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Dandan Tu

Dandan Tu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Learning to Learn from Multimodal Experience

Experience-driven learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling agents to improve from interaction trajectories by accumulating and reusing past experience. However, existing approaches are predominantly developed in textual settings and rely on manually designed memory schemas, limiting their applicability to multimodal environments. In real-world scenarios, experience is inherently multimodal, involving heterogeneous signals across perception, reasoning, and action, which makes effective memory design significantly more challenging. In particular, the optimal way to structure and utilize multimodal experience is highly task-dependent and evolves over time, rendering fixed memory designs insufficient. In this work, we propose a new paradigm, learning to learn from multimodal experience, which shifts memory design from a predefined component to an adaptive and learnable process. Our framework enables agents to dynamically construct, organize, and utilize memory based on task requirements and interaction history, effectively learning how to structure experience for improved performance. Experiments demonstrate that adaptive memory design substantially enhances agent performance and generalization across multimodal tasks, highlighting the critical role of learning memory mechanisms in experience-driven learning.

preprint2026arXiv

Precision over Diversity: High-Precision Reward Generalizes to Robust Instruction Following

A central belief in scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for instruction following (IF) tasks is that, a diverse mixture of verifiable hard and unverifiable soft constraints is essential for generalizing to unseen instructions. In this work, we challenge this prevailing consensus through a systematic empirical investigation. Counter-intuitively, we find that models trained on hard-only constraints consistently outperform those trained on mixed datasets. Extensive experiments reveal that reward precision, rather than constraint diversity, is the primary driver of effective alignment. The LLM judge suffers from a low recall rate in detecting false response, which leads to severe reward hacking, thereby undermining the benefits of diversity. Furthermore, analysis of the attention mechanism reveals that high-precision rewards develop a transferable meta-skill for IF. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple yet effective data-centric refinement strategy that prioritizes reward precision. Evaluated on five benchmarks, our approach outperforms competitive baselines by 13.4\% in performance while achieving a 58\% reduction in training time, maintaining strong generalization beyond instruction following. Our findings advocate for a paradigm shift: moving away from the indiscriminate pursuit of data diversity toward high-precision rewards.

preprint2026arXiv

Rethinking Experience Utilization in Self-Evolving Language Model Agents

Self-evolving agents improve by accumulating and reusing experience from past interactions. Existing work has largely focused on how experience is constructed, represented, and updated, while paying less attention to how experience should be used during runtime decision-making. As a result, most agents rely on rigid usage strategies, either injecting experience once at initialization or at every step, without considering whether it is needed for the current decision. This paper studies experience utilization as a critical design dimension of self-evolving agents. We ask whether agents benefit from interweaving experience use with decision-making, so that experience is invoked only when additional guidance is needed. To examine this question, we introduce {ExpWeaver}, a lightweight instantiation that leaves experience construction unchanged and modifies only runtime utilization by exposing experience as an optional resource during reasoning. Across four representative frameworks, seven LLM backbones, and three types of environments, ExpWeaver consistently achieves the best performance among different utilization strategies. Reinforcement learning experiments further show that this behavior can be amplified through training. Usage-pattern, causal ablation, and entropy-based analyses reveal that ExpWeaver enables agents to invoke experience selectively, at beneficial decision points, and under higher reasoning uncertainty. Overall, our findings call for a shift from merely studying \emph{what} experience to store toward understanding \emph{how} and \emph{when} experience should enter decision-making.

preprint2026arXiv

Safety Geometry Collapse in Multimodal LLMs and Adaptive Drift Correction

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often fail to transfer safety capabilities learned in the text modality to semantically equivalent non-text inputs, revealing a persistent multimodal safety gap. We study this gap from a representation-geometric perspective by analyzing a text-aligned refusal direction and a modality-induced drift direction. We show that multimodal inputs compress the usable separation along the refusal direction, making it no longer reliable for identifying and refusing harmful inputs. We refer to this failure mode as Safety Geometry Collapse. We quantify it through conditional refusal separability and show that stronger modality-induced drift is consistently associated with weaker refusal separability and higher attack success rates. We then validate the causal role of modality-induced drift through a fixed-strength activation intervention: counteracting the estimated drift restores refusal separability and improves multimodal safety. After drift correction, we further observe self-rectification, where the model recovers its ability to recognize and refuse harmful multimodal inputs during forward dynamics. This effect also provides an internal signal of the model's perceived harmfulness of each input. Motivated by this signal, we propose ReGap, a training-free inference-time method that adaptively corrects modality drift using self-rectification. Experiments across multiple multimodal safety benchmarks and utility benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ReGap, which significantly improves the safety of MLLMs without compromising general capabilities. Our findings highlight representation-level modality alignment as a crucial direction for real-time safety improvement and for building safer, more reliable MLLMs.

preprint2026arXiv

SeePhys Pro: Diagnosing Modality Transfer and Blind-Training Effects in Multimodal RLVR for Physics Reasoning

We introduce SeePhys Pro, a fine-grained modality transfer benchmark that studies whether models preserve the same reasoning capability when critical information is progressively transferred from text to image. Unlike standard vision-essential benchmarks that evaluate a single input form, SeePhys Pro features four semantically aligned variants for each problem with progressively increasing visual elements. Our evaluation shows that current frontier models are far from representation-invariant reasoners: performance degrades on average as information moves from language to diagrams, with visual variable grounding as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this inference-time fragility, we further develop large training corpora for multimodal RLVR and use blind training as a diagnostic control, finding that RL with all training images masked can still improve performance on unmasked validation sets. To analyze this effect, text-deletion, image-mask-rate, and format-saturation controls suggest that such gains can arise from residual textual and distributional cues rather than valid visual evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate multimodal reasoning not only by final-answer accuracy, but also by robustness under modality transfer and by diagnostics that test whether improvements rely on task-critical visual evidence.

preprint2026arXiv

Self-Distilled Trajectory-Aware Boltzmann Modeling: Bridging the Training-Inference Discrepancy in Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering stronger global awareness and highly parallel generation. However, post-training DLMs with standard Negative Evidence Lower Bound (NELBO)-based supervised fine-tuning remains inefficient: training reconstructs randomly masked tokens in a single step, whereas inference follows a confidence-guided, multi-step easy-to-hard denoising trajectory. Recent trajectory-based self-distillation methods exploit such inference trajectories mainly for sampling-step compression and acceleration, often improving decoding efficiency without substantially enhancing the model's underlying capability, and may even degrade performance under full diffusion decoding. In this work, we ask whether self-distilled trajectories can be used not merely for faster inference, but for genuine knowledge acquisition. Although these trajectories lie on the pretrained DLM's own distributional manifold and thus offer a potentially lower optimization barrier, we find that naively fine-tuning on them with standard NELBO objectives yields only marginal gains. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{T}rajectory-\textbf{A}ligned optimization via \textbf{Bo}ltzmann \textbf{M}odeling (\textbf{TABOM}), a self-distilled trajectory-based post-training framework that aligns training with the easy-to-hard structure of inference. TABOM models the inference unmasking preference as a Boltzmann distribution over predictive entropies and derives a tractable pairwise ranking objective to align the model's certainty ordering with the observed decoding trajectory. Empirically, TABOM achieves substantial gains in new domains, expands the effective knowledge boundary of DLMs, and significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting compared with standard SFT.

preprint2022arXiv

Attribute Group Editing for Reliable Few-shot Image Generation

Few-shot image generation is a challenging task even using the state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Due to the unstable GAN training process and the limited training data, the generated images are often of low quality and low diversity. In this work, we propose a new editing-based method, i.e., Attribute Group Editing (AGE), for few-shot image generation. The basic assumption is that any image is a collection of attributes and the editing direction for a specific attribute is shared across all categories. AGE examines the internal representation learned in GANs and identifies semantically meaningful directions. Specifically, the class embedding, i.e., the mean vector of the latent codes from a specific category, is used to represent the category-relevant attributes, and the category-irrelevant attributes are learned globally by Sparse Dictionary Learning on the difference between the sample embedding and the class embedding. Given a GAN well trained on seen categories, diverse images of unseen categories can be synthesized through editing category-irrelevant attributes while keeping category-relevant attributes unchanged. Without re-training the GAN, AGE is capable of not only producing more realistic and diverse images for downstream visual applications with limited data but achieving controllable image editing with interpretable category-irrelevant directions.

preprint2022arXiv

Intrinsic Bias Identification on Medical Image Datasets

Machine learning based medical image analysis highly depends on datasets. Biases in the dataset can be learned by the model and degrade the generalizability of the applications. There are studies on debiased models. However, scientists and practitioners are difficult to identify implicit biases in the datasets, which causes lack of reliable unbias test datasets to valid models. To tackle this issue, we first define the data intrinsic bias attribute, and then propose a novel bias identification framework for medical image datasets. The framework contains two major components, KlotskiNet and Bias Discriminant Direction Analysis(bdda), where KlostkiNet is to build the mapping which makes backgrounds to distinguish positive and negative samples and bdda provides a theoretical solution on determining bias attributes. Experimental results on three datasets show the effectiveness of the bias attributes discovered by the framework.

preprint2022arXiv

Unsupervised Coherent Video Cartoonization with Perceptual Motion Consistency

In recent years, creative content generations like style transfer and neural photo editing have attracted more and more attention. Among these, cartoonization of real-world scenes has promising applications in entertainment and industry. Different from image translations focusing on improving the style effect of generated images, video cartoonization has additional requirements on the temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose a spatially-adaptive semantic alignment framework with perceptual motion consistency for coherent video cartoonization in an unsupervised manner. The semantic alignment module is designed to restore deformation of semantic structure caused by spatial information lost in the encoder-decoder architecture. Furthermore, we devise the spatio-temporal correlative map as a style-independent, global-aware regularization on the perceptual motion consistency. Deriving from similarity measurement of high-level features in photo and cartoon frames, it captures global semantic information beyond raw pixel-value in optical flow. Besides, the similarity measurement disentangles temporal relationships from domain-specific style properties, which helps regularize the temporal consistency without hurting style effects of cartoon images. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our method is able to generate highly stylistic and temporal consistent cartoon videos.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Directional Feature Maps for Cardiac MRI Segmentation

Cardiac MRI segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis for evaluating personalized cardiac performance parameters. Due to the indistinct boundaries and heterogeneous intensity distributions in the cardiac MRI, most existing methods still suffer from two aspects of challenges: inter-class indistinction and intra-class inconsistency. To tackle these two problems, we propose a novel method to exploit the directional feature maps, which can simultaneously strengthen the differences between classes and the similarities within classes. Specifically, we perform cardiac segmentation and learn a direction field pointing away from the nearest cardiac tissue boundary to each pixel via a direction field (DF) module. Based on the learned direction field, we then propose a feature rectification and fusion (FRF) module to improve the original segmentation features, and obtain the final segmentation. The proposed modules are simple yet effective and can be flexibly added to any existing segmentation network without excessively increasing time and space complexity. We evaluate the proposed method on the 2017 MICCAI Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset and a large-scale self-collected dataset, showing good segmentation performance and robust generalization ability of the proposed method.