Skip to content

Author

Yang Feng

We have 4 of 40 papers

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

Preprint Sep 2026

Teaching Vision-Language Models to Use the Scale They Are Given: Label-Free Equivariance Training for Metric Physical Reasoning

Metric questions about video require vision-language models to use supplied real-world references to convert visual measurements into physical units. Yet we find that current models use this scale information only partially. When every world-space quantity in a prompt is rescaled by a common factor, the video remains equally valid and the correct answer changes by exactly that factor, but model predictions move only part of the way and accuracy remains concentrated near the familiar scale of the depicted objects. Across eight vision-language models, this under-response persists over four orders of magnitude. The same models recover the correct closed-form scaling laws when the identical physics is asked in a scale-free form, indicating that the main deficit lies in metric grounding rather than physical mechanism knowledge. We use this exact scaling relation as supervision without requiring metric annotations. Under a common rescaling of the supplied world-space quantities, the correct metric answer must change by the same factor. EquiSD exploits this constraint by projecting a model's own prediction onto the scale-equivariant family and fine-tuning the model on the resulting targets. It requires no ground-truth answers and only one model query per training video. On held-out simulated videos, EquiSD increases a 3B model's median response slope from 0.66 to 0.94 and improves mean relative accuracy by 9.2 points across scales. The learned relation generalizes to unseen world scales and transfers without adaptation to real QuantiPhy videos, where accuracy increases by 6.4 points. These results show that an exact physical symmetry can provide label-free supervision for improving metric grounding in vision-language models.

Kaizhen Tan, Yang Feng, Heqing Du et al. · 0 citations
Jul 2026

How Many Bits Can an Adapter Write? Measuring the Capacity and Memorization of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Extending compression-based memorization analysis to the frozen-base setting, this work measures directly, in bits, how much a low-rank adapter writes into a model it never changes, finding that the answer is both smaller than full fine-tuning and less lawful than parameter counting would predict.

Kaizhen Tan, Heqing Du, Yang Feng · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

What Can Latent World Models Know? Physical Parameter Identifiability in Multimodal Predictive Representations

A central premise of latent world models is that predicting the future forces a representation to internalize the physics of its environment. Which physical quantities does a trained latent actually contain, and what decides this? We answer with controlled interventions in POKEWORLD, an interactive environment whose visually identical objects hide mass, drag, and contact stiffness. A certificate-gated protocol first certifies each parameter as recoverable from raw observations, then measures whether it enters the latent, so a null result can be attributed to the objective rather than to the environment. The resulting identifiability map has two organizing mechanisms and one frontier. Inputs limit what can be known, while prediction targets decide what is retained. Stiffness enters the latent only when touch is forecast ($R^2=0.50$, compared with $-0.02$ when the same signal is merely fused into the input), and under single-step prediction a vision-only latent discards even perfectly visible object state. Drag marks the frontier. It carries a recoverability certificate of 0.89 yet plateaus near 0.13 under every deterministic prediction objective we test, while a supervised head on the same trunk reaches 0.45. Parameters whose readout is slow and ratio-type under the sensed coordinates fall outside what these objectives acquire. On RH20T, an input-target factorial across scaling curves reproduces both mechanisms across two robots and 4,258 episodes. Every arm missing information or prediction pressure stays flat over a fivefold data range, and only the full multimodal objective forecasts force beyond a persistence baseline, with held-out gains that grow with scale. Objective structure determines which physical parameters a latent acquires, and additional data improves only the parameters it already acquires.

Kaizhen Tan, Xin Xu, Siru Tao et al. · 2 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.