Qiao Li, Jing Chen, Cong Wu, Kun He, Ruiying Du, Lei Tan
Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification (AG-ReID) aims to match pedestrian images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground-based surveillance cameras. The task remains highly challenging due to severe viewpoint discrepancies, frequent occlusions, and substantial domain gaps between aerial and ground imagery. Beyond these observable factors, existing methods often overlook two fundamental structural issues: cumulative positional drift during hierarchical feature extraction and semantic inconsistency across cross-view feature distributions. To address these challenges, we propose ProAlign, a Progressive Positional and Prototype-Guided Alignment Network for AG-ReID. ProAlign comprises two key components: a Layer-wise Progressive Positional Embedding (LPPE) module and a View-Aware Prototype Contrastive Learning (PCL) module. LPPE performs adaptive positional calibration throughout transformer layers by employing conditional positional encoding in shallow layers to mitigate local spatial distortions, while introducing learnable static positional embeddings in deeper layers to reinforce global semantic priors. Meanwhile, PCL maintains view-specific aerial and ground prototypes for each identity and enforces cross-view semantic consistency via a dual-prototype contrastive objective. Extensive experiments on CARGO and two real-world AG-ReID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ProAlign, achieving state-of-the-art overall retrieval performance on CARGO with improvements of 1.60% in Rank-1 accuracy and 5.01% in mAP over the strongest competing methods.
Lianmin Chen, Junbin Qiu, Chenxing Wei, Yao Shu, Kun He
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising approach for memory-efficient large language model (LLM) post-training, yet its reliability in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) remains largely unexplored. Motivated by the distinct data regimes of on-policy RL and fixed-data optimization, we develop a generic variance-theoretic framework to investigate what limits the reliability of ZO gradient estimation. Our analysis reveals that estimation reliability is structurally determined by whether the two finite-difference evaluations are performed on matched data. On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) under the mismatched-data regime produces a $1/μ^2$ oracle-noise amplification that sets an irreducible noise floor as the perturbation scale $μ$ decreases, whereas Boltzmann Targeted SFT (BOLT) under the matched-data regime eliminates this amplification via noise cancellation. We further derive convergence guarantees with explicit constants that cleanly separate the two regimes. These results motivate the ZO-BOLT algorithm, which builds on BOLT's matched-data advantage for reliable ZO optimization of an RLVR-aligned objective. Controlled perturbation-scale sweeps and matched-versus-mismatched end-to-end comparisons validate the predicted effect of data matching. Experiments across three models and two mathematical reasoning benchmarks further show that ZO-BOLT consistently improves over the pretrained baseline while retaining a near-inference memory footprint. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lianmin-chen/the_cost_of_mismatch.
We study approximately uniform sampling of satisfying assignments from random $k$-SAT formulas. Fix a constant $B>0$. For every $k\ge 2^{20}$ and density $0<α\le 2^k/k^{16}$, we prove that, with high probability over a random formula on $n$ variables, every accuracy $n^{-B}\le\varepsilon\le 1/2$ admits a sampler whose output distribution is within total variation distance $\varepsilon$ of the uniform distribution on satisfying assignments with expected running time $$\widetilde O_B\left(\mathrm{poly}(k,α+1)n^{2+η}\right),\quad 0<η\le 2^{16-k}.$$ In particular, the exponent of $n$ is $2+O(2^{-k})$ while the dependence on the width and density is polynomial with a universal degree. This improves the parameter-dependent polynomial exponent of the sampling algorithm of Chen, Lonkar, Wang, Yang, and Yin (STOC 2025) in the density regime $2^k/\mathrm{poly}(k)$. Our algorithm separates a high-degree core from the remaining variables. Every residual formula on the good variables is a deletion subformula of a common bounded-dependency formula. Adapting the rejection--repair framework of Liu, Wang, Yin, Zhang and Zhou (arXiv 2026), we construct an executable sampler for all such residual formulas using ordinary connected violation sets replacing weighted 2-tree witnesses and use it to simulate approximate block heat-bath updates on the core. To analyze the resulting core chain, we integrate out the good variables, represent the core marginal by an absolutely convergent polymer expansion and combine a component-swap variance comparison with an adaptive exploration bound. Absorbing single-component interactions into the local weights leaves interactions of cluster size at least two; retaining their additional decay gives a spectral gap of at least $1/(2s n^{2^{12-k}})$ where $s$ counts core components. Together with the residual sampler, this yields the stated running time.
Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating robot agents in realistic, open-world household environments. Through an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop real-to-sim pipeline, RAB constructs 50 diverse household layouts with interactive objects and physically grounded tasks, encompassing 90 atomic tasks, 18 short-horizon tasks, 8 long-horizon tasks, and 4 open-ended scenarios. RAB provides a multi-level evaluation of robot agent capabilities: (1) task-level assessments systematically examine five complementary dimensions: task discovery, context reasoning, manipulation, failure recovery, and robustness; (2) scenario-level evaluation assesses how agents integrate these capabilities to autonomously fulfill high-level user needs. Furthermore, RAB enables systematic comparisons of standalone VLA/WAM models and diverse robot agent architectures under a unified planning-execution-verification framework. Extensive experiments reveal substantial gaps between manipulation and autonomy, demonstrate the advantages of agentic architectures and recursive self-improvement, and highlight the remaining challenges toward open-world robot autonomy.
Zhiwen Luo, Siyu Jiang, Weilong Jiang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Kun He Huazhong University of Sceince and Technology
Visual hallucination remains a major obstacle to the reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). We argue that this issue originates from a fundamental statistical misspecification: the conventional softmax attention implicitly assumes i.i.d. noise, yet real LVLM attention patterns exhibit structured and competitive biases (e.g., attention sinks) that violate this assumption. To address this mismatch, we introduce Latent Attention Denoising (LAD), a principled and training-free framework that recasts attention calibration as a one-step score-based denoising process. LAD employs an interpretable energy function to derive an analytic score and applies a single Langevin-inspired update to actively steer corrupted attention logits toward more faithful configurations. This intervention imposes negligible computational overhead and operates at a speed comparable to standard greedy decoding. Extensive evaluations across diverse architectures confirm that LAD achieves superior performance on both generative and discriminative tasks, effectively mitigating hallucinations while maintaining efficiency comparable to standard decoding.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiyao Dong, Guangsheng Cheng, YiLong Chen, Xiaojin Zhang, Kun He Huazhong University of Sceince and Technology
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have enabled explicit chain-of-thought inference across vision and language, substantially improving performance on complex reasoning tasks. Despite these gains, the reasoning process introduces a subtle yet critical vulnerability. We identify an underexplored multimodal safety failure mode in which harmful objectives are embedded within ostensibly benign contexts, leading models to over-prioritize narrative coherence during reasoning. We term this phenomenon Safety Context Amnesia (SCA), wherein models correctly perceive risk-relevant visual cues but fail to enforce safety constraints as the reasoning process becomes dominated by contextual alignment. To mitigate SCA, we propose Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning (IGSR), an inference-time defense that operates without modifying target model parameters. IGSR employs a Perception Decoupler to extract objective visual evidence into a structured intent output, followed by a Cognitive Arbiter that enforces explicit safety constraints prior to generation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal safety benchmarks demonstrate that IGSR improves defense success rates by over 62% compared to baselines, while largely preserving task utility. These results highlight the critical role of structured, intent-aware reasoning in achieving robust safety reasoning for multimodal reasoning models.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Boyan Li The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Ou Ocean Kun Hei, Yue Yu, Yuyu Luo The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in generating SQL queries, they fundamentally lack the capability to self-evaluate correctness without an execution oracle. This limitation creates a stark Generation-Selection Gap, where high potential accuracy (Pass@K) fails to translate into execution accuracy (Pass@1). Although supervised verifiers offer mitigation, they incur prohibitive annotation costs and suffer from domain fragility. Consequently, recent research has pivoted to the training-free setting. However, existing methods—such as Self-Consistency or LLM-as-a-Judge—remain hampered by systematic bias (consensus on hallucinations) and symbolic blindness (inability to simulate execution states). We introduce DPC (Dual-Paradigm Consistency), a multi-agent framework that reformulates SQL selection from a probabilistic guessing task on hidden data into a deterministic verification task on visible data. Specifically, DPC employs a Slicer and a Tester agent to collaboratively construct a Minimal Distinguishing Database (MDD)—an adversarial, fully observable micro-environment engineered to expose logical discrepancies between candidates. To break the self-correction bias, a Solver agent then verifies the SQL candidates by cross-referencing their execution against a parallel Python/Pandas solution. By validating execution consistency between declarative (SQL) and imperative (Python) paradigms, DPC robustly discriminates correct logic from systematic hallucinations. Experiments on BIRD and Spider across multiple LLMs demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing selection baselines, achieving absolute accuracy improvements of up to 2.2% over strong competitors like Self-Consistency.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表