Abstract:Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial memory overhead of conventional proximal policy optimization (PPO) and achieving strong performance on long-horizon interactive tasks. Despite their success, recent studies revealed three limitations: (1) Lack explicit value generalization and effective temporal credit assignment; (2) Suffer from potential advantage collapse in long-horizon complex tasks; (3) Require a costly trade-off between sampling budget and policy performance. In this work, we propose Single-rollout Autoregressive Policy Optimization (SAPO), a low-memory and compute-efficient framework in which the policy and value functions share a single autoregressive backbone. SAPO exploits the autoregressive structure of LLMs to produce policy and value predictions at distinct causal boundaries with shared parameters, while independently optimizing the PPO objectives and auxiliary on-policy SARSA objectives. To robustly estimate the contribution of each turn, we further introduce a trajectory-level generalized advantage estimator that combines lambda-returns with batch normalization. Experiments across ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B show that SAPO trains stably and outperforms PPO and GRPO by mean +15.1 and +12.1 percentage points, respectively, while eliminating the memory cost of a separate critic model and reducing per-iteration runtime by 33.2% over PPO.
Abstract:Group-relative policy optimization has emerged as a key paradigm for training agentic large language models (LLMs) on multi-turn interactive tasks. However, most existing variants fail to distinguish advantages among successful trajectories even when these trajectories differ substantially in their interaction efficiency. For instance, circuitous successes are often assigned the identical outcome reward, causing advantage collapse and severe performance bottlenecks. To this end, we propose Group Planning-aware Policy Optimization (PlanPO), a simple yet effective RL method for learning generalizable planning abilities beyond task-specific high-quality behavior patterns. Specifically, PlanPO introduces coarse-to-fine advantage signals, which capture the relative differences in trajectory-level lengths and turn-level response lengths conditioned on successful trajectories sampled for the same task. Within the group-relative optimization structure, this enables agents to actively learn generalizable and deliberate behaviors spanning interaction planning and textual generation from high-quality rollouts, without degenerating into vanilla length minimization. Experimentally, PlanPO improves over GRPO by 27.2\% on average across the challenging multi-turn benchmarks ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, outperforming recent powerful baselines while incurring negligible additional training cost.
Abstract:The integration of spatial and spectral information is beneficial to the improvement of change detection performance. However, existing methods cannot efficiently suppress the influences of spatial and spectral differences in unchanged areas. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a content-guided spatial-spectral integration network (CSI-Net) for the fusion of global spatial details and spectral difference information. Specifically, the proposed CSI-Net is composed of a spatial reasoning (SR) module, a spectral difference (SD) module, and a content-guided integration (CGI) module. In the SR module, the spatial information is learned by cascaded graph convolution blocks for global modeling. The SD module is responsible for the extraction of spectral features, by calculating the means and variances of features to reduce the impact of spectral differences in unchanged regions. In addition, in order to integrate the spatial-spectral features efficiently, we design a CGI module to further take advantage of their complementary information. In this module, high-level content information is introduced as a guide for a proper interaction. Due to the efficient spatial-spectral fusion, the proposed CSI-Net can learn the changed features better while achieving a suppression of spectral differences. Experimental results on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and CLCD datasets demonstrate that the proposed CSI-Net produces better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, and is applicable to different scenarios
Abstract:As one of the most destructive natural disasters, earthquakes have struck many countries around the world in recent years, causing serious economic losses. Change detection (CD) can be applied to post-earthquake damage assessment as it can infer destroyed change regions from multi-temporal remote sensing images. Furthermore, the CD with short imaging interval will better satisfy the needs of the emergency rescues after earthquakes. However, the capability of current methods built on deep neural networks is limited because the dataset with short imaging interval is absent. To meet post-disaster immediate relief, we create a CD dataset, Turkey earthquake CD dataset (TUE-CD), for the evaluation of building damage in the short term after an earthquake. Because of the short acquisition interval of the post-event images, the imaging angle is different for different temporal images, which leads to some side-looking problems. To deal with these challenges, we present a multi-scale feature interaction network (MSI-Net) for efficient interaction between bi-temporal features, as well as mitigating the effect of side-looking problems. Specifically, the proposed MSI-Net consists of joint cross-attention (JCA) modules, multi-scale offset calibration (MOC) modules, and feature integration (FeI) modules. The JCA module unifies channel cross-attention and spatial joint attention for sufficient feature interaction. The MOC module further estimates the offsets to align the bi-temporal image with the multi-scale features. Finally, calibrated features and multi-scale features are fused by FeI modules for the prediction of changed areas. Experiments on the WHU-CD, CLCD, and the constructed TUE-CD dataset indicate that the proposed MSI-Net provides better results than considered state-of-the-art CD methods.
Abstract:Infrared and visible image fusion aims to generate a composite image that retains significant target information and preserves detailed textures, integrating two heterogeneous modalities. Previous image fusion methods typically adopt a single-module stacking approach to extract features from the two modalities. However, these approaches may result in incomplete learning of their distinct characteristics, thereby limiting the fusion effectiveness and constrain ing robustness in real-world heterogeneous data scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose FMRFusion, a frequency-aware multi-view representation learning network for Heterogeneous Image Fusion. A Multi-Scale Struc tural Perception Module is introduced to effectively capture discriminative structures, extracting fine-grained local structures and essential contextual information. A bilinear frequency decomposition mechanism is employed to sepa rate features into high-frequency and low-frequency components, enabling joint modeling of local details and global representations across different frequency domains. Moreover, a Cross-View Complementary Interaction is incorpo rated to explicitly model and fuse the complementary characteristics between reflected light information and radiative intensity responses, facilitating effective cross-view interaction. We further improve the Performance of the fused results by flow matching, which progressively refines the fused features by learning the transformation from coarse data to high-quality representations. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that FMRFusion achieves superior and consistent performance across a range of fusion tasks, especially in nighttime scenarios
Abstract:Perception research is increasingly modelled using streetscapes, yet many approaches still rely on pixel features or object co-occurrence statistics, overlooking the explicit relations that shape human perception. This study proposes a three stage pipeline that transforms street view imagery (SVI) into structured representations for predicting six perceptual indicators. In the first stage, each image is parsed using an open-set Panoptic Scene Graph model (OpenPSG) to extract object predicate object triplets. In the second stage, compact scene-level embeddings are learned through a heterogeneous graph autoencoder (GraphMAE). In the third stage, a neural network predicts perception scores from these embeddings. We evaluate the proposed approach against image-only baselines in terms of accuracy, precision, and cross-city generalization. Results indicate that (i) our approach improves perception prediction accuracy by an average of 26% over baseline models, and (ii) maintains strong generalization performance in cross-city prediction tasks. Additionally, the structured representation clarifies which relational patterns contribute to lower perception scores in urban scenes, such as graffiti on wall and car parked on sidewalk. Overall, this study demonstrates that graph-based structure provides expressive, generalizable, and interpretable signals for modelling urban perception, advancing human-centric and context-aware urban analytics.
Abstract:Time series forecasting with exogenous variables is a critical emerging paradigm that presents unique challenges in modeling dependencies between variables. Traditional models often struggle to differentiate between endogenous and exogenous variables, leading to inefficiencies and overfitting. In this paper, we introduce CrossLinear, a novel Linear-based forecasting model that addresses these challenges by incorporating a plug-and-play cross-correlation embedding module. This lightweight module captures the dependencies between variables with minimal computational cost and seamlessly integrates into existing neural networks. Specifically, it captures time-invariant and direct variable dependencies while disregarding time-varying or indirect dependencies, thereby mitigating the risk of overfitting in dependency modeling and contributing to consistent performance improvements. Furthermore, CrossLinear employs patch-wise processing and a global linear head to effectively capture both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies, further improving its forecasting precision. Extensive experiments on 12 real-world datasets demonstrate that CrossLinear achieves superior performance in both short-term and long-term forecasting tasks. The ablation study underscores the effectiveness of the cross-correlation embedding module. Additionally, the generalizability of this module makes it a valuable plug-in for various forecasting tasks across different domains. Codes are available at https://github.com/mumiao2000/CrossLinear.
Abstract:The variability and biases in the real-world performance benchmarking of deep learning models for medical imaging compromise their trustworthiness for real-world deployment. The common approach of holding out a single fixed test set fails to quantify the variance in the estimation of test performance metrics. This study introduces NACHOS (Nested and Automated Cross-validation and Hyperparameter Optimization using Supercomputing) to reduce and quantify the variance of test performance metrics of deep learning models. NACHOS integrates Nested Cross-Validation (NCV) and Automated Hyperparameter Optimization (AHPO) within a parallelized high-performance computing (HPC) framework. NACHOS was demonstrated on a chest X-ray repository and an Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) dataset under multiple data partitioning schemes. Beyond performance estimation, DACHOS (Deployment with Automated Cross-validation and Hyperparameter Optimization using Supercomputing) is introduced to leverage AHPO and cross-validation to build the final model on the full dataset, improving expected deployment performance. The findings underscore the importance of NCV in quantifying and reducing estimation variance, AHPO in optimizing hyperparameters consistently across test folds, and HPC in ensuring computational feasibility. By integrating these methodologies, NACHOS and DACHOS provide a scalable, reproducible, and trustworthy framework for DL model evaluation and deployment in medical imaging.
Abstract:Learning task-relevant state representations is crucial to solving the problem of scene generalization in visual deep reinforcement learning. Prior work typically establishes a self-supervised auxiliary learner, introducing elements (e.g., rewards and actions) to extract task-relevant state information from observations through behavioral similarity metrics. However, the methods often ignore the inherent relationships between the elements (e.g., dynamics relationships) that are essential for learning accurate representations, and they are also limited to single-step metrics, which impedes the discrimination of short-term similar task/behavior information in long-term dynamics transitions. To solve the issues, we propose an intrinsic dynamic characteristics-driven sequence representation learning method (DSR) over a common DRL frame. Concretely, inspired by the fact of state transition in the underlying system, it constrains the optimization of the encoder via modeling the dynamics equations related to the state transition, which prompts the latent encoding information to satisfy the state transition process and thereby distinguishes state space and noise space. Further, to refine the ability of encoding similar tasks based on dynamics constraints, DSR also sequentially models inherent dynamics equation relationships from the perspective of sequence elements' frequency domain and multi-step prediction. Finally, experimental results show that DSR has achieved a significant performance boost in the Distracting DMControl Benchmark, with an average of 78.9% over the backbone baseline. Further results indicate that it also achieves the best performance in real-world autonomous driving tasks in the CARLA simulator. Moreover, the qualitative analysis results of t-SNE visualization validate that our method possesses superior representation ability on visual tasks.
Abstract:Empowered by deep neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical successes in various domains, including games, health care, and autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, DRL is still identified as data-inefficient as effective policies demand vast numbers of environmental samples. Recently, episodic control (EC)-based model-free DRL methods enable sample efficiency by recalling past experiences from episodic memory. However, existing EC-based methods suffer from the limitation of potential misalignment between the state and reward spaces for neglecting the utilization of (past) retrieval states with extensive information, which probably causes inaccurate value estimation and degraded policy performance. To tackle this issue, we introduce an efficient EC-based DRL framework with expanded state-reward space, where the expanded states used as the input and the expanded rewards used in the training both contain historical and current information. To be specific, we reuse the historical states retrieved by EC as part of the input states and integrate the retrieved MC-returns into the immediate reward in each interactive transition. As a result, our method is able to simultaneously achieve the full utilization of retrieval information and the better evaluation of state values by a Temporal Difference (TD) loss. Empirical results on challenging Box2d and Mujoco tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method over a recent sibling method and common baselines. Further, we also verify our method's effectiveness in alleviating Q-value overestimation by additional experiments of Q-value comparison.