Wenqiao Zhang
Publications
VisualThink-VLA: Visual Intermediate Reasoning for Effective and Low-Latency Vision-Language-Action Policies
Recent work has begun to equip vision-language-action (VLA) policies with explicit intermediate reasoning. In embodied control, however, textual chain-of-thought is a poor fit: irrelevant or weakly textual information can interfere with action prediction, while autoregressive text decoding adds too much latency for real-time closed-loop execution. We present VISUALTHINK-VLA, a visual intermediate-reasoning framework for accurate, low-latency VLA policies. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to guide action with effective visual thinking: VISUALTHINK-VLA bootstraps action prediction through a compact visual-evidence interface that preserves spatial precision while avoiding decoding overhead. Besides, to further improve performance and efficiency, VISUALTHINK-VLA adopts a tailored selective routing mechanism to learn the visual evidence tokens, enabling low-latency inference while preserving high-capacity specialization. We also introduce VisualEvidence-Kit, a supervision-and-audit resource centered on a VisualEvidence-Agent that constructs a 754.7k VLA instructions VisualEvidence-Set for route supervision and counterfactual faithfulness tests. Across multiple benchmarks and real-robot evaluation, VISUALTHINK-VLA achieves the highest success rate on most benchmarks while reducing the multi-second latency of reasoning-augmented baselines to the sub-second regime. For example, on BridgeData V2, it reduces step latency from 8.377,s with ECoT to 0.367,s, achieving a 22.8 times speedup.
Catching Every Ripple: Enhanced Anomaly Awareness via Dynamic Concept Adaptation
Online anomaly detection (OAD) plays a pivotal role in real-time analytics and decision-making for evolving data streams. However, existing methods often rely on costly retraining and rigid decision boundaries, limiting their ability to adapt both effectively and efficiently to concept drift in dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we propose DyMETER, a dynamic concept adaptation framework for OAD that unifies on-the-fly parameter shifting and dynamic thresholding within a single online paradigm. DyMETER first learns a static detector on historical data to capture recurring central concepts, and then transitions to a dynamic mode to adapt to new concepts as drift occurs. Specifically, DyMETER employs a novel dynamic concept adaptation mechanism that leverages a hypernetwork to generate instance-aware parameter shifts for the static detector, thereby enabling efficient and effective adaptation without retraining or fine-tuning. To achieve robust and interpretable adaptation, DyMETER introduces a lightweight evolution controller to estimate instance-level concept uncertainty for adaptive updates. Further, DyMETER employs a dynamic threshold optimization module to adaptively recalibrates the decision boundary by maintaining a candidate window of uncertain samples, which ensures continuous alignment with evolving concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyMETER significantly outperforms existing OAD approaches across a wide spectrum of application scenarios.
IAD-Unify: A Region-Grounded Unified Model for Industrial Anomaly Segmentation, Understanding, and Generation
Real-world industrial inspection requires not only localizing defects, but also explaining them in natural language and generating controlled defect edits. However, existing approaches fail to jointly support all three capabilities within a unified framework and evaluation protocol. We propose IAD-Unify, a dual-encoder unified framework in which a frozen DINOv2-based region expert supplies precise anomaly evidence to a shared Qwen3.5-4B vision-language backbone via lightweight token injection, jointly enabling anomaly segmentation, region-grounded understanding, and mask-guided generation. To enable unified evaluation, we further construct Anomaly-56K, a comprehensive unified multi-task IAD evaluation platform, spanning 59,916 images across 24 categories and 104 defect variants. Controlled ablations yield four findings: (i) region grounding is the decisive mechanism for understanding, removing it degrades location accuracy by >76 pp; (ii) predicted-region performance closely matches oracle, confirming deployment viability; (iii) region-grounded generation achieves the best full-image fidelity and masked-region perceptual quality; and (iv) pre-initialized joint training improves understanding at negligible generation cost (-0.16 dB). IAD-Unify further achieves strong performance on the MMAD benchmark, including categories unseen during training, demonstrating robust cross-category generalization.
Scientific Graphics Program Synthesis via Dual Self-Consistency Reinforcement Learning
Graphics Program Synthesis is pivotal for interpreting and editing visual data, effectively facilitating the reverse-engineering of static visuals into editable TikZ code. While TikZ is the de facto standard for scientific schematics due to its programmatic flexibility, its requirement for rigorous spatial precision presents a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models. Progress is currently stifled by two primary gaps: (1) Data Quality Gap: existing image-TikZ corpora often lack strict executability and reliable visual alignment; (2) Evaluation Gap: a lack of benchmarks for both structural and visual fidelity. To address these, we present a closed-loop framework featuring: SciTikZ-230K, a large-scale, high-quality dataset from our Execution-Centric Data Engine covering 11 diverse scientific disciplines; SciTikZ-Bench, a multifaceted benchmark spanning from basic geometric constructs to intricate hierarchical schematics to evaluate both visual fidelity and structural logic. To further broaden the scope of visual-code optimization methodology, we introduce a novel Dual Self-Consistency Reinforcement Learning optimization paradigm, which utilizes Round-Trip Verification to penalize degenerate code and boost overall self-consistency. Empowered by these, our trained model SciTikZer-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming proprietary giants like Gemini-2.5-Pro and massive models like Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct.
Draft-Thinking: Learning Efficient Reasoning in Long Chain-of-Thought LLMs
Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs); however, the performance gains often come with a substantial increase in reasoning budget. Recent studies show that existing CoT paradigms tend to induce systematic overthinking, unnecessarily coupling reasoning capability with reasoning cost. Most prior approaches reduce token usage through post hoc techniques such as token compression, truncation, or length penalties, without explicitly addressing the core mechanisms of reasoning. We propose \textbf{Draft-Thinking}, which guides models to first learn a concise \textit{draft-style} reasoning structure that retains only the critical reasoning steps. Through a \textit{progressive curriculum learning}, the model stably internalizes this efficient reasoning pattern as its capability scales. Moreover, Draft-Thinking introduces adaptive prompting, which elevates reasoning depth to a flexible, model-selectable behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Draft-Thinking substantially reduces reasoning budget while largely preserving reasoning performance; for example, on MATH500, it achieves an 82.6\% reduction in reasoning budget at the cost of only a 2.6\% performance drop.
OmniCT: Towards a Unified Slice-Volume LVLM for Comprehensive CT Analysis
Computed Tomography (CT) is one of the most widely used and diagnostically information-dense imaging modalities, covering critical organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and colon. Clinical interpretation relies on both slice-driven local features (e.g., sub-centimeter nodules, lesion boundaries) and volume-driven spatial representations (e.g., tumor infiltration, inter-organ anatomical relations). However, existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain fragmented in CT slice versus volumetric understanding: slice-driven LVLMs show strong generalization but lack cross-slice spatial consistency, while volume-driven LVLMs explicitly capture volumetric semantics but suffer from coarse granularity and poor compatibility with slice inputs. The absence of a unified modeling paradigm constitutes a major bottleneck for the clinical translation of medical LVLMs. We present OmniCT, a powerful unified slice-volume LVLM for CT scenarios, which makes three contributions: (i) Spatial Consistency Enhancement (SCE): volumetric slice composition combined with tri-axial positional embedding that introduces volumetric consistency, and an MoE hybrid projection enables efficient slice-volume adaptation; (ii) Organ-level Semantic Enhancement (OSE): segmentation and ROI localization explicitly align anatomical regions, emphasizing lesion- and organ-level semantics; (iii) MedEval-CT: the largest slice-volume CT dataset and hybrid benchmark integrates comprehensive metrics for unified evaluation. OmniCT consistently outperforms existing methods with a substantial margin across diverse clinical tasks and satisfies both micro-level detail sensitivity and macro-level spatial reasoning. More importantly, it establishes a new paradigm for cross-modal medical imaging understanding.
CLEAR-Mamba:Towards Accurate, Adaptive and Trustworthy Multi-Sequence Ophthalmic Angiography Classification
Medical image classification is a core task in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), playing a pivotal role in early disease detection, treatment planning, and patient prognosis assessment. In ophthalmic practice, fluorescein fundus angiography (FFA) and indocyanine green angiography (ICGA) provide hemodynamic and lesion-structural information that conventional fundus photography cannot capture. However, due to the single-modality nature, subtle lesion patterns, and significant inter-device variability, existing methods still face limitations in generalization and high-confidence prediction. To address these challenges, we propose CLEAR-Mamba, an enhanced framework built upon MedMamba with optimizations in both architecture and training strategy. Architecturally, we introduce HaC, a hypernetwork-based adaptive conditioning layer that dynamically generates parameters according to input feature distributions, thereby improving cross-domain adaptability. From a training perspective, we develop RaP, a reliability-aware prediction scheme built upon evidential uncertainty learning, which encourages the model to emphasize low-confidence samples and improves overall stability and reliability. We further construct a large-scale ophthalmic angiography dataset covering both FFA and ICGA modalities, comprising multiple retinal disease categories for model training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that CLEAR-Mamba consistently outperforms multiple baseline models, including the original MedMamba, across various metrics-showing particular advantages in multi-disease classification and reliability-aware prediction. This study provides an effective solution that balances generalizability and reliability for modality-specific medical image classification tasks.
CtrlCoT: Dual-Granularity Chain-of-Thought Compression for Controllable Reasoning
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning but incurs high latency and memory cost due to verbose traces, motivating CoT compression with preserved correctness. Existing methods either shorten CoTs at the semantic level, which is often conservative, or prune tokens aggressively, which can miss task-critical cues and degrade accuracy. Moreover, combining the two is non-trivial due to sequential dependency, task-agnostic pruning, and distribution mismatch. We propose \textbf{CtrlCoT}, a dual-granularity CoT compression framework that harmonizes semantic abstraction and token-level pruning through three components: Hierarchical Reasoning Abstraction produces CoTs at multiple semantic granularities; Logic-Preserving Distillation trains a logic-aware pruner to retain indispensable reasoning cues (e.g., numbers and operators) across pruning ratios; and Distribution-Alignment Generation aligns compressed traces with fluent inference-time reasoning styles to avoid fragmentation. On MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, CtrlCoT uses 30.7\% fewer tokens while achieving 7.6 percentage points higher than the strongest baseline, demonstrating more efficient and reliable reasoning. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/fanzhenxuan/Ctrl-CoT.