Xidian University
Abstract:Autonomous parking fundamentally differs from on-road driving due to its frequent direction changes and complex maneuvering requirements. However, existing End-to-End (E2E) planning methods often simplify the parking task into a geometric path regression problem, neglecting explicit modeling of the vehicle's kinematic state. This "dimensionality deficiency" easily leads to physically infeasible trajectories and deviates from real human driving behavior, particularly at critical gear-shift points in multi-shot parking scenarios. In this paper, we propose SunnyParking, a novel dual-branch E2E architecture that achieves motion state awareness by jointly predicting spatial trajectories and discrete motion state sequences (e.g., forward/reverse). Additionally, we introduce a Fourier feature-based representation of target parking slots to overcome the resolution limitations of traditional bird's-eye view (BEV) approaches, enabling high-precision target interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework generates more robust and human-like trajectories in complex multi-shot parking scenarios, while significantly improving gear-shift point localization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. We open-source a new parking dataset of the CARLA simulator, specifically designed to evaluate full prediction capabilities under complex maneuvers.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential for enhancing recommender systems through their extensive world knowledge and reasoning capabilities. However, effectively translating these semantic signals into traditional collaborative embeddings remains an open challenge. Existing approaches typically fall into two extremes: direct inference methods are computationally prohibitive for large-scale retrieval, while embedding-based methods primarily focus on unilateral feature augmentation rather than holistic collaborative signal enhancement. To bridge this gap, we propose Topology-Augmented Graph Collaborative Filtering (TAGCF), a novel framework that transforms semantic knowledge into topological connectivity. Unlike existing approaches that depend on textual features or direct interaction synthesis, TAGCF employs LLMs to infer interaction intents and underlying causal relationships from user-item pairs, representing these insights as intermediate attribute nodes within an enriched User-Attribute-Item (U-A-I) graph. Furthermore, to effectively model the heterogeneous relations in this augmented structure, we propose Adaptive Relation-weighted Graph Convolution (ARGC), which employs relation-specific prediction networks to dynamically estimate the importance of each relation type. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets and CF backbones demonstrate consistent improvements, with comprehensive evaluations including cold-start scenarios validating the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. All code will be made publicly available. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following anonymous link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AGCF-2441353190/.
Abstract:LVLMs have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities but remain prone to hallucinations, producing outputs inconsistent with visual inputs or user instructions. Existing training-free methods, including contrastive decoding and auxiliary expert models, which incur several times more computational overhead and may introduce potential interference, as well as static internal signal enhancement, are often vulnerable to the attention sink phenomenon. We find that internal Positive Attention Dynamics (PAD) in LVLMs naturally reveal semantically core visual regions under the distortions of attention sinks. Based on this, we propose Positive Attention Dynamics Enhancement (PADE), a training-free attention intervention that constructs a PAD map to identify semantically core visual regions, applies per-head Median Absolute Deviation Scaling to adaptively control the intervention strength, and leverages System-Token Compensation to maintain attention to complex user instructions and support long-term output consistency. Experiments on multiple LVLMs and benchmarks show that PADE improves visual grounding and reduces hallucinations, validating the effectiveness of leveraging internal attention dynamics for reliable multimodal reasoning.
Abstract:Automating scientific discovery in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of programs; it demands structured hypothesis management, environment interaction, and principled reflection. We present OR-Agent, a configurable multi-agent research framework designed for automated exploration in rich experimental environments. OR-Agent organizes research as a structured tree-based workflow that explicitly models branching hypothesis generation and systematic backtracking, enabling controlled management of research trajectories beyond simple mutation-crossover loops. At its core, we introduce an evolutionary-systematic ideation mechanism that unifies evolutionary selection of research starting points, comprehensive research plan generation, and coordinated exploration within a research tree. We further propose a hierarchical optimization-inspired reflection system: short-term experimental reflection operates as a form of verbal gradient providing immediate corrective signals; long-term reflection accumulates cross-experiment insights as verbal momentum; and memory compression serves as a regularization mechanism analogous to weight decay, preserving essential signals while mitigating drift. Together, these components form a principled architecture governing research dynamics. We conduct extensive experiments across classical combinatorial optimization benchmarks-including traveling salesman, capacitated vehicle routing, bin packing, orienteering, and multiple knapsack problems-as well as simulation-based cooperative driving scenarios. Results demonstrate that OR-Agent outperforms strong evolutionary baselines while providing a general, extensible, and inspectable framework for AI-assisted scientific discovery. OR-Agent source code and experiments data are publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/OR-Agent.
Abstract:Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely on autoregressive generation, which limits their efficiency and flexibility. In particular, token-by-token decoding incurs high latency, while the fixed left-to-right generation order causes early prediction errors to propagate and is difficult to revise. To address these limitations, we explore the use of diffusion language models (dLLMs) for document reranking and propose DiffuRank, a reranking framework built upon dLLMs. Unlike autoregressive models, dLLMs support more flexible decoding and generation processes that are not constrained to a left-to-right order, and enable parallel decoding, which may lead to improved efficiency and controllability. Specifically, we investigate three reranking strategies based on dLLMs: (1) a pointwise approach that uses dLLMs to estimate the relevance of each query-document pair; (2) a logit-based listwise approach that prompts dLLMs to jointly assess the relevance of multiple documents and derives ranking lists directly from model logits; and (3) a permutation-based listwise approach that adapts the canonical decoding process of dLLMs to the reranking tasks. For each approach, we design corresponding training methods to fully exploit the advantages of dLLMs. We evaluate both zero-shot and fine-tuned reranking performance on multiple benchmarks. Experimental results show that dLLMs achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, that of autoregressive LLMs with similar model sizes. These findings demonstrate the promise of diffusion-based language models as a compelling alternative to autoregressive architectures for document reranking.
Abstract:This paper proposes Omni Dense Captioning, a novel task designed to generate continuous, fine-grained, and structured audio-visual narratives with explicit timestamps. To ensure dense semantic coverage, we introduce a six-dimensional structural schema to create "script-like" captions, enabling readers to vividly imagine the video content scene by scene, akin to a cinematographic screenplay. To facilitate research, we construct OmniDCBench, a high-quality, human-annotated benchmark, and propose SodaM, a unified metric that evaluates time-aware detailed descriptions while mitigating scene boundary ambiguity. Furthermore, we construct a training dataset, TimeChatCap-42K, and present TimeChat-Captioner-7B, a strong baseline trained via SFT and GRPO with task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeChat-Captioner-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro, while its generated dense descriptions significantly boost downstream capabilities in audio-visual reasoning (DailyOmni and WorldSense) and temporal grounding (Charades-STA). All datasets, models, and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yaolinli/TimeChat-Captioner.
Abstract:Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a critical role in decision-making for many real-world applications. Recently, LLM-based forecasters have made promising advancements. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods often lack explicit experience accumulation and continual evolution. In this work, we propose MemCast, a learning-to-memory framework that reformulates TSF as an experience-conditioned reasoning task. Specifically, we learn experience from the training set and organize it into a hierarchical memory. This is achieved by summarizing prediction results into historical patterns, distilling inference trajectories into reasoning wisdom, and inducing extracted temporal features into general laws. Furthermore, during inference, we leverage historical patterns to guide the reasoning process and utilize reasoning wisdom to select better trajectories, while general laws serve as criteria for reflective iteration. Additionally, to enable continual evolution, we design a dynamic confidence adaptation strategy that updates the confidence of individual entries without leaking the test set distribution. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MemCast consistently outperforms previous methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/MemCast-TS.
Abstract:As large language model agents tackle increasingly complex long-horizon tasks, effective post-training becomes critical. Prior work faces fundamental challenges: outcome-only rewards fail to precisely attribute credit to intermediate steps, estimated step-level rewards introduce systematic noise, and Monte Carlo sampling approaches for step reward estimation incur prohibitive computational cost. Inspired by findings that only a small fraction of high-entropy tokens drive effective RL for reasoning, we propose Critical Step Optimization (CSO), which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps, decision points where alternate actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. Crucially, our method starts from failed policy trajectories rather than expert demonstrations, directly targeting the policy model's weaknesses. We use a process reward model (PRM) to identify candidate critical steps, leverage expert models to propose high-quality alternatives, then continue execution from these alternatives using the policy model itself until task completion. Only alternatives that the policy successfully executes to correct outcomes are verified and used as DPO training data, ensuring both quality and policy reachability. This yields fine-grained, verifiable supervision at critical decisions while avoiding trajectory-level coarseness and step-level noise. Experiments on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch show that CSO achieves 37% and 26% relative improvement over the SFT baseline and substantially outperforms other post-training methods, while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. This demonstrates the effectiveness of selective verification-based learning for agent post-training.
Abstract:Time series forecasting can be viewed as a generative problem that requires both semantic understanding over contextual conditions and stochastic modeling of continuous temporal dynamics. Existing approaches typically rely on either autoregressive large language models (LLMs) for semantic context modeling or diffusion-like models for continuous probabilistic generation. However, neither method alone can adequately model both aspects simultaneously. In this work, we propose CoGenCast, a hybrid generative framework that couples pre-trained LLMs with flow-matching mechanism for effective time series forecasting. Specifically, we reconfigure pre-trained decoder-only LLMs into a native forecasting encoder-decoder backbone by modifying only the attention topology, enabling bidirectional context encoding and causal representation generation. Building on this, a flow-matching mechanism is further integrated to model temporal evolution, capturing continuous stochastic dynamics conditioned on the autoregressively generated representation. Notably, CoGenCast naturally supports multimodal forecasting and cross-domain unified training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CoGenCast consistently outperforms previous compared baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/liuyaguo/_CoGenCast.
Abstract:Time series forecasting has traditionally been formulated as a model-centric, static, and single-pass prediction problem that maps historical observations to future values. While this paradigm has driven substantial progress, it proves insufficient in adaptive and multi-turn settings where forecasting requires informative feature extraction, reasoning-driven inference, iterative refinement, and continual adaptation over time. In this paper, we argue for agentic time series forecasting (ATSF), which reframes forecasting as an agentic process composed of perception, planning, action, reflection, and memory. Rather than focusing solely on predictive models, ATSF emphasizes organizing forecasting as an agentic workflow that can interact with tools, incorporate feedback from outcomes, and evolve through experience accumulation. We outline three representative implementation paradigms -- workflow-based design, agentic reinforcement learning, and a hybrid agentic workflow paradigm -- and discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise when shifting from model-centric prediction to agentic forecasting. Together, this position aims to establish agentic forecasting as a foundation for future research at the intersection of time series forecasting.