Southeast University
Abstract:Video generation models have shown strong potential as world models for autonomous driving simulation. However, existing approaches are primarily trained on real-world driving datasets, which mostly contain natural and safe driving scenarios. As a result, current models often fail when conditioned on challenging or counterfactual trajectories-such as imperfect trajectories generated by simulators or planning systems-producing videos with severe physical inconsistencies and artifacts. To address this limitation, we propose PhyGenesis, a world model designed to generate driving videos with high visual fidelity and strong physical consistency. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) a physical condition generator that transforms potentially invalid trajectory inputs into physically plausible conditions, and (2) a physics-enhanced video generator that produces high-fidelity multi-view driving videos under these conditions. To effectively train these components, we construct a large-scale, physics-rich heterogeneous dataset. Specifically, in addition to real-world driving videos, we generate diverse challenging driving scenarios using the CARLA simulator, from which we derive supervision signals that guide the model to learn physically grounded dynamics under extreme conditions. This challenging-trajectory learning strategy enables trajectory correction and promotes physically consistent video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhyGenesis consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially on challenging trajectories. Our project page is available at: https://wm-research.github.io/PhyGenesis/.
Abstract:Knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from large teacher models to smaller students for efficient inference. While existing methods primarily focus on distillation strategies, they often overlook the importance of enhancing teacher knowledge quality. In this paper, we propose Text-guided Multi-view Knowledge Distillation (TMKD), which leverages dual-modality teachers, a visual teacher and a text teacher (CLIP), to provide richer supervisory signals. Specifically, we enhance the visual teacher with multi-view inputs incorporating visual priors (edge and high-frequency features), while the text teacher generates semantic weights through prior-aware prompts to guide adaptive feature fusion. Additionally, we introduce vision-language contrastive regularization to strengthen semantic knowledge in the student model. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that TMKD consistently improves knowledge distillation performance by up to 4.49\%, validating the effectiveness of our dual-teacher multi-view enhancement strategy. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TMKD-main-44D1.
Abstract:Event-based pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR) leverages motion cues to enhance RGB cameras in low-light and motion-blur scenarios, enabling more accurate inference of attributes like age and emotion. However, existing two-stream multimodal fusion methods introduce significant computational overhead and neglect the valuable guidance from contextual samples. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an Event Prompter. Discarding the computationally expensive auxiliary backbone, this module directly applies extremely lightweight and efficient Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Inverse DCT (IDCT) operations to the event data. This design extracts frequency-domain event features at a minimal computational cost, thereby effectively augmenting the RGB branch. Furthermore, an external memory bank designed to provide rich prior knowledge, combined with modern Hopfield networks, enables associative memory-augmented representation learning. This mechanism effectively mines and leverages global relational knowledge across different samples. Finally, a cross-attention mechanism fuses the RGB and event modalities, followed by feed-forward networks for attribute prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets fully validate the effectiveness of the proposed RGB-Event PAR framework. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenPAR
Abstract:The dominant paradigm for improving mathematical reasoning in language models relies on Reinforcement Learning with verifiable rewards. Yet existing methods treat each problem instance in isolation without leveraging the reusable strategies that emerge and accumulate during training. To this end, we introduce ARISE (Agent Reasoning via Intrinsic Skill Evolution), a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework, in which a shared policy operates both to manage skills at high-level and to generate responses at low-level (denoted as a Skills Manager and a Worker, respectively). The Manager maintains a tiered skill library through a dedicated skill generation rollout that performs structured summarization of successful solution traces (after execution), while employing a policy-driven selection mechanism to retrieve relevant skills to condition future rollouts (before execution). A hierarchical reward design guides the co-evolution of reasoning ability and library quality. Experiments on two base models and seven benchmarks spanning both competition mathematics and Omni-MATH show that ARISE consistently outperforms GRPO-family algorithms and memory-augmented baselines, with particularly notable gains on out-of-distribution tasks. Ablation studies confirm that each component contributes to the observed improvements and that library quality and reasoning performance improve in tandem throughout training. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Skylanding/ARISE}{https://github.com/Skylanding/ARISE}.
Abstract:We study alpha factor mining, the automated discovery of predictive signals from noisy, non-stationary market data-under a practical requirement that mined factors be directly executable and auditable, and that the discovery process remain computationally tractable at scale. Existing symbolic approaches are limited by bounded expressiveness, while neural forecasters often trade interpretability for performance and remain vulnerable to regime shifts and overfitting. We introduce FactorEngine (FE), a program-level factor discovery framework that casts factors as Turing-complete code and improves both effectiveness and efficiency via three separations: (i) logic revision vs. parameter optimization, (ii) LLM-guided directional search vs. Bayesian hyperparameter search, and (iii) LLM usage vs. local computation. FE further incorporates a knowledge-infused bootstrapping module that transforms unstructured financial reports into executable factor programs through a closed-loop multi-agent extraction-verification-code-generation pipeline, and an experience knowledge base that supports trajectory-aware refinement (including learning from failures). Across extensive backtests on real-world OHLCV data, FE produces factors with substantially stronger predictive stability and portfolio impact-for example, higher IC/ICIR (and Rank IC/ICIR) and improved AR/Sharpe, than baseline methods, achieving state-of-the-art predictive and portfolio performance.
Abstract:Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making them harder to recover in deeper layers. We introduce mixture-of-depths attention (MoDA), a mechanism that allows each attention head to attend to sequence KV pairs at the current layer and depth KV pairs from preceding layers. We further describe a hardware-efficient algorithm for MoDA that resolves non-contiguous memory-access patterns, achieving 97.3% of FlashAttention-2's efficiency at a sequence length of 64K. Experiments on 1.5B-parameter models demonstrate that MoDA consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it improves average perplexity by 0.2 across 10 validation benchmarks and increases average performance by 2.11% on 10 downstream tasks, with a negligible 3.7% FLOPs computational overhead. We also find that combining MoDA with post-norm yields better performance than using it with pre-norm. These results suggest that MoDA is a promising primitive for depth scaling. Code is released at https://github.com/hustvl/MoDA .
Abstract:Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an effective method for training reasoning models. While it computes advantages based on group mean, GRPO treats each output as an independent sample during the optimization and overlooks a vital structural signal: the natural contrast between correct and incorrect solutions within the same group, thus ignoring the rich, comparative data that could be leveraged by explicitly pitting successful reasoning traces against failed ones. To capitalize on this, we present a contrastive reformulation of GRPO, showing that the GRPO objective implicitly maximizes the margin between the policy ratios of correct and incorrect samples. Building on this insight, we propose Bilateral Context Conditioning (BICC), a mechanism that allows the model to cross-reference successful and failed reasoning traces during the optimization, enabling a direct information flow across samples. We further introduce Reward-Confidence Correction (RCC) to stabilize training by dynamically adjusts the advantage baseline in GRPO using reward-confidence covariance derived from the first-order approximation of the variance-minimizing estimator. Both mechanisms require no additional sampling or auxiliary models and can be adapted to all GRPO variants. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across comprehensive models and algorithms. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Skylanding/BiCC}{https://github.com/Skylanding/BiCC}.
Abstract:Cable/rope elements are pervasive in deformable-object manipulation, often serving as a deformable force-transmission medium whose routing and contact determine how wrenches are delivered. In cable-towed manipulation, transmission is unilateral and hybrid: the tether can pull only when taut and becomes force-free when slack; in practice, the tether may also contact the object boundary and self-wrap around edges, which is not merely collision avoidance but a change of the wrench transmission channel by shifting the effective application point and moment arm, thereby coupling routing geometry with rigid-body motion and tensioning. We formulate self-wrap towing as a routing-aware, tensioning-implicit trajectory optimization (TITO) problem that couples (i) a tensioning-implicit taut/slack constraint and (ii) routing-conditioned transmission maps for effective length and wrench, and we build a relaxation hierarchy from a strict mode-conditioned reference to three tractable relaxations: Full-Mode Relaxation (FMR), Binary-Mode Relaxation (BMR), and Implicit-Mode Relaxation (IMR). Across planar towing tasks, we find that making routing an explicit decision often yields conservative solutions that stay near switching boundaries, whereas IMR induces self-wrap through state evolution and exploits the redirected torque channel whenever turning requires it.
Abstract:Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable collaborative reasoning capabilities but introduce new attack surfaces, such as the sleeper agent, which behave benignly during routine operation and gradually accumulate trust, only revealing malicious behaviors when specific conditions or triggers are met. Existing defense works primarily focus on static graph optimization or hierarchical data management, often failing to adapt to evolving adversarial strategies or suffering from high false-positive rates (FPR) due to rigid blocking policies. To address this, we propose DynaTrust, a novel defense method against sleeper agents. DynaTrust models MAS as a dynamic trust graph~(DTG), and treats trust as a continuous, evolving process rather than a static attribute. It dynamically updates the trust of each agent based on its historical behaviors and the confidence of selected expert agents. Instead of simply blocking, DynaTrust autonomously restructures the graph to isolate compromised agents and restore task connectivity to ensure the usability of MAS. To assess the effectiveness of DynaTrust, we evaluate it on mixed benchmarks derived from AdvBench and HumanEval. The results demonstrate that DynaTrust outperforms the state-of-the-art method AgentShield by increasing the defense success rate by 41.7%, achieving rates exceeding 86% under adversarial conditions. Furthermore, it effectively balances security with utility by significantly reducing FPR, ensuring uninterrupted system operations through graph adaptation.
Abstract:Pedestrian Attribute Recognition is a foundational computer vision task that provides essential support for downstream applications, including person retrieval in video surveillance and intelligent retail analytics. However, existing research is frequently constrained by the ``one-model-per-dataset" paradigm and struggles to handle significant discrepancies across domains in terms of modalities, attribute definitions, and environmental scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose UniPAR, a unified Transformer-based framework for PAR. By incorporating a unified data scheduling strategy and a dynamic classification head, UniPAR enables a single model to simultaneously process diverse datasets from heterogeneous modalities, including RGB images, video sequences, and event streams. We also introduce an innovative phased fusion encoder that explicitly aligns visual features with textual attribute queries through a late deep fusion strategy. Experimental results on the widely used benchmark datasets, including MSP60K, DukeMTMC, and EventPAR, demonstrate that UniPAR achieves performance comparable to specialized SOTA methods. Furthermore, multi-dataset joint training significantly enhances the model's cross-domain generalization and recognition robustness in extreme environments characterized by low light and motion blur. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenPAR