School of Information, North China University of Technology
Abstract:The ability to reason from audio, including speech, paralinguistic cues, environmental sounds, and music, is essential for AI agents to interact effectively in real-world scenarios. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on static or single-scene settings and do not fully capture scenarios where multiple speakers, unfolding events, and heterogeneous audio sources interact. To address these challenges, we introduce MDAR, a benchmark for evaluating models on complex, multi-scene, and dynamically evolving audio reasoning tasks. MDAR comprises 3,000 carefully curated question-answer pairs linked to diverse audio clips, covering five categories of complex reasoning and spanning three question types. We benchmark 26 state-of-the-art audio language models on MDAR and observe that they exhibit limitations in complex reasoning tasks. On single-choice questions, Qwen2.5-Omni (open-source) achieves 76.67% accuracy, whereas GPT-4o Audio (closed-source) reaches 68.47%; however, GPT-4o Audio substantially outperforms Qwen2.5-Omni on the more challenging multiple-choice and open-ended tasks. Across all three question types, no model achieves 80% performance. These findings underscore the unique challenges posed by MDAR and its value as a benchmark for advancing audio reasoning research.Code and benchmark can be found at https://github.com/luckyerr/MDAR.
Abstract:Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive zero-shot segmentation capabilities across natural image domains, but it struggles to generalize to the unique challenges of remote sensing data, such as complex terrain, multi-scale objects, and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce TASAM, a terrain and temporally-aware extension of SAM designed specifically for high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation. TASAM integrates three lightweight yet effective modules: a terrain-aware adapter that injects elevation priors, a temporal prompt generator that captures land-cover changes over time, and a multi-scale fusion strategy that enhances fine-grained object delineation. Without retraining the SAM backbone, our approach achieves substantial performance gains across three remote sensing benchmarks-LoveDA, iSAID, and WHU-CD-outperforming both zero-shot SAM and task-specific models with minimal computational overhead. Our results highlight the value of domain-adaptive augmentation for foundation models and offer a scalable path toward more robust geospatial segmentation.
Abstract:Robotic real-world reinforcement learning (RL) with vision-language-action (VLA) models is bottlenecked by sparse, handcrafted rewards and inefficient exploration. We introduce VLAC, a general process reward model built upon InternVL and trained on large scale heterogeneous datasets. Given pairwise observations and a language goal, it outputs dense progress delta and done signal, eliminating task-specific reward engineering, and supports one-shot in-context transfer to unseen tasks and environments. VLAC is trained on vision-language datasets to strengthen perception, dialogic and reasoning capabilities, together with robot and human trajectories data that ground action generation and progress estimation, and additionally strengthened to reject irrelevant prompts as well as detect regression or stagnation by constructing large numbers of negative and semantically mismatched samples. With prompt control, a single VLAC model alternately generating reward and action tokens, unifying critic and policy. Deployed inside an asynchronous real-world RL loop, we layer a graded human-in-the-loop protocol (offline demonstration replay, return and explore, human guided explore) that accelerates exploration and stabilizes early learning. Across four distinct real-world manipulation tasks, VLAC lifts success rates from about 30\% to about 90\% within 200 real-world interaction episodes; incorporating human-in-the-loop interventions yields a further 50% improvement in sample efficiency and achieves up to 100% final success.
Abstract:As privacy and security take center stage in AI, machine unlearning, the ability to erase specific knowledge from models, has garnered increasing attention. However, existing methods overly prioritize efficiency and aggressive forgetting, which introduces notable limitations. In particular, radical interventions like gradient ascent, influence functions, and random label noise can destabilize model weights, leading to collapse and reduced reliability. To address this, we propose CUFG (Curriculum Unlearning via Forgetting Gradients), a novel framework that enhances the stability of approximate unlearning through innovations in both forgetting mechanisms and data scheduling strategies. Specifically, CUFG integrates a new gradient corrector guided by forgetting gradients for fine-tuning-based unlearning and a curriculum unlearning paradigm that progressively forgets from easy to hard. These innovations narrow the gap with the gold-standard Retrain method by enabling more stable and progressive unlearning, thereby improving both effectiveness and reliability. Furthermore, we believe that the concept of curriculum unlearning has substantial research potential and offers forward-looking insights for the development of the MU field. Extensive experiments across various forgetting scenarios validate the rationale and effectiveness of our approach and CUFG. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CUFG-6375.
Abstract:Deep learning has demonstrated strong capability in compressing point clouds. Within this area, entropy modeling for lossless compression is widely investigated. However, most methods rely solely on parent orsibling contexts and level-wise autoregression, which suffers from decoding latency on the order of 10 to 100 seconds. We propose HINT, a method that integrates temporal and spatial correlation for sequential point cloud compression. Specifically, it first uses a two stage temporal feature extraction: (i) a parent-level existence map and (ii) a child-level neighborhood lookup in the previous frame. These cues are fused with the spatial features via elementwise addition and encoded with a group-wise strategy. Experimental results show that HINT achieves encoding and decoding time at 105 ms and 140 ms, respectively, equivalent to 49.6x and 21.6x acceleration in comparison with G-PCC, while achieving up to bit rate reduction of 43.6%, in addition, consistently outperforming over the strong spatial only baseline (RENO).
Abstract:Developing autonomous LLM agents capable of making a series of intelligent decisions to solve complex, real-world tasks is a fast-evolving frontier. Like human cognitive development, agents are expected to acquire knowledge and skills through exploration and interaction with the environment. Despite advances, the community still lacks a unified, interactive reinforcement learning (RL) framework that can effectively train such agents from scratch -- without relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) -- across diverse and realistic environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentGym-RL, a new framework to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive decision-making through RL. The framework features a modular and decoupled architecture, ensuring high flexibility and extensibility. It encompasses a wide variety of real-world scenarios, and supports mainstream RL algorithms. Furthermore, we propose ScalingInter-RL, a training approach designed for exploration-exploitation balance and stable RL optimization. In early stages, it emphasizes exploitation by restricting the number of interactions, and gradually shifts towards exploration with larger horizons to encourage diverse problem-solving strategies. In this way, the agent develops more diverse behaviors and is less prone to collapse under long horizons. We perform extensive experiments to validate the stability and effectiveness of both the AgentGym-RL framework and the ScalingInter-RL approach. Our agents match or surpass commercial models on 27 tasks across diverse environments. We offer key insights and will open-source the complete AgentGym-RL framework -- including code and datasets -- to empower the research community in developing the next generation of intelligent agents.




Abstract:Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) focuses on recovering high-quality images from low-resolution inputs that suffer from complex degradations like noise, blur, and compression. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential in this area by leveraging strong generative priors to restore fine details. However, their iterative denoising process incurs high computational overhead, posing challenges for real-time applications. Although one-step distillation methods, such as OSEDiff and TSD-SR, offer faster inference, they remain fundamentally constrained by their large, over-parameterized model architectures. In this work, we present TinySR, a compact yet effective diffusion model specifically designed for Real-ISR that achieves real-time performance while maintaining perceptual quality. We introduce a Dynamic Inter-block Activation and an Expansion-Corrosion Strategy to facilitate more effective decision-making in depth pruning. We achieve VAE compression through channel pruning, attention removal and lightweight SepConv. We eliminate time- and prompt-related modules and perform pre-caching techniques to further speed up the model. TinySR significantly reduces computational cost and model size, achieving up to 5.68x speedup and 83% parameter reduction compared to its teacher TSD-SR, while still providing high quality results.
Abstract:"Fedspeak", the stylized and often nuanced language used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, encodes implicit policy signals and strategic stances. The Federal Open Market Committee strategically employs Fedspeak as a communication tool to shape market expectations and influence both domestic and global economic conditions. As such, automatically parsing and interpreting Fedspeak presents a high-impact challenge, with significant implications for financial forecasting, algorithmic trading, and data-driven policy analysis. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based, uncertainty-aware framework for deciphering Fedspeak and classifying its underlying monetary policy stance. Technically, to enrich the semantic and contextual representation of Fedspeak texts, we incorporate domain-specific reasoning grounded in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We further introduce a dynamic uncertainty decoding module to assess the confidence of model predictions, thereby enhancing both classification accuracy and model reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the policy stance analysis task. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals a significant positive correlation between perceptual uncertainty and model error rates, validating the effectiveness of perceptual uncertainty as a diagnostic signal.




Abstract:Effective tool use is essential for large language models (LLMs) to interact meaningfully with their environment. However, progress is limited by the lack of efficient reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks specifically designed for tool use, due to challenges in constructing stable training environments and designing verifiable reward mechanisms. To address this, we propose an automated environment construction pipeline, incorporating scenario decomposition, document generation, function integration, complexity scaling, and localized deployment. This enables the creation of high-quality training environments that provide detailed and measurable feedback without relying on external tools. Additionally, we introduce a verifiable reward mechanism that evaluates both the precision of tool use and the completeness of task execution. When combined with trajectory data collected from the constructed environments, this mechanism integrates seamlessly with standard RL algorithms to facilitate feedback-driven model training. Experiments on LLMs of varying scales demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the models' tool-use performance without degrading their general capabilities, regardless of inference modes or training algorithms. Our analysis suggests that these gains result from improved context understanding and reasoning, driven by updates to the lower-layer MLP parameters in models.
Abstract:This paper presents a multimodal framework that integrates touch signals (contact points and surface normals) into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach enhances scene reconstruction, particularly under challenging conditions like low lighting, limited camera viewpoints, and occlusions. Different from the visual-only method, the proposed approach incorporates spatially selective touch measurements to refine both the geometry and appearance of the 3D Gaussian representation. To guide the touch exploration, we introduce a two-stage sampling scheme that initially probes sparse regions and then concentrates on high-uncertainty boundaries identified from the reconstructed mesh. A geometric loss is proposed to ensure surface smoothness, resulting in improved geometry. Experimental results across diverse scenarios show consistent improvements in geometric accuracy. In the most challenging case with severe occlusion, the Chamfer Distance is reduced by over 15x, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating touch cues into 3D Gaussian Splatting. Furthermore, our approach maintains a fully online pipeline, underscoring its feasibility in visually degraded environments.