Zhihang Zhong
Publications
DA-NBV: A Direction-Aware Next-Best-View Planner for Efficient 3D Reconstruction of Ships at Sea
Accurate 3D reconstruction of ships at sea is important for maritime supervision, damage assessment, and autonomous maritime operations. Although 3D reconstruction has advanced considerably, high-quality data acquisition still largely relies on manually designed trajectories or skilled operators, resulting in high costs and limited scalability. Next-best-view (NBV) planning automates this process by selecting subsequent viewpoints based on the current state. However, existing NBV policies mainly model spatial occupancy while overlooking directional observation history. This limitation is particularly problematic for ships: their complex superstructures and severe self-occlusions require observations from multiple viewpoints, and insufficient directional coverage often yields incomplete reconstructions. These challenges are further amplified at sea, where wave-induced heave, roll, and pitch continuously alter the ship's pose and surface visibility. Meanwhile, wind disturbances and limited onboard power impose stricter requirements on scanning efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose DA-NBV, a direction-aware NBV policy that augments the conventional occupancy state with directional observation statistics. We introduce a learnable Position Advantage Field (PAF) that uses directional information to guide viewpoint selection. The policy further adopts a locally constrained action space and a nonlinear coverage-shaping reward to improve scanning efficiency. We also develop the ship-oriented SeaShip-3D dataset and a configurable sea-state simulation environment. Experiments under varying heave, roll, and pitch conditions show that DA-NBV improves reconstruction completeness by approximately 3 percentage points and reduces Chamfer distance by 43% while achieving higher path efficiency.
Ideas Have Genomes: Benchmarking Scientific Lineage Reasoning and Lineage-Grounded Idea Generation
Scientific ideas rarely start from a blank page. They inherit mechanisms, repair known limitations, and recombine pieces of earlier work, much like biological genomes. Current benchmarks still say little about whether AI systems can follow this inheritance structure. We present IdeaGene-Bench (IG-Bench), a benchmark for scientific lineage reasoning and lineage-grounded idea generation. IG-Bench is organized around the IdeaGene framework: each paper or proposal is represented as a set of minimal, typed, evidence-grounded Idea Genome objects, and a GenomeDiff aligns these objects to record inheritance, mutation, loss, external import, and novel insertion under six operational evolutionary dynamics. The benchmark contains 1,961 golden lineage traces, 1,085 curated Idea Genome objects, and 920 pairwise GenomeDiff records across 10 scientific domains. It supports two evaluations. IG-Exam (42 task types, 1,029 instances) tests closed-form lineage reasoning across Idea Genome abstraction, inheritance tracing, evolutionary reasoning, and lineage verification. IG-Arena evaluates generation with a lineage-conditioned Population-Evolution Score(PES), asking whether a proposal can be inserted as a coherent descendant of a given lineage population: it should inherit the right Idea Genome objects, vary meaningfully from nearby work, and offer selection value for future research. Experiments on 14 LLM-based scientists expose a compositional bottleneck. The strongest system reaches only 27.3% exact accuracy on lineage reasoning, and structured lineage context reshuffles system rankings rather than helping every participant uniformly.
Perceptual Flow Network for Visually Grounded Reasoning
Despite the success of Large-Vision Language Models (LVLMs), general optimization objectives (e.g., standard MLE) fail to constrain visual trajectories, leading to language bias and hallucination. To mitigate this, current methods introduce geometric priors from visual experts as additional supervision. However, we observe that such supervision is typically suboptimal: it is biased toward geometric precision and offers limited reasoning utility. To bridge this gap, we propose Perceptual Flow Network (PFlowNet), which eschews rigid alignment with the expert priors and achieves interpretable yet more effective visual reasoning. Specifically, PFlowNet decouples perception from reasoning to establish a self-conditioned generation process. Based on this, it integrates multi-dimensional rewards with vicinal geometric shaping via variational reinforcement learning, thereby facilitating reasoning-oriented perceptual behaviors while preserving visual reliability. PFlowNet delivers a provable performance guarantee and competitive empirical results, particularly setting new SOTA records on V* Bench (90.6%) and MME-RealWorld-lite (67.0%).
COSMO-Agent: Tool-Augmented Agent for Closed-loop Optimization,Simulation,and Modeling Orchestration
Iterative industrial design-simulation optimization is bottlenecked by the CAD-CAE semantic gap: translating simulation feedback into valid geometric edits under diverse, coupled constraints. To fill this gap, we propose COSMO-Agent (Closed-loop Optimization, Simulation, and Modeling Orchestration), a tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) framework that teaches LLMs to complete the closed-loop CAD-CAE process. Specifically, we cast CAD generation, CAE solving, result parsing, and geometry revision as an interactive RL environment, where an LLM learns to orchestrate external tools and revise parametric geometries until constraints are satisfied. To make this learning stable and industrially usable, we design a multi-constraint reward that jointly encourages feasibility, toolchain robustness, and structured output validity. In addition, we contribute an industry-aligned dataset that covers 25 component categories with executable CAD-CAE tasks to support realistic training and evaluation. Experiments show that COSMO-Agent training substantially improves small open-source LLMs for constraint-driven design, exceeding large open-source and strong closed-source models in feasibility, efficiency, and stability.
RISE-Video: Can Video Generators Decode Implicit World Rules?
While generative video models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity, their capacity to internalize and reason over implicit world rules remains a critical yet under-explored frontier. To bridge this gap, we present RISE-Video, a pioneering reasoning-oriented benchmark for Text-Image-to-Video (TI2V) synthesis that shifts the evaluative focus from surface-level aesthetics to deep cognitive reasoning. RISE-Video comprises 467 meticulously human-annotated samples spanning eight rigorous categories, providing a structured testbed for probing model intelligence across diverse dimensions, ranging from commonsense and spatial dynamics to specialized subject domains. Our framework introduces a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol consisting of four metrics: \textit{Reasoning Alignment}, \textit{Temporal Consistency}, \textit{Physical Rationality}, and \textit{Visual Quality}. To further support scalable evaluation, we propose an automated pipeline leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to emulate human-centric assessment. Extensive experiments on 11 state-of-the-art TI2V models reveal pervasive deficiencies in simulating complex scenarios under implicit constraints, offering critical insights for the advancement of future world-simulating generative models.
Motion-Aware Animatable Gaussian Avatars Deblurring
The creation of 3D human avatars from multi-view videos is a significant yet challenging task in computer vision. However, existing techniques rely on high-quality, sharp images as input, which are often impractical to obtain in real-world scenarios due to variations in human motion speed and intensity. This paper introduces a novel method for directly reconstructing sharp 3D human Gaussian avatars from blurry videos. The proposed approach incorporates a 3D-aware, physics-based model of blur formation caused by human motion, together with a 3D human motion model designed to resolve ambiguities in motion-induced blur. This framework enables the joint optimization of the avatar representation and motion parameters from a coarse initialization. Comprehensive benchmarks are established using both a synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset captured with a 360-degree synchronous hybrid-exposure camera system. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the model across diverse conditions. Codes Available: https://github.com/MyNiuuu/MAD-Avatar