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Kaitong Cai

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7 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

3DAlign-DAER: Dynamic Attention Policy and Efficient Retrieval Strategy for Fine-grained 3D-Text Alignment at Scale

Yijia Fan
jusheng zhang
Kaitong Cai
Jing Yang
Jian Wang
Keze Wang

Despite recent advancements in 3D-text cross-modal alignment, existing state-of-the-art methods still struggle to align fine-grained textual semantics with detailed geometric structures, and their alignment performance degrades significantly when scaling to large-scale 3D databases. To overcome this limitation, we introduce 3DAlign-DAER, a unified framework designed to align text and 3D geometry via the proposed dynamic attention policy and the efficient retrieval strategy, capturing subtle correspondences for diverse cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks. Specifically, during the training, our proposed dynamic attention policy (DAP) employs the Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module to represent the alignment as learnable fine-grained token-to-point attentions. To optimize these attentions across different tasks and geometric hierarchies, our DAP further exploits the Monte Carlo tree search to dynamically calibrate HAF attention weights via a hybrid reward signal and further enhances the alignment between textual descriptions and local 3D geometry. During the inference, our 3DAlign-DAER introduces an Efficient Retrieval Strategy (ERS) to leverage efficient hierarchical searching in the large-scale embedding spaces, outperforming traditional methods (eg, KNN) in accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to facilitate text-3D alignment research and train our 3DAlign-DAER, we construct Align3D-2M, a large-scale dataset featuring 2M text-3D pairs, to provide sufficient fine-grained cross-modal annotations. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our 3DAlign-DAER on diverse benchmarks.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Cost-Effective Communication: An Auction-based Method for Language Agent Interaction

Yijia Fan
jusheng zhang
Kaitong Cai
Jing Yang
Chengpei Tang
Jian Wang
Keze Wang

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) often suffer from inefficient ''free-for-all'' communication, leading to exponential token costs and low signal-to-noise ratios that hinder their practical deployment. We challenge the notion that more communication is always beneficial, hypothesizing instead that the core issue is the absence of resource rationality. We argue that "free'' communication, by ignoring the principle of scarcity, inherently breeds inefficiency and unnecessary expenses. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Auction-based Language Agent (DALA), a novel framework that treats communication bandwidth as a scarce and tradable resource. Specifically, our DALA regards inter-agent communication as a centralized auction, where agents learn to bid for the opportunity to speak based on the predicted value density of their messages. Thus, our DALA intrinsically encourages agents to produce concise, informative messages while filtering out low-value communication. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our economically-driven DALA achieves new state-of-the-art performance across seven challenging reasoning benchmarks, including 84.32% on MMLU and a 91.21% pass@1 rate on HumanEval. Note that this is accomplished with remarkable efficiency, i.e., our DALA uses only 6.25 million tokens, a fraction of the resources consumed by current state-of-the-art methods on GSM8K. Further analysis reveals that our DALA cultivates the emergent skill of strategic silence, effectively adapting its communication strategies from verbosity to silence in a dynamic manner via resource constraints.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

LLM-CAS: Dynamic Neuron Perturbation for Real-Time Hallucination Correction

jusheng zhang
Ningyuan Liu
Yijia Fan
Zihao Huang
Qinglin Zeng
Kaitong Cai
Jian Wang
Keze Wang

Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinated content lacking factual or contextual grounding, hindering their reliability in critical applications. Traditional methods like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback are data-intensive and computationally expensive, while static parameter editing struggles with context-dependent errors and catastrophic forgetting. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LLM-CAS, a framework that formulates real-time hallucination correction as a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) problem. LLM-CAS trains an agent to learn a sophisticated policy, dynamically selecting optimal, temporary neuron perturbations during inference based on the immediate context. This learned, policy-driven approach provides greater adaptability than prior dynamic methods that rely on heuristic or pre-defined adjustments. As a result, LLM-CAS achieves significant performance gains across various LLMs, improving accuracy by 10.98 percentage points on StoryCloze, 2.71 points on TriviaQA, and 2.06 points on TruthfulQA's MC1 score, thereby outperforming static methods like ITI and CAA, as well as the dynamic SADI framework. This context-aware, efficient approach promises enhanced reliability for LLMs in high-stakes domains, with future potential for multimodal extensions.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

RaCoT: Plug-and-Play Contrastive Example Generation Mechanism for Enhanced LLM Reasoning Reliability

Kaitong Cai
jusheng zhang
Yijia Fan
Jing Yang
Keze Wang

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a Δ-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the "critical details that determine answer divergence." This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from "post-hoc context cleaning" to "a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning," offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Top-Down Semantic Refinement for Image Captioning

jusheng zhang
Kaitong Cai
Jing Yang
Jian Wang
Chengpei Tang
Keze Wang

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face an inherent contradiction in image captioning: their powerful single-step generation capabilities often lead to a myopic decision-making process. This makes it difficult to maintain global narrative coherence while capturing rich details, a limitation that is particularly pronounced in tasks that require multi-step and complex scene description. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we redefine image captioning as a goal-oriented hierarchical refinement planning problem, and further propose a novel framework, named Top-Down Semantic Refinement (TDSR), which models the generation process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, planning within the vast state space of a VLM presents a significant computational hurdle. Our core contribution, therefore, is the design of a highly efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm tailored for VLMs. By incorporating a visual-guided parallel expansion and a lightweight value network, our TDSR reduces the call frequency to the expensive VLM by an order of magnitude without sacrificing planning quality. Furthermore, an adaptive early stopping mechanism dynamically matches computational overhead to the image's complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including DetailCaps, COMPOSITIONCAP, and POPE, demonstrate that our TDSR, as a plug-and-play module, can significantly enhance the performance of existing VLMs (e.g., LLaVA-1.5, Qwen2.5-VL) by achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive results in fine-grained description, compositional generalization, and hallucination suppression.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CF-VLM:CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning

jusheng zhang
Kaitong Cai
Yijia Fan
Jian Wang
Keze Wang

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have greatly improved cross-modal semantic understanding, yet significant limitations remain in fine-grained discrimination and deep causal reasoning tasks. Existing VLMs often rely on superficial statistical correlations, lacking the ability to capture the underlying causal logic between visual and textual content. To address this, we propose the CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning Model (CF-VLM), a novel framework that enhances the causal reasoning capabilities of VLMs through the targeted use of counterfactual samples. CF-VLM introduces three complementary training objectives: maintaining foundational cross-modal alignment, reinforcing the uniqueness, and stability of factual scene representations against coherent counterfactuals, and sharpening the model’s sensitivity to minimal but critical causal edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CF-VLM consistently outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods on compositional reasoning and generalization benchmarks. Furthermore, it shows promise in mitigating visual hallucinations, indicating improved factual consistency. Our CF-VLM provides a robust foundation for deploying VLMs in high-stakes, real-world scenarios requiring reliable reasoning and interpretability.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MAT-Agent: Adaptive Multi-Agent Training Optimization

jusheng zhang
Kaitong Cai
Yijia Fan
Ningyuan Liu
Keze Wang

We propose a novel collaborative multi-agent optimization framework for adaptive training in multi-label image classification, fundamentally advancing beyond static decision rules and isolated automation. Our method deploys a set of distributed, task-specific agents, each responsible for dynamically orchestrating critical training components—including data augmentation, optimization methods, learning rate schedules, and loss functions—according to evolving visual-semantic relationships and training states. Each agent employs an advanced non-stationary multi-armed bandit algorithm, integrating both $\epsilon$-greedy and upper confidence bound strategies, to judiciously balance exploration with exploitation throughout the training lifecycle. A hierarchical composite reward mechanism synergizes overall classification accuracy, rare class recognition, and training stability, fostering both independent optimization and implicit collaborative behavior among agents. The framework further leverages refined techniques such as dual-rate exponential moving average smoothing and structured mixed-precision training to enhance robustness and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across benchmarks including Pascal VOC, COCO, Yeast, and Mediamill demonstrate that our approach achieves superior mean average precision and rare-class F1 scores compared to state-of-the-art methods, while also exhibiting rapid convergence and remarkable cross-domain generalization. Our results indicate that collaborative multi-agent adaptive optimization offers a scalable and principled solution for self-optimizing deep learning in complex multi-label scenarios.

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