the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
Abstract:Skill usage has become a core component of modern agent systems and can substantially improve agents' ability to complete complex tasks. In real-world settings, where agents must monitor and interact with numerous personal applications, web browsers, and other environment interfaces, skill libraries can scale to thousands of reusable skills. Scaling to larger skill sets introduces two key challenges. First, loading the full skill set saturates the context window, driving up token costs, hallucination, and latency. In this paper, we present Graph of Skills (GoS), an inference-time structural retrieval layer for large skill libraries. GoS constructs an executable skill graph offline from skill packages, then at inference time retrieves a bounded, dependency-aware skill bundle through hybrid semantic-lexical seeding, reverse-weighted Personalized PageRank, and context-budgeted hydration. On SkillsBench and ALFWorld, GoS improves average reward by 43.6% over the vanilla full skill-loading baseline while reducing input tokens by 37.8%, and generalizes across three model families: Claude Sonnet, GPT-5.2 Codex, and MiniMax. Additional ablation studies across skill libraries ranging from 200 to 2,000 skills further demonstrate that GoS consistently outperforms both vanilla skills loading and simple vector retrieval in balancing reward, token efficiency, and runtime.
Abstract:In this paper, we explore a joint source and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted channel encoding (JSRE) framework for multi-user semantic communications, where a deep neural network (DNN) extracts semantic features for all users and the RIS provides channel orthogonality, enabling a unified semantic encoding-decoding design. We aim to maximize the overall energy efficiency of semantic communications across all users by jointly optimizing the user scheduling, the RIS's phase shifts, and the semantic compression ratio. Although this joint optimization problem can be addressed using conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods, evaluating semantic similarity typically relies on extensive real environment interactions, which can incur heavy computational overhead during training. To address this challenge, we propose a truncated DRL (T-DRL) framework, where a DNN-based semantic similarity estimator is developed to rapidly estimate the similarity score. Moreover, the user scheduling strategy is tightly coupled with the semantic model configuration. To exploit this relationship, we further propose a semantic model caching mechanism that stores and reuses fine-tuned semantic models corresponding to different scheduling decisions. A Transformer-based actor network is employed within the DRL framework to dynamically generate action space conditioned on the current caching state. This avoids redundant retraining and further accelerates the convergence of the learning process. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed JSRE framework significantly improves the system energy efficiency compared with the baseline methods. By training fewer semantic models, the proposed T-DRL framework significantly enhances the learning efficiency.
Abstract:Self-evolving has emerged as a key paradigm for improving foundational models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) with minimal human intervention. While recent approaches have demonstrated that LLM agents can self-evolve from scratch with little to no data, VLMs introduce an additional visual modality that typically requires at least some seed data, such as images, to bootstrap the self-evolution process. In this work, we present Multi-model Multimodal Zero (MM-Zero), the first RL-based framework to achieve zero-data self-evolution for VLM reasoning. Moving beyond prior dual-role (Proposer and Solver) setups, MM-Zero introduces a multi-role self-evolving training framework comprising three specialized roles: a Proposer that generates abstract visual concepts and formulates questions; a Coder that translates these concepts into executable code (e.g., Python, SVG) to render visual images; and a Solver that performs multimodal reasoning over the generated visual content. All three roles are initialized from the same base model and trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), with carefully designed reward mechanisms that integrate execution feedback, visual verification, and difficulty balancing. Our experiments show that MM-Zero improves VLM reasoning performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. MM-Zero establishes a scalable path toward self-evolving multi-model systems for multimodal models, extending the frontier of self-improvement beyond the conventional two-model paradigm.
Abstract:While recent video diffusion models (VDMs) produce visually impressive results, they fundamentally struggle to maintain 3D structural consistency, often resulting in object deformation or spatial drift. We hypothesize that these failures arise because standard denoising objectives lack explicit incentives for geometric coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoGPA (Video Geometric Preference Alignment), a data-efficient self-supervised framework that leverages a geometry foundation model to automatically derive dense preference signals that guide VDMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This approach effectively steers the generative distribution toward inherent 3D consistency without requiring human annotations. VideoGPA significantly enhances temporal stability, physical plausibility, and motion coherence using minimal preference pairs, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in extensive experiments.
Abstract:Most existing memory-enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) approaches implicitly assume that memory validity can be established either through external evaluators that provide task-specific success signals or through internal model cognition, such as reflection, for editing memory entries. However, these assumptions often break down in practical environments with dynamic drifts. We propose the Global Verifier (GLOVE), a framework that introduces a new design dimension for LLM memory systems by establishing a relative notion of truth. Through active probing to detect inconsistencies between retrieved memories and fresh observations, GLOVE enables memory-environment realignment by verifying and updating memory without access to ground-truth supervision or strong reliance on model introspection. We evaluate GLOVE on diverse benchmarks spanning web navigation, planning, and control, augmented with controlled environmental drifts that introduce non-stationarity beyond the original benchmark settings. Our results show that GLOVE substantially improves agent success rates, suggesting a robust pathway to cognitive agents capable of self-evolving.
Abstract:Personalized mobile artificial intelligence applications are widely deployed, yet they are expected to infer user behavior from sparse and irregular histories under a continuously evolving spatio-temporal context. This setting induces a fundamental tension among three requirements, i.e., immediacy to adapt to recent behavior, stability to resist transient noise, and generalization to support long-horizon prediction and cold-start users. Most existing approaches satisfy at most two of these requirements, resulting in an inherent impossibility triangle in data-scarce, non-stationary personalization. To address this challenge, we model mobile behavior as a partially observed spatio-temporal tensor and unify short-term adaptation, long-horizon forecasting, and cold-start recommendation as a conditional completion problem, where a user- and task-specific mask specifies which coordinates are treated as evidence. We propose U-MASK, a user-adaptive spatio-temporal masking method that allocates evidence budgets based on user reliability and task sensitivity. To enable mask generation under sparse observations, U-MASK learns a compact, task-agnostic user representation from app and location histories via U-SCOPE, which serves as the sole semantic conditioning signal. A shared diffusion transformer then performs mask-guided generative completion while preserving observed evidence, so personalization and task differentiation are governed entirely by the mask and the user representation. Experiments on real-world mobile datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods across short-term prediction, long-horizon forecasting, and cold-start settings, with the largest gains under severe data sparsity. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/NICE-HKU/U-MASK.
Abstract:Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving unprecedented communication efficiency in sixth-generation (6G) networks by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to extract and transmit the underlying meanings of source data. However, deploying SemCom over digital systems presents new challenges, particularly in ensuring robustness against transmission errors that may distort semantically critical content. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework, termed generative feature imputing, which comprises three key techniques. First, we introduce a spatial error concentration packetization strategy that spatially concentrates feature distortions by encoding feature elements based on their channel mappings, a property crucial for both the effectiveness and reduced complexity of the subsequent techniques. Second, building on this strategy, we propose a generative feature imputing method that utilizes a diffusion model to efficiently reconstruct missing features caused by packet losses. Finally, we develop a semantic-aware power allocation scheme that enables unequal error protection by allocating transmission power according to the semantic importance of each packet. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms conventional approaches, such as Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (DJSCC) and JPEG2000, under block fading conditions, achieving higher semantic accuracy and lower Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) scores.
Abstract:Digital task-oriented semantic communication (ToSC) aims to transmit only task-relevant information, significantly reducing communication overhead. Existing ToSC methods typically rely on learned codebooks to encode semantic features and map them to constellation symbols. However, these codebooks are often sparsely activated, resulting in low spectral efficiency and underutilization of channel capacity. This highlights a key challenge: how to design a codebook that not only supports task-specific inference but also approaches the theoretical limits of channel capacity. To address this challenge, we construct a spectral efficiency-aware codebook design framework that explicitly incorporates the codebook activation probability into the optimization process. Beyond maximizing task performance, we introduce the Wasserstein (WS) distance as a regularization metric to minimize the gap between the learned activation distribution and the optimal channel input distribution. Furthermore, we reinterpret WS theory from a generative perspective to align with the semantic nature of ToSC. Combining the above two aspects, we propose a WS-based adaptive hybrid distribution scheme, termed WS-DC, which learns compact, task-driven and channel-aware latent representations. Experimental results demonstrate that WS-DC not only outperforms existing approaches in inference accuracy but also significantly improves codebook efficiency, offering a promising direction toward capacity-approaching semantic communication systems.




Abstract:Service-level mobile traffic prediction for individual users is essential for network efficiency and quality of service enhancement. However, current prediction methods are limited in their adaptability across different urban environments and produce inaccurate results due to the high uncertainty in personal traffic patterns, the lack of detailed environmental context, and the complex dependencies among different network services. These challenges demand advanced modeling techniques that can capture dynamic traffic distributions and rich environmental features. Inspired by the recent success of diffusion models in distribution modeling and Large Language Models (LLMs) in contextual understanding, we propose an LLM-Enhanced Spatio-temporal Diffusion Model (LSDM). LSDM integrates the generative power of diffusion models with the adaptive learning capabilities of transformers, augmented by the ability to capture multimodal environmental information for modeling service-level patterns and dynamics. Extensive evaluations on real-world service-level datasets demonstrate that the model excels in traffic usage predictions, showing outstanding generalization and adaptability. After incorporating contextual information via LLM, the performance improves by at least 2.83% in terms of the coefficient of determination. Compared to models of a similar type, such as CSDI, the root mean squared error can be reduced by at least 8.29%. The code and dataset will be available at: https://github.com/SoftYuaneR/LSDM.
Abstract:Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved strong performance in cooperative adversarial tasks. However, most existing methods typically train agents against fixed opponent strategies and rely on such meta-static difficulty conditions, which limits their adaptability to changing environments and often leads to suboptimal policies. Inspired by the success of curriculum learning (CL) in supervised tasks, we propose a dynamic CL framework for MARL that employs an self-adaptive difficulty adjustment mechanism. This mechanism continuously modulates opponent strength based on real-time agent training performance, allowing agents to progressively learn from easier to more challenging scenarios. However, the dynamic nature of CL introduces instability due to nonstationary environments and sparse global rewards. To address this challenge, we develop a Counterfactual Group Relative Policy Advantage (CGRPA), which is tightly coupled with the curriculum by providing intrinsic credit signals that reflect each agent's impact under evolving task demands. CGRPA constructs a counterfactual advantage function that isolates individual contributions within group behavior, facilitating more reliable policy updates throughout the curriculum. CGRPA evaluates each agent's contribution through constructing counterfactual action advantage function, providing intrinsic rewards that enhance credit assignment and stabilize learning under non-stationary conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves both training stability and final performance, achieving competitive results against state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/NICE-HKU/CL2MARL-SMAC.