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Qingzhao Zhang

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Methodology Computer Vision Applications Artificial Intelligence Cryptography and Security Machine Learning Robotics

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preprint2026arXiv

CLAP: Contrastive Latent-space Prompt Optimization for End-to-end Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving systems powered by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on common driving scenarios, yet remain brittle in rare but safety-critical long-tail situations such as active construction zones and complex yielding geometries. In this paper, we present a method that addresses the long-tail challenging scenes beyond data scaling and model training. We introduce CLAP (Contrastive Latent-space Prompt optimization), a location-aware adaptation framework that augments a frozen VLA driving model with per-roadblock soft prompts, optimized from crowdsourced data and retrieved on demand via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Our approach rests on two observations from VLAs' latent space: (i) at the VLA's hidden-state layer, scenarios from the same roadblock cluster tightly and occupy compact regions of the latent space; and (ii) within a single roadblock, long-tail and normal frames are heavily intermixed in the latent representation, making it difficult to improve one without disturbing the other. CLAP addresses this via a two-stage pipeline: supervised contrastive learning to discover a roadblock-specific hard-scene direction, followed by directionally regularized prompt optimization that selectively improves challenging frames while preserving normal frame performance. On the NAVSIM benchmark with various state-of-the-art VLA backbones, CLAP reduces challenging scenario planning error by 24% with no regression on normal frames, significantly improving planning performance.

preprint2026arXiv

Still Camouflage, Moving Illusion: View-Induced Trajectory Manipulation in Autonomous Driving

Existing physical adversarial attacks on vision-based autonomous driving induce time-evolving perception errors, including biased object tracking or trajectory prediction, through (i) sophisticated physical patch inducing detection box drift when entering the view distance, or (ii) dynamically changing patches that cause different perception errors at different time. In both cases, viewing-angle variation is treated as a challenge, requiring adversarial patches to remain effective across frames under varying views, leading to complex multi-view optimization. In contrast, we show that viewing-angle variation itself can be turned into an attack tool. We design a new attack paradigm where a static, passive adversarial camouflage is mounted on a vehicle whose view-dependent appearance naturally evolves with relative motion, inducing consistent feature drift across frames. This causes the system to infer a physically plausible but incorrect trajectory, such as a false cut-in, which propagates to downstream decision-making and triggers unnecessary braking. Unlike prior approaches that require multi-view robustness or active intervention, our attack emerges from normal driving dynamics and is easy to deploy: a parked vehicle with a natural camouflage can induce hard braking in passing autonomous vehicles. We demonstrate the novel attack on nuScenes dataset, showing the effectiveness with an end-to-end success rate of up to 87.5%, measured by hard-braking events, and robustness across different scene backgrounds, victim vehicle speeds, and perception models.

preprint2023arXiv

Locally sparse quantile estimation for a partially functional interaction model

Functional data analysis has been extensively conducted. In this study, we consider a partially functional model, under which some covariates are scalars and have linear effects, while some other variables are functional and have unspecified nonlinear effects. Significantly advancing from the existing literature, we consider a model with interactions between the functional and scalar covariates. To accommodate long-tailed error distributions which are not uncommon in data analysis, we adopt the quantile technique for estimation. To achieve more interpretable estimation, and to accommodate many practical settings, we assume that the functional covariate effects are locally sparse (that is, there exist subregions on which the effects are exactly zero), which naturally leads to a variable/model selection problem. We propose respecting the "main effect, interaction" hierarchy, which postulates that if a subregion has a nonzero effect in an interaction term, then its effect has to be nonzero in the corresponding main functional effect. For estimation, identification of local sparsity, and respect of the hierarchy, we propose a penalization approach. An effective computational algorithm is developed, and the consistency properties are rigorously established under mild regularity conditions. Simulation shows the practical effectiveness of the proposed approach. The analysis of the Tecator data further demonstrates its practical applicability. Overall, this study can deliver a novel and practically useful model and a statistically and numerically satisfactory estimation approach.

preprint2022arXiv

Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition Against Common Corruptions

Deep neural networks on 3D point cloud data have been widely used in the real world, especially in safety-critical applications. However, their robustness against corruptions is less studied. In this paper, we present ModelNet40-C, the first comprehensive benchmark on 3D point cloud corruption robustness, consisting of 15 common and realistic corruptions. Our evaluation shows a significant gap between the performances on ModelNet40 and ModelNet40-C for state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. To reduce the gap, we propose a simple but effective method by combining PointCutMix-R and TENT after evaluating a wide range of augmentation and test-time adaptation strategies. We identify a number of critical insights for future studies on corruption robustness in point cloud recognition. For instance, we unveil that Transformer-based architectures with proper training recipes achieve the strongest robustness. We hope our in-depth analysis will motivate the development of robust training strategies or architecture designs in the 3D point cloud domain. Our codebase and dataset are included in https://github.com/jiachens/ModelNet40-C

preprint2022arXiv

On Adversarial Robustness of Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles

Trajectory prediction is a critical component for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to perform safe planning and navigation. However, few studies have analyzed the adversarial robustness of trajectory prediction or investigated whether the worst-case prediction can still lead to safe planning. To bridge this gap, we study the adversarial robustness of trajectory prediction models by proposing a new adversarial attack that perturbs normal vehicle trajectories to maximize the prediction error. Our experiments on three models and three datasets show that the adversarial prediction increases the prediction error by more than 150%. Our case studies show that if an adversary drives a vehicle close to the target AV following the adversarial trajectory, the AV may make an inaccurate prediction and even make unsafe driving decisions. We also explore possible mitigation techniques via data augmentation and trajectory smoothing. The implementation is open source at https://github.com/zqzqz/AdvTrajectoryPrediction.

preprint2020arXiv

Integrative Sparse Partial Least Squares

Partial least squares, as a dimension reduction method, has become increasingly important for its ability to deal with problems with a large number of variables. Since noisy variables may weaken the performance of the model, the sparse partial least squares (SPLS) technique has been proposed to identify important variables and generate more interpretable results. However, the small sample size of a single dataset limits the performance of conventional methods. An effective solution comes from gathering information from multiple comparable studies. The integrative analysis holds an important status among multi-datasets analyses. The main idea is to improve estimation results by assembling raw datasets and analyzing them jointly. In this paper, we develop an integrative SPLS (iSPLS) method using penalization based on the SPLS technique. The proposed approach consists of two penalties. The first penalty conducts variable selection under the context of integrative analysis; The second penalty, a contrasted one, is imposed to encourage the similarity of estimates across datasets and generate more reasonable and accurate results. Computational algorithms are provided. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare iSPLS with alternative approaches. The practical utility of iSPLS is shown in the analysis of two TCGA gene expression data.

preprint2020arXiv

Robust Identification of Gene-Environment Interactions under High-Dimensional Accelerated Failure Time Models

For complex diseases, beyond the main effects of genetic (G) and environmental (E) factors, gene-environment (G-E) interactions also play an important role. Many of the existing G-E interaction methods conduct marginal analysis, which may not appropriately describe disease biology. Joint analysis methods have been developed, with most of the existing loss functions constructed based on likelihood. In practice, data contamination is not uncommon. Development of robust methods for interaction analysis that can accommodate data contamination is very limited. In this study, we consider censored survival data and adopt an accelerated failure time (AFT) model. An exponential squared loss is adopted to achieve robustness. A sparse group penalization approach, which respects the "main effects, interactions" hierarchy, is adopted for estimation and identification. Consistency properties are rigorously established. Simulation shows that the proposed method outperforms direct competitors. In data analysis, the proposed method makes biologically sensible findings.

preprint2016arXiv

Identifying Gene-Environment Interactions with A Least Relative Error Approach

For complex diseases, the interactions between genetic and environmental risk factors can have important implications beyond the main effects. Many of the existing interaction analyses conduct marginal analysis and cannot accommodate the joint effects of multiple main effects and interactions. In this study, we conduct joint analysis which can simultaneously accommodate a large number of effects. Significantly different from the existing studies, we adopt loss functions based on relative errors, which offer a useful alternative to the "classic" methods such as the least squares and least absolute deviation. Further to accommodate censoring in the response variable, we adopt a weighted approach. Penalization is used for identification and regularized estimation. Computationally, we develop an effective algorithm which combines the majorize-minimization and coordinate descent. Simulation shows that the proposed approach has satisfactory performance. We also analyze lung cancer prognosis data with gene expression measurements.

preprint2015arXiv

A Robust Approach for Identifying Gene-Environment Interactions for Prognosis

For many complex diseases, prognosis is of essential importance. It has been shown that, beyond the main effects of genetic (G) and environmental (E) risk factors, the gene-environment (G$\times$E) interactions also play a critical role. In practice, the prognosis outcome data can be contaminated, and most of the existing methods are not robust to data contamination. In the literature, it has been shown that even a single contaminated observation can lead to severely biased model estimation. In this study, we describe prognosis using an accelerated failure time (AFT) model. An exponential squared loss is proposed to accommodate possible data contamination. A penalization approach is adopted for regularized estimation and marker selection. The proposed method is realized using an effective coordinate descent (CD) and minorization maximization (MM) algorithm. Simulation shows that without contamination, the proposed method has performance comparable to or better than the unrobust alternative. With contamination, it outperforms the unrobust alternative and, under certain scenarios, can be superior to the robust method based on quantile regression. The proposed method is applied to the analysis of TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) lung cancer data. It identifies interactions different from those using the alternatives. The identified marker have important implications and satisfactory stability.

preprint2015arXiv

Penalized integrative analysis under the accelerated failure time model

For survival data with high-dimensional covariates, results generated in the analysis of a single dataset are often unsatisfactory because of the small sample size. Integrative analysis pools raw data from multiple independent studies with comparable designs, effectively increases sample size, and has better performance than meta-analysis and single-dataset analysis. In this study, we conduct integrative analysis of survival data under the accelerated failure time (AFT) model. The sparsity structures of multiple datasets are described using the homogeneity and heterogeneity models. For variable selection under the homogeneity model, we adopt group penalization approaches. For variable selection under the heterogeneity model, we use composite penalization and sparse group penalization approaches. As a major advancement from the existing studies, the asymptotic selection and estimation properties are rigorously established. Simulation study is conducted to compare different penalization methods and against alternatives. We also analyze four lung cancer prognosis datasets with gene expression measurements.

preprint2015arXiv

Promoting Similarity of Sparsity Structures in Integrative Analysis with Penalization

For data with high-dimensional covariates but small to moderate sample sizes, the analysis of single datasets often generates unsatisfactory results. The integrative analysis of multiple independent datasets provides an effective way of pooling information and outperforms single-dataset analysis and some alternative multi-datasets approaches including meta-analysis. Under certain scenarios, multiple datasets are expected to share common important covariates, that is, the multiple models have similarity in sparsity structures. However, the existing methods do not have a mechanism to {\it promote} the similarity of sparsity structures in integrative analysis. In this study, we consider penalized variable selection and estimation in integrative analysis. We develop an $L_0$-penalty based approach, which is the first to explicitly promote the similarity of sparsity structures. Computationally it is realized using a coordinate descent algorithm. Theoretically it has the much desired consistency properties. In simulation, it significantly outperforms the competing alternative when the models in multiple datasets share common important covariates. It has better or similar performance as the alternative when the sparsity structures share no similarity. Thus it provides a "safe" choice for data analysis. Applying the proposed method to three lung cancer datasets with gene expression measurements leads to models with significantly more similar sparsity structures and better prediction performance.

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