Renal Division, Department of Medicine, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, China, Center for Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, China
Abstract:Time series forecasting plays a critical role in domains such as transportation, energy, and meteorology. Despite their success, modern deep forecasting models are typically trained to minimize point-wise prediction loss without leveraging the rich information contained in past prediction residuals from rolling forecasts - residuals that reflect persistent biases, unmodeled patterns, or evolving dynamics. We propose TEFL (Temporal Error Feedback Learning), a unified learning framework that explicitly incorporates these historical residuals into the forecasting pipeline during both training and evaluation. To make this practical in deep multi-step settings, we address three key challenges: (1) selecting observable multi-step residuals under the partial observability of rolling forecasts, (2) integrating them through a lightweight low-rank adapter to preserve efficiency and prevent overfitting, and (3) designing a two-stage training procedure that jointly optimizes the base forecaster and error module. Extensive experiments across 10 real-world datasets and 5 backbone architectures show that TEFL consistently improves accuracy, reducing MAE by 5-10% on average. Moreover, it demonstrates strong robustness under abrupt changes and distribution shifts, with error reductions exceeding 10% (up to 19.5%) in challenging scenarios. By embedding residual-based feedback directly into the learning process, TEFL offers a simple, general, and effective enhancement to modern deep forecasting systems.
Abstract:Accurately predicting short-term traffic demand is critical for intelligent transportation systems. While deep learning models achieve strong performance under stationary conditions, their accuracy often degrades significantly when faced with distribution shifts caused by external events or evolving urban dynamics. Frequent model retraining to adapt to such changes incurs prohibitive computational costs, especially for large-scale or foundation models. To address this challenge, we propose FORESEE (Forecasting Online with Residual Smoothing and Ensemble Experts), a lightweight online adaptation framework that is accurate, robust, and computationally efficient. FORESEE operates without any parameter updates to the base model. Instead, it corrects today's forecast in each region using yesterday's prediction error, stabilized through exponential smoothing guided by a mixture-of-experts mechanism that adapts to recent error dynamics. Moreover, an adaptive spatiotemporal smoothing component propagates error signals across neighboring regions and time slots, capturing coherent shifts in demand patterns. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets with three backbone models demonstrate that FORESEE consistently improves prediction accuracy, maintains robustness even when distribution shifts are minimal (avoiding performance degradation), and achieves the lowest computational overhead among existing online methods. By enabling real-time adaptation of traffic forecasting models with negligible computational cost, FORESEE paves the way for deploying reliable, up-to-date prediction systems in dynamic urban environments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xiannanhuang/FORESEE
Abstract:Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for achieving high performance while ensuring safety in real-world applications. However, the complex interplay of multiple uncertainty sources in real environments poses significant challenges for interpretable risk assessment and robust decision-making. To address these challenges, we propose Fuz-RL, a fuzzy measure-guided robust framework for safe RL. Specifically, our framework develops a novel fuzzy Bellman operator for estimating robust value functions using Choquet integrals. Theoretically, we prove that solving the Fuz-RL problem (in Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) form) is equivalent to solving distributionally robust safe RL problems (in robust CMDP form), effectively avoiding min-max optimization. Empirical analyses on safe-control-gym and safety-gymnasium scenarios demonstrate that Fuz-RL effectively integrates with existing safe RL baselines in a model-free manner, significantly improving both safety and control performance under various types of uncertainties in observation, action, and dynamics.
Abstract:The prevailing paradigm for training large reasoning models--combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)--is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on high-quality, human-annotated reasoning data and external verifiers. This dependency incurs significant data-collection costs, risks embedding human cognitive biases, and confines the reinforcement learning stage to objectively assessable domains like mathematics and coding, leaving a wide range of unverifiable tasks beyond its scope. To overcome these limitations, we introduce NRT (Native Reasoning Training), a novel framework that cultivates complex reasoning by having the model generate its own reasoning traces using only standard question-answer pairs, thereby obviating the need for expert-written demonstrations. NRT reframes the training problem by treating the reasoning process as a latent variable. It employs a unified training objective that models reasoning as an optimization problem, intrinsically rewarding paths that increase the model's likelihood of producing the ground-truth answer. This unified perspective allows us to analyze intrinsic failure modes of prior methods, such as policy collapse, and systematically design more robust reward aggregation functions, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop where the model learns to think in ways that resolve its own uncertainty. Empirical evaluation on Llama and Mistral model families demonstrates that NRT achieves state-of-the-art performance among verifier-free methods, significantly outperforming standard SFT baselines and prior verifier-free RL methods. Our approach yields particularly strong performance gains in complex reasoning domains and exhibits high robustness to policy collapse, offering a general, scalable path toward building more powerful and broadly applicable reasoning systems.
Abstract:The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs: requiring preprocessing, lacking global evaluation, violating query independence, or incurring high computational overhead. We present RRAttention, a novel dynamic sparse attention method that simultaneously achieves all desirable properties through a head \underline{r}ound-\underline{r}obin (RR) sampling strategy. By rotating query sampling positions across attention heads within each stride, RRAttention maintains query independence while enabling efficient global pattern discovery with stride-level aggregation. Our method reduces complexity from $O(L^2)$ to $O(L^2/S^2)$ and employs adaptive Top-$τ$ selection for optimal sparsity. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding (HELMET) and multimodal video comprehension (Video-MME) demonstrate that RRAttention recovers over 99\% of full attention performance while computing only half of the attention blocks, achieving 2.4$\times$ speedup at 128K context length and outperforming existing dynamic sparse attention methods.
Abstract:Defect depth quantification in additively manufactured (AM) components remains a significant challenge for non-destructive testing (NDT). This study proposes a Pixel-wise Quantitative Thermography Neural Network (PQT-Net) to address this challenge for polylactic acid (PLA) parts. A key innovation is a novel data augmentation strategy that reconstructs thermal sequence data into two-dimensional stripe images, preserving the complete temporal evolution of heat diffusion for each pixel. The PQT-Net architecture incorporates a pre-trained EfficientNetV2-S backbone and a custom Residual Regression Head (RRH) with learnable parameters to refine outputs. Comparative experiments demonstrate the superiority of PQT-Net over other deep learning models, achieving a minimum Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0094 mm and a coefficient of determination (R) exceeding 99%. The high precision of PQT-Net underscores its potential for robust quantitative defect characterization in AM.
Abstract:Infrared-visible image fusion aims to integrate infrared and visible information into a single fused image. Existing 2D fusion methods focus on fusing images from fixed camera viewpoints, neglecting a comprehensive understanding of complex scenarios, which results in the loss of critical information about the scene. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Infrared-Visible Gaussian Fusion (IVGF) framework, which reconstructs scene geometry from multimodal 2D inputs and enables direct rendering of fused images. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal adjustment (CMA) module that modulates the opacity of Gaussians to solve the problem of cross-modal conflicts. Moreover, to preserve the distinctive features from both modalities, we introduce a fusion loss that guides the optimization of CMA, thus ensuring that the fused image retains the critical characteristics of each modality. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Abstract:Traditional two-dimensional thermography, despite being non-invasive and useful for defect detection in the construction field, is limited in effectively assessing complex geometries, inaccessible areas, and subsurface defects. This paper introduces Thermo-LIO, a novel multi-sensor system that can enhance Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) by fusing thermal imaging with high-resolution LiDAR. To achieve this, the study first develops a multimodal fusion method combining thermal imaging and LiDAR, enabling precise calibration and synchronization of multimodal data streams to create accurate representations of temperature distributions in buildings. Second, it integrates this fusion approach with LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO), enabling full coverage of large-scale structures and allowing for detailed monitoring of temperature variations and defect detection across inspection cycles. Experimental validations, including case studies on a bridge and a hall building, demonstrate that Thermo-LIO can detect detailed thermal anomalies and structural defects more accurately than traditional methods. The system enhances diagnostic precision, enables real-time processing, and expands inspection coverage, highlighting the crucial role of multimodal sensor integration in advancing SHM methodologies for large-scale civil infrastructure.
Abstract:The advantage of RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) detection lies in its ability to perform modality fusion and integrate cross-modality complementary information, enabling robust detection under diverse illumination and weather conditions. However, under extreme conditions where one modality exhibits poor quality and disturbs detection, modality separation is necessary to mitigate the impact of noise. To address this problem, we propose a Modality-Decoupled RGB-T detection framework with Query Fusion (MDQF) to balance modality complementation and separation. In this framework, DETR-like detectors are employed as separate branches for the RGB and TIR images, with query fusion interspersed between the two branches in each refinement stage. Herein, query fusion is performed by feeding the high-quality queries from one branch to the other one after query selection and adaptation. This design effectively excludes the degraded modality and corrects the predictions using high-quality queries. Moreover, the decoupled framework allows us to optimize each individual branch with unpaired RGB or TIR images, eliminating the need for paired RGB-T data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach delivers superior performance to existing RGB-T detectors and achieves better modality independence.
Abstract:This paper addresses the critical bottleneck of infrared (IR) data scarcity in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) defect detection by proposing a cross-modal data augmentation framework integrating CycleGAN and YOLOv8. Unlike conventional methods relying on paired supervision, we leverage CycleGAN to perform unpaired image-to-image translation, mapping abundant visible-light PCB images into the infrared domain. This generative process synthesizes high-fidelity pseudo-IR samples that preserve the structural semantics of defects while accurately simulating thermal distribution patterns. Subsequently, we construct a heterogeneous training strategy that fuses generated pseudo-IR data with limited real IR samples to train a lightweight YOLOv8 detector. Experimental results demonstrate that this method effectively enhances feature learning under low-data conditions. The augmented detector significantly outperforms models trained on limited real data alone and approaches the performance benchmarks of fully supervised training, proving the efficacy of pseudo-IR synthesis as a robust augmentation strategy for industrial inspection.