University of Texas at Dallas
Abstract:Color fundus photography (CFP) is the mainstay for large-scale retinal screening, yet its diagnostic capacity is constrained by the lack of depth-resolved structural information. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides cross-sectional retinal anatomy, but is less accessible in population-level screening. Here, we present EyeMVP, a cross-modal retinal foundation model that uses paired CFP--OCT pretraining to learn OCT-informed CFP representations. EyeMVP is pretrained on 674,893 strict same-eye same-day paired CFP--OCT image triples from 112,642 patients across eight hospitals in China. The model uses cross-modal masked reconstruction to enrich CFP representations with OCT-associated supervision, while requiring only CFP images at inference. To accommodate the non-aligned imaging geometry between en-face CFP and cross-sectional OCT, EyeMVP combines source-constrained cross-attention with CFP-derived structural masks. Across 16 downstream tasks, including classification, segmentation, few-shot adaptation, and cross-modal retrieval, EyeMVP outperforms representative retinal foundation models and shows consistent gains on tasks involving macular and optic nerve structure. For CFP-challenging macular diseases, EyeMVP achieves an AUROC of 0.948 for macular edema (vs.~0.852 for EyeCLIP) and 0.825 for myopic macular schisis. In an exploratory reader study, EyeMVP exceeds junior and intermediate ophthalmologist groups but does not reach senior ophthalmologist performance on macular edema, while showing numerically higher balanced accuracy than all reader groups on myopic macular schisis. These results suggest that pixel-level cross-modal reconstruction can enrich CFP representations with OCT-associated supervision, providing a practical route toward stronger CFP-based retinal analysis in screening settings.
Abstract:Reward models play a pivotal role in reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-modal trajectory selection for autonomous driving. However, acquiring such rewards typically relies on hand-crafted rule-based objectives or perception ground truth, which hinders generalization for data-scaling. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated feasibility as reward models in other domains, their effectiveness in driving tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by (1) introducing DriveReward, a reasoning trajectory evaluation dataset rigorously labeled via temporally-grounded visual guidance, and augmented with counterfactual driving behaviors., (2) alongside a specialized Vision-Language Reward Model. To address the scarcity of failure cases in conventional datasets, we propose a counterfactual data annotation scheme to construct cases encompassing diverse driving styles and erroneous behaviors. Evaluations on our proposed benchmark reveal that even leading open-source and proprietary VLMs fail to excel across all tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement in existing models. Building on these findings, we subsequently tailor a specialized 1B reward model that outperforms larger VLMs on task-specific reward alignment. Finally, we validate our reward model's effectiveness by integrating it into RL finetuning and multi-modal trajectory scoring across multiple baselines, achieving performance comparable to rule-based reward calculations in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation.
Abstract:Recent advances in generative models have empowered impressive layered image generation, yet their success is largely confined to graphic design domains. The layering of in-the-wild images remains an underexplored problem, limiting fine-grained editing and applications of images in real-world scenarios. Specifically, challenges remain in scalable layered data and the modeling of object interaction in natural images, such as illumination effects and structural boundary. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a novel framework for high-fidelity natural image decomposition. First, we introduce an Agent-driven Data Decomposition (ADD) pipeline that orchestrates agents and tools to synthesize layered data without manual intervention. Utilizing this pipeline, we construct a large-scale dataset, named LiWi-100k, with over 100,000 high-quality layered in-the-wild images. Second, we present a novel framework that jointly improves photometric fidelity and alpha boundary accuracy. Specifically, shadow-guided learning explicitly models the illumination effects, and degradation-restoration objective provides boundary-correction supervision by recovering clean foreground image from degraded one. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in natural image decomposition, outperforming existing models in RGB L1 and Alpha IoU metrics. We will soon release our code and dataset.
Abstract:Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a powerful driver of trajectory prediction in VLA-based autonomous driving, yet its autoregressive nature imposes a latency cost that is prohibitive for real-time deployment. Latent CoT methods attempt to close this gap by compressing reasoning into continuous hidden states, but consistently fall short of their explicit counterparts. We suggest that this is due to purely linguistic latent representations compressing a symbolic abstraction of the world, rather than the causal dynamics that actually govern driving. Thus, we present OneVL (One-step latent reasoning and planning with Vision-Language explanations), a unified VLA and World Model framework that routes reasoning through compact latent tokens supervised by dual auxiliary decoders. Alongside a language decoder that reconstructs text CoT, we introduce a visual world model decoder that predicts future-frame tokens, forcing the latent space to internalize the causal dynamics of road geometry, agent motion, and environmental change. A three-stage training pipeline progressively aligns these latents with trajectory, language, and visual objectives, ensuring stable joint optimization. At inference, the auxiliary decoders are discarded and all latent tokens are prefilled in a single parallel pass, matching the speed of answer-only prediction. Across four benchmarks, OneVL becomes the first latent CoT method to surpass explicit CoT, delivering state-of-the-art accuracy at answer-only latency, and providing direct evidence that tighter compression, when guided in both language and world-model supervision, produces more generalizable representations than verbose token-by-token reasoning. Project Page: https://xiaomi-embodied-intelligence.github.io/OneVL
Abstract:Image-goal navigation steers an agent to a target location specified by an image in unseen environments. Existing methods primarily handle this task by learning an end-to-end navigation policy, which compares the similarities of target and observation images and directly predicts the actions. However, when the target is distant or lies in another room, such methods fail to extract informative visual cues, leading the agent to wander around. Motivated by the human cognitive principle that deliberate, high-level reasoning guides fast, reactive execution in complex tasks, we propose Hierarchical Reasoning Navigation (HRNav), a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. In high-level planning, a vision-language model is trained on a self-collected dataset to generate a short-horizon plan, such as whether the agent should walk through the door or down the hallway. This downgrades the difficulty of the long-horizon task, making it more amenable to the execution part. In low-level execution, an online reinforcement learning policy is utilized to decide actions conditioned on the short-horizon plan. We also devise a novel Wandering Suppression Penalty (WSP) to further reduce the wandering problem. Together, these components form a hierarchical framework for Image-Goal Navigation. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Abstract:EEG foundation models (FMs) achieve strong cross-subject and cross-task generalization but impose substantial computational and memory costs that hinder deployment on embedded BCI systems. Knowledge distillation is a natural solution; however, conventional methods fail for EEG FMs because task-relevant semantics are often distributed across intermediate layers, and aggressive dimensionality reduction can distort oscillatory structure via representational collapse and aliasing. To address these challenges, we propose DLink (Distilling Layer-wise and Dominant Knowledge), a unified framework for transferring knowledge from large EEG FMs to compact students with three key innovations: (1) a dynamic Router that adaptively aggregates teacher layers to capture dominant intermediate representations; (2) an EEG MiC student with a Mimic-then-Compress pipeline, which inherits high-dimensional teacher features and then applies structured spatio-temporal compression to avoid a heavy classification head; and (3) spectral distillation that aligns teacher-student representations in the frequency domain to regularize compression and mitigate aliasing and temporal jitter. Experiments on four EEG benchmarks show that DLink enables compact students to outperform lightweight baselines while approaching fully fine-tuned FM performance at substantially lower model size and inference cost.
Abstract:Label noise in multi-label learning (MLL) poses significant challenges for model training, particularly in partial multi-label learning (PML) where candidate labels contain both relevant and irrelevant labels. While clustering offers a natural approach to exploit data structure for noise identification, traditional clustering methods cannot be directly applied to multi-label scenarios due to a fundamental incompatibility: clustering produces membership values that sum to one per instance, whereas multi-label assignments require binary values that can sum to any number. We propose a novel weakly-supervised clustering approach for PML (WSC-PML) that bridges clustering and multi-label learning through membership matrix decomposition. Our key innovation decomposes the clustering membership matrix $\mathbf{A}$ into two components: $\mathbf{A} = \mathbfΠ \odot \mathbf{F}$, where $\mathbfΠ$ maintains clustering constraints while $\mathbf{F}$ preserves multi-label characteristics. This decomposition enables seamless integration of unsupervised clustering with multi-label supervision for effective label noise handling. WSC-PML employs a three-stage process: initial prototype learning from noisy labels, adaptive confidence-based weak supervision construction, and joint optimization via iterative clustering refinement. Extensive experiments on 24 datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms six state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation metrics.
Abstract:End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from the conventional paradigm based on sparse perception into vision-language-action (VLA) models, which focus on learning language descriptions as an auxiliary task to facilitate planning. In this paper, we propose an alternative Vision-Geometry-Action (VGA) paradigm that advocates dense 3D geometry as the critical cue for autonomous driving. As vehicles operate in a 3D world, we think dense 3D geometry provides the most comprehensive information for decision-making. However, most existing geometry reconstruction methods (e.g., DVGT) rely on computationally expensive batch processing of multi-frame inputs and cannot be applied to online planning. To address this, we introduce a streaming Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT-2), which processes inputs in an online manner and jointly outputs dense geometry and trajectory planning for the current frame. We employ temporal causal attention and cache historical features to support on-the-fly inference. To further enhance efficiency, we propose a sliding-window streaming strategy and use historical caches within a certain interval to avoid repetitive computations. Despite the faster speed, DVGT-2 achieves superior geometry reconstruction performance on various datasets. The same trained DVGT-2 can be directly applied to planning across diverse camera configurations without fine-tuning, including closed-loop NAVSIM and open-loop nuScenes benchmarks.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are formulated to ground instructions in visual context and generate action sequences for robotic manipulation. Despite recent progress, VLA models still face challenges in learning related and reusable primitives, reducing reliance on large-scale data and complex architectures, and enabling exploration beyond demonstrations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language-Action (NS-VLA) framework via online reinforcement learning (RL). It introduces a symbolic encoder to embedding vision and language features and extract structured primitives, utilizes a symbolic solver for data-efficient action sequencing, and leverages online RL to optimize generation via expansive exploration. Experiments on robotic manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that NS-VLA outperforms previous methods in both one-shot training and data-perturbed settings, while simultaneously exhibiting superior zero-shot generalizability, high data efficiency and expanded exploration space. Our code is available.
Abstract:While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have revolutionized autonomous driving by unifying perception and planning, their reliance on explicit textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) leads to semantic-perceptual decoupling and perceptual-symbolic conflicts. Recent shifts toward latent reasoning attempt to bypass these bottlenecks by thinking in continuous hidden space. However, without explicit intermediate constraints, standard latent CoT often operates as a physics-agnostic representation. To address this, we propose the Latent Spatio-Temporal VLA (LaST-VLA), a framework shifting the reasoning paradigm from discrete symbolic processing into a physically grounded Latent Spatio-Temporal CoT. By implementing a dual-feature alignment mechanism, we distill geometric constraints from 3D foundation models and dynamic foresight from world models directly into the latent space. Coupled with a progressive SFT training strategy that transitions from feature alignment to trajectory generation, and refined via Reinforcement Learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to ensure safety and rule compliance. \method~setting a new record on NAVSIM v1 (91.3 PDMS) and NAVSIM v2 (87.1 EPDMS), while excelling in spatial-temporal reasoning on SURDS and NuDynamics benchmarks.