domains, with the data mixture--the proportion of each domain used--playing a critical role in model performance. The standard approach to selecting this mixture relies on trial and error, which becomes impractical for large-scale pretraining. We propose a systematic method to determine the optimal data mixture for any target domain using scaling laws. Our approach accurately predicts the loss of a model of size $N$ trained with $D$ tokens and a specific domain weight vector $h$. We validate the universality of these scaling laws by demonstrating their predictive power in three distinct and large-scale settings: large language model (LLM), native multimodal model (NMM), and large vision models (LVM) pretraining. We further show that these scaling laws can extrapolate to new data mixtures and across scales: their parameters can be accurately estimated using a few small-scale training runs, and used to estimate the performance at larger scales and unseen domain weights. The scaling laws allow to derive the optimal domain weights for any target domain under a given training budget ($N$,$D$), providing a principled alternative to costly trial-and-error methods.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Joshua L Pughe-Sanford, Xuehao Ding, Jason Moore, Anirvan Sengupta, Charles Epstein, Philip Greengard, Dmitri Chklovskii

We model sensory streams as observations from high-dimensional stochastic dynamical systems and conceptualize sensory neurons as self-supervised learners of compact representations of such dynamics. From prior experience, neurons learn {\it coherent sets}—regions of stimulus state space whose trajectories evolve cohesively over finite times—and assign membership indices to new stimuli. Coherent sets are identified via spectral clustering of the {\it stochastic Koopman operator (SKO)}, where the sign pattern of a subdominant singular function partitions the state space into minimally coupled regions. For multivariate Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes, this singular function reduces to a linear projection onto the dominant singular vector of the whitened state-transition matrix. Encoding this singular vector as a receptive field enables neurons to compute membership indices via the projection sign in a biologically plausible manner. Each neuron detects either a {\it predictive} coherent set (stimuli with common futures) or a {\it retrospective} coherent set (stimuli with common pasts), suggesting a functional dichotomy among neurons. Since neurons lack access to explicit dynamical equations, the requisite singular vectors must be estimated directly from data, for example, via past–future canonical correlation analysis on lag-vector representations—an approach that naturally extends to nonlinear dynamics. This framework provides a novel account of neuronal temporal filtering, the ubiquity of rectification in neural responses, and known functional dichotomies. Coherent-set clustering thus emerges as a fundamental computation underlying sensory processing and transferable to bio-inspired artificial systems.

Data-centric AI · Everything Else

Anirban Das, Muhammad Irtaza Khalid, Rafael Peñaloza, Steven Schockaert

Designing models that can learn to reason in a systematic way is an important and long-standing challenge. In recent years, a wide range of solutions have been proposed for the specific case of systematic relational reasoning, including Neuro-Symbolic approaches, variants of the Transformer architecture, and specialized Graph Neural Networks. However, existing benchmarks for systematic relational reasoning focus on an overly simplified setting, based on the assumption that reasoning can be reduced to composing relational paths. In fact, this assumption is hard-baked into the architecture of several recent models, leading to approaches that can perform well on existing benchmarks but are difficult to generalize to other settings. To support further progress in the field of systematic relational reasoning with neural networks, we introduce a new benchmark that adds several levels of difficulty, requiring models to go beyond path-based reasoning.

Optimization

Zhonglin Xie, Yiman Fong, Haoran Yuan, Zaiwen Wen

A common approach for accelerating optimization algorithms is to minimize the loss achieved in a fixed time, which enables a differentiable framework with respect to the algorithm's hyperparameters. In contrast, the complementary objective of minimizing the time to reach a target loss is traditionally considered non-differentiable. To address this limitation, we propose a differentiable discrete stopping time and theoretically justify it based on its connection to continuous differential equations. We design an efficient algorithm to compute its sensitivities, thereby enabling a new differentiable formulation for directly accelerating algorithms. We demonstrate its effectiveness in applications such as online hyperparameter tuning and learning to optimize. Our proposed methods show superior performance in comprehensive experiments across various problems, which confirms their effectiveness.

Optimization · Everything Else

Sota Moriyama, Katsumi Inoue

The use of deep learning to solve fundamental AI problems such as Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) has been explored recently to develop robust and scalable reasoning systems. This work advances such neural-based reasoning approaches by developing a new Graph Neural Network (GNN) to differentiably solve (weighted) Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT). To this end, we propose SAT-based Graph Attention Networks (SGATs) as novel GNNs that are built on t-norm based attention and message passing mechanisms, and structurally designed to approximate greedy distributed local search. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we develop a local search solver that uses SGATs to continuously solve any given MaxSAT problem. Experiments on (weighted) MaxSAT benchmark datasets demonstrate that SGATs significantly outperform existing neural-based architectures, and achieve state-of-the-art performance among continuous approaches, highlighting the strength of the proposed model.