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Researcher profile

Cihang Xie

Cihang Xie contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computer VisionArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputation and Languagecs.CYSound

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Published work

18 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

AudioMosaic: Contrastive Masked Audio Representation Learning

Audio self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to learn general-purpose representations from large-scale unlabeled audio data. While recent advances have been driven mainly by generative reconstruction objectives, contrastive approaches remain less explored, partly due to the difficulty of designing effective audio augmentations and the large batch sizes required for contrastive pre-training. We introduce \textbf{AudioMosaic}, a contrastive learning-based audio encoder for general audio understanding. During pre-training, AudioMosaic constructs positive pairs by applying structured time-frequency masking to spectrogram patches, which reduces memory usage and enables efficient large-batch training. Compared with generative approaches, the AudioMosaic encoder learns more discriminative utterance-level representations that demonstrate strong transferability across datasets, domains, and acoustic conditions. Extensive experiments show that AudioMosaic achieves state-of-the-art performance on several standard audio benchmarks under both linear probing and fine-tuning. We further show that integrating the pretrained AudioMosaic encoder into audio-language models improves performance on audio-language tasks. The code is publicly available in our \href{https://github.com/HanxunH/AudioMosaic}{GitHub repository}.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

ClawForge: Generating Executable Interactive Benchmarks for Command-Line Agents

Interactive agent benchmarks face a tension between scalable construction and realistic workflow evaluation. Hand-authored tasks are expensive to extend and revise, while static prompt evaluation misses failures that only appear when agents operate over persistent state. Existing interactive benchmarks have advanced agent evaluation significantly, but most initialize tasks from clean state and do not systematically test how agents handle pre-existing partial, stale, or conflicting artifacts. We present \textbf{ClawForge}, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line workflows under state conflict. The framework compiles scenario templates, grounded slots, initialized state, reference trajectories, and validators into reproducible task specifications, and evaluates agents step by step over persistent workflow surfaces using normalized end state and observable side effects rather than exact trajectory matching. We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories). Results across seven frontier models show that the best model reaches only 45.3% strict accuracy, wrong-state replacement remains below 17\% for all models, and the widest model separation (17% to 90%) is driven by whether agents inspect existing state before acting. Partial-credit and step-efficiency analyses further reveal that many failures are near-miss closures rather than early breakdowns, and that models exhibit qualitatively different failure styles under state conflict.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

ClinSeekAgent: Automating Multimodal Evidence Seeking for Agentic Clinical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems have shown promise for clinical decision support, but existing works largely assume that evidence has already been curated and handed to the model. Real-world clinical workflows instead require agents to actively seek, iteratively plan, and synthesize multimodal evidence from heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we introduce ClinSeekAgent, an automated agentic framework for dynamic multimodal evidence seeking that shifts the paradigm from passive evidence consumption to active evidence acquisition. Given only a clinical query and access to raw data sources, ClinSeekAgent gathers evidence by querying medical knowledge bases, navigating raw EHRs, and invoking medical imaging tools; refines its hypotheses as new information emerges; and integrates the collected evidence into grounded clinical decisions. ClinSeekAgent serves both as an inference-time agent for frontier LLMs and as a training-time pipeline for distilling high-quality agent trajectories into compact open-source models. To validate its inference-time effectiveness, we construct ClinSeek-Bench, which pairs Curated Input reasoning from fixed pre-selected evidence with Automated Evidence-Seeking over raw clinical data. On text-only EHR tasks, ClinSeekAgent improves Claude Opus 4.6 from 60.0 to 63.2 overall F1 and MiniMax M2.5 from 43.1 to 47.3, with positive risk-prediction gains in 7 out of 9 evaluated host models. On multimodal tasks, ClinSeekAgent improves Claude Opus 4.6 from 47.5 to 62.6 (+15.1); all evaluated models improve across the three CXR-related task groups. We further validate ClinSeekAgent as a training pipeline by distilling agentic evidence-seeking trajectories into ClinSeek-35B-A3B, which achieves 34.0 average F1 on existing AgentEHR-Bench, improving over its Qwen3.5-35B-A3B baseline by +11.9 points and approaching Claude Opus 4.6.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

EvolveMem:Self-Evolving Memory Architecture via AutoResearch for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for LLM agents that operate across multiple sessions, yet existing memory systems treat retrieval infrastructure as fixed: stored content evolves while scoring functions, fusion strategies, and answer-generation policies remain frozen at deployment. We argue that truly adaptive memory requires co-evolution at two levels: the stored knowledge and the retrieval mechanism that queries it. We present EvolveMem, a self-evolving memory architecture that exposes its full retrieval configuration as a structured action space optimized by an LLM-powered diagnosis module. In each evolution round, the module reads per-question failure logs, identifies root causes, and proposes targeted configuration adjustments; a guarded meta-analyzer applies them with automatic revert-on-regression and explore-on-stagnation safeguards. This closed-loop self-evolution realizes an AutoResearch process: the system autonomously conducts iterative research cycles on its own architecture, replacing manual configuration tuning. Starting from a minimal baseline, the process converges autonomously, discovering effective retrieval strategies including entirely new configuration dimensions not present in the original action space. On LoCoMo, EvolveMem outperforms the strongest baseline by 25.7% relative and achieves a 78.0% relative improvement over the minimal baseline. On MemBench, EvolveMem exceeds the strongest baseline by 18.9% relative. Evolved configurations transfer across benchmarks with positive rather than catastrophic transfer, indicating that the self-evolution process captures universal retrieval principles rather than benchmark-specific heuristics. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

From Seeing to Thinking: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning Improves Post-Training of Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) emphasize long chain-of-thought reasoning; yet, we find that their performance on visual tasks is primarily limited by a lack of visual perception as opposed to reasoning itself. In this work, we systematically study the interplay between perception and reasoning in VLM post-training by decomposing their capabilities into three separate training stages: visual perception, visual reasoning, and textual reasoning, incorporating specialized training data. We demonstrate that visual perception (a) requires targeted optimization with specialized data; (b) serves as a fundamental scaffold that should be solidified through staged training before refining visual reasoning; and (c) is more effectively learned via RL than caption-based SFT. Our experiments across multiple VLMs demonstrate that staged training consistently improves both visual perception and reasoning performance over merged training. Notably, models trained with our approach achieve 1.5% higher reasoning accuracy with 20.8% shorter reasoning traces, suggesting that superior perception reduces the need for excessive reasoning. Furthermore, we show that this capability-based staging represents a new curriculum dimension orthogonal to traditional difficulty-based curricula, and combining both yields further additive gains. Our staged-training models achieve superior performance among open-weight VLMs, establishing advanced results on several visual math and perception (e.g., +5.2% on WeMath and +3.7% on RealWorldQA) tasks compared with the base counterpart.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2024arXiv

SPFormer: Enhancing Vision Transformer with Superpixel Representation

In this work, we introduce SPFormer, a novel Vision Transformer enhanced by superpixel representation. Addressing the limitations of traditional Vision Transformers' fixed-size, non-adaptive patch partitioning, SPFormer employs superpixels that adapt to the image's content. This approach divides the image into irregular, semantically coherent regions, effectively capturing intricate details and applicable at both initial and intermediate feature levels. SPFormer, trainable end-to-end, exhibits superior performance across various benchmarks. Notably, it exhibits significant improvements on the challenging ImageNet benchmark, achieving a 1.4% increase over DeiT-T and 1.1% over DeiT-S respectively. A standout feature of SPFormer is its inherent explainability. The superpixel structure offers a window into the model's internal processes, providing valuable insights that enhance the model's interpretability. This level of clarity significantly improves SPFormer's robustness, particularly in challenging scenarios such as image rotations and occlusions, demonstrating its adaptability and resilience.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Benchmarking Robustness in Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has demonstrated excellent quality in novel view synthesis, thanks to its ability to model 3D object geometries in a concise formulation. However, current approaches to NeRF-based models rely on clean images with accurate camera calibration, which can be difficult to obtain in the real world, where data is often subject to corruption and distortion. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of the robustness of NeRF-based novel view synthesis algorithms in the presence of different types of corruptions. We find that NeRF-based models are significantly degraded in the presence of corruption, and are more sensitive to a different set of corruptions than image recognition models. Furthermore, we analyze the robustness of the feature encoder in generalizable methods, which synthesize images using neural features extracted via convolutional neural networks or transformers, and find that it only contributes marginally to robustness. Finally, we reveal that standard data augmentation techniques, which can significantly improve the robustness of recognition models, do not help the robustness of NeRF-based models. We hope that our findings will attract more researchers to study the robustness of NeRF-based approaches and help to improve their performance in the real world.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A Simple Data Mixing Prior for Improving Self-Supervised Learning

Data mixing (e.g., Mixup, Cutmix, ResizeMix) is an essential component for advancing recognition models. In this paper, we focus on studying its effectiveness in the self-supervised setting. By noticing the mixed images that share the same source images are intrinsically related to each other, we hereby propose SDMP, short for $\textbf{S}$imple $\textbf{D}$ata $\textbf{M}$ixing $\textbf{P}$rior, to capture this straightforward yet essential prior, and position such mixed images as additional $\textbf{positive pairs}$ to facilitate self-supervised representation learning. Our experiments verify that the proposed SDMP enables data mixing to help a set of self-supervised learning frameworks (e.g., MoCo) achieve better accuracy and out-of-distribution robustness. More notably, our SDMP is the first method that successfully leverages data mixing to improve (rather than hurt) the performance of Vision Transformers in the self-supervised setting. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/SDMP

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Fast AdvProp

Adversarial Propagation (AdvProp) is an effective way to improve recognition models, leveraging adversarial examples. Nonetheless, AdvProp suffers from the extremely slow training speed, mainly because: a) extra forward and backward passes are required for generating adversarial examples; b) both original samples and their adversarial counterparts are used for training (i.e., 2$\times$ data). In this paper, we introduce Fast AdvProp, which aggressively revamps AdvProp's costly training components, rendering the method nearly as cheap as the vanilla training. Specifically, our modifications in Fast AdvProp are guided by the hypothesis that disentangled learning with adversarial examples is the key for performance improvements, while other training recipes (e.g., paired clean and adversarial training samples, multi-step adversarial attackers) could be largely simplified. Our empirical results show that, compared to the vanilla training baseline, Fast AdvProp is able to further model performance on a spectrum of visual benchmarks, without incurring extra training cost. Additionally, our ablations find Fast AdvProp scales better if larger models are used, is compatible with existing data augmentation methods (i.e., Mixup and CutMix), and can be easily adapted to other recognition tasks like object detection. The code is available here: https://github.com/meijieru/fast_advprop.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer

The success of language Transformers is primarily attributed to the pretext task of masked language modeling (MLM), where texts are first tokenized into semantically meaningful pieces. In this work, we study masked image modeling (MIM) and indicate the advantages and challenges of using a semantically meaningful visual tokenizer. We present a self-supervised framework iBOT that can perform masked prediction with an online tokenizer. Specifically, we perform self-distillation on masked patch tokens and take the teacher network as the online tokenizer, along with self-distillation on the class token to acquire visual semantics. The online tokenizer is jointly learnable with the MIM objective and dispenses with a multi-stage training pipeline where the tokenizer needs to be pre-trained beforehand. We show the prominence of iBOT by achieving an 82.3% linear probing accuracy and an 87.8% fine-tuning accuracy evaluated on ImageNet-1K. Beyond the state-of-the-art image classification results, we underline emerging local semantic patterns, which helps the models to obtain strong robustness against common corruptions and achieve leading results on dense downstream tasks, eg., object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

In Defense of Image Pre-Training for Spatiotemporal Recognition

Image pre-training, the current de-facto paradigm for a wide range of visual tasks, is generally less favored in the field of video recognition. By contrast, a common strategy is to directly train with spatiotemporal convolutional neural networks (CNNs) from scratch. Nonetheless, interestingly, by taking a closer look at these from-scratch learned CNNs, we note there exist certain 3D kernels that exhibit much stronger appearance modeling ability than others, arguably suggesting appearance information is already well disentangled in learning. Inspired by this observation, we hypothesize that the key to effectively leveraging image pre-training lies in the decomposition of learning spatial and temporal features, and revisiting image pre-training as the appearance prior to initializing 3D kernels. In addition, we propose Spatial-Temporal Separable (STS) convolution, which explicitly splits the feature channels into spatial and temporal groups, to further enable a more thorough decomposition of spatiotemporal features for fine-tuning 3D CNNs. Our experiments show that simply replacing 3D convolution with STS notably improves a wide range of 3D CNNs without increasing parameters and computation on both Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2. Moreover, this new training pipeline consistently achieves better results on video recognition with significant speedup. For instance, we achieve +0.6% top-1 of Slowfast on Kinetics-400 over the strong 256-epoch 128-GPU baseline while fine-tuning for only 50 epochs with 4 GPUs. The code and models are available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/Image-Pretraining-for-Video.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Simulated Adversarial Testing of Face Recognition Models

Most machine learning models are validated and tested on fixed datasets. This can give an incomplete picture of the capabilities and weaknesses of the model. Such weaknesses can be revealed at test time in the real world. The risks involved in such failures can be loss of profits, loss of time or even loss of life in certain critical applications. In order to alleviate this issue, simulators can be controlled in a fine-grained manner using interpretable parameters to explore the semantic image manifold. In this work, we propose a framework for learning how to test machine learning algorithms using simulators in an adversarial manner in order to find weaknesses in the model before deploying it in critical scenarios. We apply this method in a face recognition setup. We show that certain weaknesses of models trained on real data can be discovered using simulated samples. Using our proposed method, we can find adversarial synthetic faces that fool contemporary face recognition models. This demonstrates the fact that these models have weaknesses that are not measured by commonly used validation datasets. We hypothesize that this type of adversarial examples are not isolated, but usually lie in connected spaces in the latent space of the simulator. We present a method to find these adversarial regions as opposed to the typical adversarial points found in the adversarial example literature.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Adversarial Examples Improve Image Recognition

Adversarial examples are commonly viewed as a threat to ConvNets. Here we present an opposite perspective: adversarial examples can be used to improve image recognition models if harnessed in the right manner. We propose AdvProp, an enhanced adversarial training scheme which treats adversarial examples as additional examples, to prevent overfitting. Key to our method is the usage of a separate auxiliary batch norm for adversarial examples, as they have different underlying distributions to normal examples. We show that AdvProp improves a wide range of models on various image recognition tasks and performs better when the models are bigger. For instance, by applying AdvProp to the latest EfficientNet-B7 [28] on ImageNet, we achieve significant improvements on ImageNet (+0.7%), ImageNet-C (+6.5%), ImageNet-A (+7.0%), Stylized-ImageNet (+4.8%). With an enhanced EfficientNet-B8, our method achieves the state-of-the-art 85.5% ImageNet top-1 accuracy without extra data. This result even surpasses the best model in [20] which is trained with 3.5B Instagram images (~3000X more than ImageNet) and ~9.4X more parameters. Models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Neural Architecture Search for Lightweight Non-Local Networks

Non-Local (NL) blocks have been widely studied in various vision tasks. However, it has been rarely explored to embed the NL blocks in mobile neural networks, mainly due to the following challenges: 1) NL blocks generally have heavy computation cost which makes it difficult to be applied in applications where computational resources are limited, and 2) it is an open problem to discover an optimal configuration to embed NL blocks into mobile neural networks. We propose AutoNL to overcome the above two obstacles. Firstly, we propose a Lightweight Non-Local (LightNL) block by squeezing the transformation operations and incorporating compact features. With the novel design choices, the proposed LightNL block is 400x computationally cheaper} than its conventional counterpart without sacrificing the performance. Secondly, by relaxing the structure of the LightNL block to be differentiable during training, we propose an efficient neural architecture search algorithm to learn an optimal configuration of LightNL blocks in an end-to-end manner. Notably, using only 32 GPU hours, the searched AutoNL model achieves 77.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet under a typical mobile setting (350M FLOPs), significantly outperforming previous mobile models including MobileNetV2 (+5.7%), FBNet (+2.8%) and MnasNet (+2.1%). Code and models are available at https://github.com/LiYingwei/AutoNL.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

PatchAttack: A Black-box Texture-based Attack with Reinforcement Learning

Patch-based attacks introduce a perceptible but localized change to the input that induces misclassification. A limitation of current patch-based black-box attacks is that they perform poorly for targeted attacks, and even for the less challenging non-targeted scenarios, they require a large number of queries. Our proposed PatchAttack is query efficient and can break models for both targeted and non-targeted attacks. PatchAttack induces misclassifications by superimposing small textured patches on the input image. We parametrize the appearance of these patches by a dictionary of class-specific textures. This texture dictionary is learned by clustering Gram matrices of feature activations from a VGG backbone. PatchAttack optimizes the position and texture parameters of each patch using reinforcement learning. Our experiments show that PatchAttack achieves > 99% success rate on ImageNet for a wide range of architectures, while only manipulating 3% of the image for non-targeted attacks and 10% on average for targeted attacks. Furthermore, we show that PatchAttack circumvents state-of-the-art adversarial defense methods successfully.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Regional Homogeneity: Towards Learning Transferable Universal Adversarial Perturbations Against Defenses

This paper focuses on learning transferable adversarial examples specifically against defense models (models to defense adversarial attacks). In particular, we show that a simple universal perturbation can fool a series of state-of-the-art defenses. Adversarial examples generated by existing attacks are generally hard to transfer to defense models. We observe the property of regional homogeneity in adversarial perturbations and suggest that the defenses are less robust to regionally homogeneous perturbations. Therefore, we propose an effective transforming paradigm and a customized gradient transformer module to transform existing perturbations into regionally homogeneous ones. Without explicitly forcing the perturbations to be universal, we observe that a well-trained gradient transformer module tends to output input-independent gradients (hence universal) benefiting from the under-fitting phenomenon. Thorough experiments demonstrate that our work significantly outperforms the prior art attacking algorithms (either image-dependent or universal ones) by an average improvement of 14.0% when attacking 9 defenses in the transfer-based attack setting. In addition to the cross-model transferability, we also verify that regionally homogeneous perturbations can well transfer across different vision tasks (attacking with the semantic segmentation task and testing on the object detection task). The code is available here: https://github.com/LiYingwei/Regional-Homogeneity.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Universal Physical Camouflage Attacks on Object Detectors

In this paper, we study physical adversarial attacks on object detectors in the wild. Previous works mostly craft instance-dependent perturbations only for rigid or planar objects. To this end, we propose to learn an adversarial pattern to effectively attack all instances belonging to the same object category, referred to as Universal Physical Camouflage Attack (UPC). Concretely, UPC crafts camouflage by jointly fooling the region proposal network, as well as misleading the classifier and the regressor to output errors. In order to make UPC effective for non-rigid or non-planar objects, we introduce a set of transformations for mimicking deformable properties. We additionally impose optimization constraint to make generated patterns look natural to human observers. To fairly evaluate the effectiveness of different physical-world attacks, we present the first standardized virtual database, AttackScenes, which simulates the real 3D world in a controllable and reproducible environment. Extensive experiments suggest the superiority of our proposed UPC compared with existing physical adversarial attackers not only in virtual environments (AttackScenes), but also in real-world physical environments. Code and dataset are available at https://mesunhlf.github.io/index_physical.html.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access