Showing 1–50 of 617 results for author: Chen, E

DynaForcing: Overcoming Dynamic Collapse in Self-Forcing Distillation for Streaming Avatar Generation

Authors: Yubo Huang, Sirui Zhao, Xinchen Yao, Zhengye Zhang, Jinyang Huang, Fengqi Cui, Shiwei Wu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Audio-driven avatar generation requires realistic lip-sync, expressive motion, and real-time streaming. Recent work achieves the latter via self-forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), but this paradigm suffers from a critical failure that has not been systematically characterized: dynamic collapse, where the student model converges to a near-static optimum with high perceptual qual… ▽ More Audio-driven avatar generation requires realistic lip-sync, expressive motion, and real-time streaming. Recent work achieves the latter via self-forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), but this paradigm suffers from a critical failure that has not been systematically characterized: dynamic collapse, where the student model converges to a near-static optimum with high perceptual quality but severely suppressed temporal dynamics. We trace this to two causes: the reverse KL objective in DMD, which biases toward low-motion modes, and unanchored self-conditioning, which creates a feedback loop that amplifies collapse. This is especially harmful for avatars, where even subtle motion loss breaks lip-sync and expression. To address this, we propose DynaForcing, a training framework with three complementary strategies applied at different levels. Specifically, Hybrid Forcing anchors rollouts to ground-truth dynamics at the data level to break the feedback loop. Dynamics-Aware Reward Regularization introduces explicit motion rewards via the RL interpretation of DMD to counteract the reverse KL bias at the loss level. Reference Perturbation perturbs reference images to decouple identity from static details, forcing the model to rely on audio for motion at the conditioning level. We further introduce computation graph pruning and gradient replay, reducing the GPU footprint of self-forcing by over an order of magnitude. Experiments show that DynaForcing recovers dynamics to teacher-comparable levels (Dyn-Deg: 0.31 -> 0.73, Sync-C: 7.03 -> 7.68) while improving visual quality, resolving the quality-dynamics trade-off throughout training without early stopping. △ Less

Submitted 18 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted at ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '26)

The Ethical Decision Head: Operationalizing Normative Ethics in Autonomous Vehicles via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Authors: Thomas Mbrice, Ammar Ali, Sami Mian, Khai Hern Low, Eric Chen, Arshia Aghajani, Wolf Schäfer, Amin Shirangi

Abstract: As autonomous vehicles (AVs) approach Level 4 and Level 5 operational capability [SAE International, 2018], their on- board decision systems must handle not only safety-critical locomotion but also their subsequent moral weight. This paper details the Ethical Decision Head (EDH), a deep re- inforcement learning (RL) framework that encodes ethical reasoning as a differentiable reward signal, enabli… ▽ More As autonomous vehicles (AVs) approach Level 4 and Level 5 operational capability [SAE International, 2018], their on- board decision systems must handle not only safety-critical locomotion but also their subsequent moral weight. This paper details the Ethical Decision Head (EDH), a deep re- inforcement learning (RL) framework that encodes ethical reasoning as a differentiable reward signal, enabling a pol- icy gradient agent to learn morally-aligned driving behavior in scenarios whose state representation is aligned with the CARLA simulation environment [Dosovitskiy et al., 2017]. Two normative frameworks are instantiated and evaluated: a Utilitarian framework minimizing total casualties and a Kan- tian framework enforcing course maintenance as a categori- cal imperative. The EDH is trained via Proximal Policy Op- timization (PPO) [Schulman et al., 2017] against a Bradley- Terry reward model [Bradley and Terry, 1952] learned from pairwise human preference annotations over 200 collision- imminent scenarios. Results reveal an asymmetry in the learnability of normative ethical frameworks under human su- pervision. The Kantian condition, which reduces to a con- stant prediction task under the codebook, serves as a pipeline control: it confirms training stability and rules out infrastruc- ture failure as an explanation for the utilitarian result. The Utilitarian agent learned something more unsettling: human raters rewarded self-sacrifice over casualty minimization, and the model learned that preference faithfully. This divergence between what humans prescribe in theory and what they re- ward in practice suggests that RLHF does not learn ethics as philosophers define it, but as humans live it. △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Chartography: A Benchmark for Professional Chart Understanding

Authors: Suhaas Garre, Chris Mutty, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen

Abstract: Professionals across medicine, engineering, finance, manufacturing, and the sciences often make consequential decisions from charts. Existing chart benchmarks do not sufficiently measure this ability: they are dominated by bar, line, and pie formats, rely on shorter reasoning chains, and are nearing saturation, with frontier models already scoring 80-90%. We introduce Chartography, a benchmark of… ▽ More Professionals across medicine, engineering, finance, manufacturing, and the sciences often make consequential decisions from charts. Existing chart benchmarks do not sufficiently measure this ability: they are dominated by bar, line, and pie formats, rely on shorter reasoning chains, and are nearing saturation, with frontier models already scoring 80-90%. We introduce Chartography, a benchmark of 100 tasks that pair charts drawn from professional practice, in domain-specific formats that standard chart benchmarks rarely include, with questions written by professionals who read these charts for a living and independently verified by three additional experts. In an evaluation of 30 frontier-model configurations (20 scored trials per task), the best configuration reaches only 45.0% mean pass@1; the remainder span 9.0-39.5%. Failures concentrate in visual perception: models can miss nuanced features, misread values along sparsely labeled axes, mishandle projected 3D geometry, and violate domain conventions encoded in the chart. We release all tasks, images, provenance metadata, and evaluation code. △ Less

Submitted 11 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at the 2nd Workshop on Benchmarking Evidence-Aligned Multimodal Reasoning (BEAM 2), ECCV 2026

Do Judges Behave Like Algorithms?

Authors: Riya Manchanda, Eric Chen, Chloe Zhu, Cynthia Rudin, Brandon Garrett, Songman Kang

Abstract: What if judges already behave like algorithms? As artificial intelligence and algorithms are deployed in many settings, including the judicial system, many have debated whether judges should be allowed to rely on them. Instead, we ask whether judges follow predictable, algorithmic-like rules already. If judges already follow consistent, formula-like rules based on discrete and static factors such… ▽ More What if judges already behave like algorithms? As artificial intelligence and algorithms are deployed in many settings, including the judicial system, many have debated whether judges should be allowed to rely on them. Instead, we ask whether judges follow predictable, algorithmic-like rules already. If judges already follow consistent, formula-like rules based on discrete and static factors such as criminal history, age, and charge type, then judicial behavior may be improved. However, if judges rely on individualized information that cannot be identified through court data, then standards-based decision-making may be more challenging to understand or improve. This work explores these questions by studying judicial decision-making in misdemeanor bail hearings in Harris County, Texas. Using available court data, we investigate whether magistrate judges follow what resembles an algorithm; whether they consider the same variables in their decision-making; and whether they are consistent with themselves and with each other. To do this, we train machine learning models for each judge, measure variable importance metrics to determine important variables for each judge's decision-making, and analyze outcomes of similar cases for judges. Our results reveal that these judges generally behave algorithmically: their decisions can be captured by small, interpretable formulas. However, in some cases, judges differ substantially, leading to surprising inconsistency and unequal treatment across similar defendants. Identifying cases where algorithms do not explain judicial decision-making can improve the justice system by focusing attention on decisions where individualized standards, rather than rules, better explains outcomes. △ Less

Submitted 11 August, 2026; v1 submitted 10 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted at the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026)

HandSplatter: Automated Digital Goniometry from Neural Rendering

Authors: Emmett Chen, Neal Chen, Xiang Li, Quanzheng Li, Siyeop Yoon

Abstract: Hand and finger disorders are leading contributors to musculoskeletal disability, creating a clinical need for precise methods to quantify joint motion. Range of motion (ROM) serves as the metric for diagnosis, rehabilitation monitoring, and evaluating surgical outcomes. Currently, the goniometer is the standard tool for assessing finger flexion and extension. However, manual goniometry is labor-i… ▽ More Hand and finger disorders are leading contributors to musculoskeletal disability, creating a clinical need for precise methods to quantify joint motion. Range of motion (ROM) serves as the metric for diagnosis, rehabilitation monitoring, and evaluating surgical outcomes. Currently, the goniometer is the standard tool for assessing finger flexion and extension. However, manual goniometry is labor-intensive and suffers from inconsistent inter-rater reliability due to variations in examiner technique. While digital alternatives exist, current software-based approaches often lack the necessary accuracy for clinical usage. To address these limitations, we present a novel pipeline for 3-D hand joint location and pose estimation using neural rendering. Unlike previous methods, our approach combines 2-D feature extraction with view synthesis to significantly improve accuracy and clinical viability. Furthermore, we introduce a discrete density hill climbing algorithm that facilitates the meaningful correction of projected landmarks in 3-D space. This system overcomes the inefficiencies of manual measurement and the inaccuracies of existing software, providing a robust tool for objective functional assessment. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 48th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2026), Full Paper #1985

SITA: Semantic Interest Tokens for Target-Aware Compression in Long-Sequence Recommendation

Authors: Rui Zhou, Bo Chen, Qinglin Jia, Jiezhou Ji, Chaoyi Ma, Ruiming Tang, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: As user behavior histories continue to grow on modern Internet platforms, effectively modeling long behavior sequences has become crucial for predicting user interests in candidate items. Existing methods have evolved along two directions. One line dynamically retrieves target-relevant behaviors from long histories, enabling target-aware modeling but requiring target-dependent computation during i… ▽ More As user behavior histories continue to grow on modern Internet platforms, effectively modeling long behavior sequences has become crucial for predicting user interests in candidate items. Existing methods have evolved along two directions. One line dynamically retrieves target-relevant behaviors from long histories, enabling target-aware modeling but requiring target-dependent computation during inference. The other line compresses entire behavior sequences into compact user representations, achieving high efficiency and scalability but sacrificing target-specific adaptation due to target-independent encoding. The key challenge is therefore to enable target-aware modeling while preserving the efficiency and scalability of compressed user representations. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{SITA}, a target-aware compression framework for long-sequence recommendation. SITA enables target-aware compression by organizing compressed interests into semantic structures through semantic identifiers learned via parallel semantic quantization. Conditioned on the semantic identifier of the target item, SITA adaptively aggregates the corresponding structured interests to construct the target-specific user representation. Extensive experiments on public datasets and a large-scale industrial dataset demonstrate that SITA consistently outperforms representative baselines while maintaining strong scalability, highlighting its strong potential for real-world recommender systems. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

CastFSR: A Fast--Slow--Reflect Agentic Reasoning Framework for Context-Aware Time Series Forecasting

Authors: Xiaoyu Tao, Mingyue Cheng, Bokai Pan, Chuang Jiang, Huanjian Zhang, Tian Gao, Yaguo Liu, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Time series forecasting is fundamental to decision-making in complex systems, where future dynamics are influenced not only by historical observations but also by evolving contextual features. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have extended forecasting beyond numerical extrapolation toward context-aware reasoning. However, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to identif… ▽ More Time series forecasting is fundamental to decision-making in complex systems, where future dynamics are influenced not only by historical observations but also by evolving contextual features. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have extended forecasting beyond numerical extrapolation toward context-aware reasoning. However, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to identify relevant contexts, reason about their impacts, and validate forecasts against temporal and domain constraints. In this work, we propose CastFSR, an agentic framework that formulates context-aware forecasting as a Fast--Slow--Reflect workflow. In fast thinking, CastFSR profiles observations and selects lightweight forecasters to construct a data-driven forecast prior. In slow deliberation, it retrieves contextual evidence, adaptively determines informative look-back windows, and reasons about how contexts reshape future dynamics. In reflection, it iteratively refines forecasts to ensure temporal, contextual, and domain consistency. CastFSR supports both training-free inference with off-the-shelf LLMs and efficient deployment through a two-stage SFT and reinforcement learning strategy that transfers its orchestration capability to compact LLMs. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that CastFSR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/CastFSR. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2026; v1 submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Post-Training on Office Work Improves Software Engineering: A Behavioral Account of Cross-Domain Transfer

Authors: Logan Ritchie, Sushant Mehta, Liudas Panavas, Edwin Chen

Abstract: Long-horizon tasks require agents to maintain coherent state and goals across nested and branching work. We call this capability goal-directed execution (GDE): the repeated application of four behaviors, namely selecting goals, constructing task-relevant state, maintaining fidelity to higher-level objectives, and verifying completion against the environment. We hypothesize that long-horizon post-t… ▽ More Long-horizon tasks require agents to maintain coherent state and goals across nested and branching work. We call this capability goal-directed execution (GDE): the repeated application of four behaviors, namely selecting goals, constructing task-relevant state, maintaining fidelity to higher-level objectives, and verifying completion against the environment. We hypothesize that long-horizon post-training strengthens these behaviors across domains. We test this by post-training Qwen3.5-122B-A10B on 363 Long-Horizon Multi-Tool Agent (LHMTA) tasks drawn from office workflows. The collection contained no software-engineering tasks, yet the model's pass@1 improved by 5.8 points on SWE-Bench Pro. Matched trajectory analysis shows gains in all four GDE behaviors in both office workflows and software repositories. Aggregate SWE-Bench Pro statistics showed related changes in information gathering, implementation, and verification. Together, the results support a behavioral interpretation in which long-horizon post-training changed how the model organized and applied knowledge across tasks, with effects extending beyond the training domain. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 20 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables

Cross-Benchmark Generalization in Long-Horizon Agents

Authors: Sushant Mehta, Logan Ritchie, Liudas Panavas, Edwin Chen

Abstract: For reinforcement learning (RL) in self-contained environments, a policy can get rewards by exploiting environment-specific regularities (tool schemas, grader parsing, task templates) rather than by acquiring transferable skill, and an in-distribution holdout shares those regularities. We argue that the discriminating question is behavioral, namely how a trained agent acts, and that cross-benchmar… ▽ More For reinforcement learning (RL) in self-contained environments, a policy can get rewards by exploiting environment-specific regularities (tool schemas, grader parsing, task templates) rather than by acquiring transferable skill, and an in-distribution holdout shares those regularities. We argue that the discriminating question is behavioral, namely how a trained agent acts, and that cross-benchmark transfer is the right place to look for it. We post-train an open-weight mixture-of-experts model (Qwen3.5-122B-A10B) on 363 long-horizon Model Context Protocol (MCP) tasks across 27 categories, using a two-stage SFT-then-RL pipeline. Toolathlon performance informed the initial base-family and SFT-teacher choices, but no external-benchmark task or grader entered training and no external score informed the reward, training hyperparameters, trained-checkpoint selection, or stopping. At greedy pass@1, the trained model improves over the base on five reported external evaluations: Toolathlon (+9.6 pp), $τ^2$-Bench (+5.3 pp), BFCL-V4 (+3.5 pp), SWE-Bench Pro (+5.8 pp), and Terminal-Bench 2 (+2.8 pp). Both software-engineering benchmarks improve despite the training collection containing no software-engineering tasks. An exploratory paired-trajectory analysis identifies four recurring behavioral differences (more careful local-goal formation, building goal-relevant working state, keeping parent goals stable through local repairs, and verifying completion) that appear in analogous forms across office workflows and code. These results provide descriptive evidence that long-horizon multi-tool post-training can change ways of working that transfer beyond its training domain. △ Less

Submitted 31 July, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted at the COLM 2026 Workshop on Agent Behavior. 11 pages, 4 tables

DragonCrawl: A Generative, Intent-Based Framework for Scalable Mobile End-to-End Testing

Authors: Sowjanya Puligadda, Mengdie Zhang, Ali Zamani, Dhruva Dixith Kurra, Eric Chen, Juan Marcano

Abstract: As mobile applications grow in complexity, traditional End-to-End (E2E) testing frameworks struggle with UI volatility, maintenance overhead, and cross-platform scalability. This paper presents DragonCrawl, an AI-driven mobile testing system for continuous regression testing that has evolved from embedding-based similarity matching to generative intent-based reasoning using large language models.… ▽ More As mobile applications grow in complexity, traditional End-to-End (E2E) testing frameworks struggle with UI volatility, maintenance overhead, and cross-platform scalability. This paper presents DragonCrawl, an AI-driven mobile testing system for continuous regression testing that has evolved from embedding-based similarity matching to generative intent-based reasoning using large language models. Unlike prior LLM-based testing research focused on exploratory testing and crash detection, DragonCrawl validates specific user flows on every code change, blocking commits that break critical functionality. By leveraging GPT-4o's multimodal capabilities, DragonCrawl achieves 91.6% pass rate on iOS and 92.2% on Android across 1,013 automated tests running continuously in CI/CD pipelines. The system reduces test onboarding time from 96-120 hours to under 4 hours and has saved an estimated 27 developer years in test maintenance effort. We present the architectural evolution from V1 (semantic embedding matching) to V2 (generative intent-based reasoning), discuss implementation challenges including token explosion and memory constraints, and report operational experience from production deployment. The integration of multimodal vision for end-state detection and tool calling for backend state transitions enables comprehensive regression testing that bridges UI interactions with system state. Our results demonstrate that AI-driven testing can maintain stability while eliminating the brittleness of traditional automated tests, enabling continuous quality assurance at scale. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; v1 submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 12 pages, 6 figures, 6 pages

ViSAGE: Constructing Self-Correcting Memories for Long-Form Video Understanding

Authors: Xinkui Zhao, Enbo Chen, Yifan Zhang, Chang Liu, Guanjie Cheng, Naibo Wang, Yueshen Xu

Abstract: Multimodal agents operating in long-horizon environments must build and continually update multimedia memories to support entity-consistent, temporally grounded reasoning. However, existing agentic memory approaches often discard fine-grained dentity cues under aggressive compression and segment-wise processing. They also rely heavily on vector similarity retrieval, which can surface semantically… ▽ More Multimodal agents operating in long-horizon environments must build and continually update multimedia memories to support entity-consistent, temporally grounded reasoning. However, existing agentic memory approaches often discard fine-grained dentity cues under aggressive compression and segment-wise processing. They also rely heavily on vector similarity retrieval, which can surface semantically related yet identity-mismatched evidence, leading to entity confusion, error propagation, and hallucinated answers. We propose ViSAGE, a multimodal agentic memory framework that constructs self-correcting, entity-centric memories. Specifically, ViSAGE anchors entity identity via cross-modal binding over long temporal ranges. It then applies bidirectional memory refinement to propagate delayed identity evidence, retroactively unifying historical records and improving future reasoning. We also introduce multi-agent cross-verification to assess retrieved evidence under an identity-evidence alignment onstraint, enabling abstention instead of unsupported answers when evidence is missing. Extensive results demonstrate that ViSAGE consistently outperforms the strongest baseline, achieving 5.9% higher accuracy. △ Less

Submitted 29 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Accept by ACMMM 2026

Towards Trustworthy Embodied Intelligence: A Systems Framework and Graded Trustworthiness Levels

Authors: Xinyu Yang, Tianxing Chen, Honghao Su, Minxuan Wang, Chenze Yu, Zhangzheng Tu, Yue Chen, Yuxiao Huo, Lingfeng Zhang, Yan Huang, Yan Qin, Shaolong Zhu, Qiwei Liang, Hekun Tian, Shujia Liu, Guangyu Chen, Junhao Gong, Zixuan Li, Wenwei Lin, Zijian Lin, Wenxuan Zhu, Eric J Chen, Yue Yuan, Qize Yu, Jiaqi Liang , et al. (16 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction. Because failures can cause immediate physical or operational harm, task completion alone does not establish trustworthiness. We define trustworthy embodied intelligence as the sustained capacity to execute specified tasks reliably under environmental and system var… ▽ More Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction. Because failures can cause immediate physical or operational harm, task completion alone does not establish trustworthiness. We define trustworthy embodied intelligence as the sustained capacity to execute specified tasks reliably under environmental and system variation while maintaining risk within acceptable bounds. We term this objective sustained safe success. Its supporting mechanisms are organized into four interdependent layers. The model layer generates task-competent action proposals with calibrated uncertainty and explicit safety preferences. The system layer realizes authorized actions dependably through integrated sensing, computation, control, hardware safeguards, fault containment, and fallback. The evidence layer substantiates bounded claims through evaluation, verification, validation, traceability, and structured assurance arguments. The deployment layer maintains claim validity through runtime monitoring, authority management, intervention, incident response, and controlled updates. Because assumptions and failures propagate across these layers, neither model capability, isolated safeguards, nor benchmark performance alone can establish end-to-end trustworthiness. Drawing on embodied AI, robotics, control, dependable computing, distributed systems, and autonomous driving, we further propose a non-normative hierarchy of trustworthiness levels. This hierarchy grades the strength of bounded deployment claims across task capability, safety, system assurance, operational governance, and supporting evidence, providing a basis for bounded deployment, comparative evaluation, research prioritization, and future standardization. △ Less

Submitted 28 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Website: https://xsparkai.com/sparklab/towards-trustworthy-eai

HANDBOOK.md: A Benchmark for Long-Context Agentic Instruction Following

Authors: Liudas Panavas, Sebastian Minus, Bradley Monton, Derek Ray, Suhaas Garre, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen

Abstract: Language-model agents are increasingly deployed under standing instructions: a system prompt, a policy file, or a skills document is placed in context, and the agent is trusted to let that document govern every action that follows. Existing benchmarks rarely test this deployment pattern directly; they measure whether an agent can complete a task, not whether a long, binding policy document constra… ▽ More Language-model agents are increasingly deployed under standing instructions: a system prompt, a policy file, or a skills document is placed in context, and the agent is trusted to let that document govern every action that follows. Existing benchmarks rarely test this deployment pattern directly; they measure whether an agent can complete a task, not whether a long, binding policy document constrains its behavior over an extended tool-use horizon. We present HANDBOOK_md, a benchmark of 65 agentic tasks modeled on how employees follow company handbooks. Each task places an agent in a self-contained company environment (a file workspace with mock email, chat, calendar, issue-tracking, and commerce services exposed over the Model Context Protocol) and instructs it to carry out routine professional work governed by an expert-written standard operating procedure of 20-124 pages. Tasks span five domains (finance, medical billing, insurance, logistics, and HR) and 10 fictional companies. To resist memorization, every task modifies one of 10 base handbooks, altering the specific rules and thresholds on which grading depends, so no two tasks share the same set of policies. Grading is fully deterministic: each task carries a rubric of programmatic criteria (824 in total) that check both that required actions occurred and that prohibited actions did not. Under strict grading, where a trial passes only if every criterion is satisfied, the strongest evaluated model passes 36.2% of trials, and most frontier models remain below 25%. Failures follow consistent patterns: agents let a plausible but unauthorized in-environment request override the standing policy, perform a required check and then act against its result, lose rule details over long horizons, and report compliance they did not achieve. We release the tasks, environments, and evaluation harness. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; v1 submitted 28 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Accepted to the Workshop on Agent Behavior (WAB) at COLM 2026. Benchmark, environments, and evaluation harness: https://github.com/surge-ai/handbook

MATS: A novel multi-modality multi-task learning framework for 3D perception in autonomous driving

Authors: Junchen Huo, Wanming Hao, Song Wang, Enqing Chen, Shouyi Yang, Guanghui Wang

Abstract: Multi-modality data from different sensors provides rich complementary information for 3D perception, becoming an essential component in reliable autonomous driving systems. Current research typically designs intricate and complex fusion strategies to integrate information from multimodal data on a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for the joint learning of multiple perception tasks. Howev… ▽ More Multi-modality data from different sensors provides rich complementary information for 3D perception, becoming an essential component in reliable autonomous driving systems. Current research typically designs intricate and complex fusion strategies to integrate information from multimodal data on a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for the joint learning of multiple perception tasks. However, such a single feature map hardly carries sufficient information to simultaneously meet the requirements of various perception tasks, leading to a very limited perception performance. To mitigate this limitation, this paper proposes MATS, a novel multi-modality multi-task learning approach with modality-adaptive BEV fusion and task-specific Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) for 3D perception. Specifically, a simple modality-adaptive BEV fusion module is designed to adaptively recalibrate the BEV features by modeling the global cross-modality dependencies, generating diverse BEV feature maps for various perception tasks. For joint multi-task learning, this paper proposes a task-specific MoE module to decouple the tasks and enable the network to automatically choose the appropriate BEV feature candidates for each specific task. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale benchmark nuScenes. With the camera- and LiDAR-modality input data, the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by a significant margin. Furthermore, the experimental results on the single tasks show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baselines. The code and trained models will be available upon publication. △ Less

Submitted 27 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 12 pages

STAIF: A Stage-wise Optimization for Complex Instruction Following

Authors: Jian Hong, Chen Cheng, Quan Liu, Yuhao Chen, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Following complex instructions with multiple explicit constraints remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods, such as DPO, optimize holistic reward signals that often underemphasize strict satisfaction of individual constraints, particularly under out-of-distribution or multi-constraint settings. In this paper, we propose STAIF, a stage-wise optimi… ▽ More Following complex instructions with multiple explicit constraints remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods, such as DPO, optimize holistic reward signals that often underemphasize strict satisfaction of individual constraints, particularly under out-of-distribution or multi-constraint settings. In this paper, we propose STAIF, a stage-wise optimization framework that decouples the alignment of subjective (soft) constraints from the optimization of objectively verifiable (hard) constraints. Stage 1 applies preference optimization with multiple negative samples to sharpen sensitivity to soft constraints, while Stage 2 applies Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to enforce strict compliance with hard constraints. To support this method, we construct STAINSTRUCT, a high-quality bilingual (English, Chinese) dataset of approximately 31,000 complex multi-constraint instructions. Extensive analyses validate the design of STAIF and show state-of-the-art performance on representative benchmarks against strong baselines, as well as genuine generalization. △ Less

Submitted 26 June, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 6 figures

Routing Without Training: Controllable-Ratio LLM Offloading via Reliability Gating

Authors: Evan Chen, Shiqiang Wang, Kevin S Chan, Su Wang, Christopher Brinton

Abstract: Local-cloud collaboration is a practical way to deploy large language models under resource constraints, but existing methods often rely on trained routers or collaboration-aware finetuning that tie routing behavior to a particular operating regime. In this work, we show that such training may be unnecessary: the local model's own inference-time agreement across sampled responses already provides… ▽ More Local-cloud collaboration is a practical way to deploy large language models under resource constraints, but existing methods often rely on trained routers or collaboration-aware finetuning that tie routing behavior to a particular operating regime. In this work, we show that such training may be unnecessary: the local model's own inference-time agreement across sampled responses already provides a strong signal for deciding when to trust local execution and when to offload to a stronger cloud model. We propose CARGO, a training-free routing framework that estimates this agreement through prompt-varied sampling, applies Bayesian early stopping for sample-efficient uncertainty control, and supports arbitrary target collaboration ratios through lightweight deployment-time calibration. Across diverse reasoning and question-answering tasks, multiple local LLM families and scales, and both pretrained and finetuned local models, CARGO consistently outperforms other training-free baselines and in several settings surpasses supervised learned routers. These results suggest that effective and adaptable local-cloud collaboration can emerge directly from the local model's intrinsic response behavior, without requiring an additional trained router. △ Less

Submitted 30 May, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

AI Tool Discovery at Scale: All You Need is DNS

Authors: Enhao Chen, Yulin Shao

Abstract: The coming era of autonomous AI agents demands a discovery mechanism capable of navigating millions of tools, yet existing solutions buckle under O(N) complexity and centralized governance. Instead of building another fragile overlay, we propose ToolDNS, a radical framework that retrofits semantic tool discovery onto the Internet's most resilient substrate: the Domain Name System (DNS). By embeddi… ▽ More The coming era of autonomous AI agents demands a discovery mechanism capable of navigating millions of tools, yet existing solutions buckle under O(N) complexity and centralized governance. Instead of building another fragile overlay, we propose ToolDNS, a radical framework that retrofits semantic tool discovery onto the Internet's most resilient substrate: the Domain Name System (DNS). By embedding functional intent and organizational trust into a hierarchical namespace, ToolDNS transforms an expensive semantic search into a series of lightweight, O(log N) name resolutions. We introduce three protocol-compliant enhancements to enable decentralized governance and semantic pruning: partially unfolded names, EDNS0 intent payloads, and logical subdomains. To rigorously evaluate this approach across the fragmented tooling landscape, we construct and release a large-scale heterogeneous benchmark comprising 33,688 real-world tools spanning MCP, A2A, RESTful, and Skill protocols. On this dataset, ToolDNS slashes the per-query search space by 95.26% while matching state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy. Furthermore, its UDP-native design reduces discovery latency by orders of magnitude compared to HTTP-based registries. Our work demonstrates that scalable AI interoperability requires not more middleware, but a smarter utilization of the infrastructure already beneath our feet. △ Less

Submitted 19 April, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: keywords: AI tool discovery, ToolDNS, Agent, DNS

Gold-Guided Programmatic Distillation for Financial Reasoning over Hybrid Tables and Text

Authors: Yun Dong, Erica Zhao, Elana Chen

Abstract: Financial question answering over hybrid tabular and textual data may require multi-source reasoning and precise numerical computation. While large language models (LLMs) can generate intermediate reasoning steps, natural-language rationales remain prone to arithmetic errors, making them an unreliable supervision source for distillation. Building on programmatic distillation, we develop an approac… ▽ More Financial question answering over hybrid tabular and textual data may require multi-source reasoning and precise numerical computation. While large language models (LLMs) can generate intermediate reasoning steps, natural-language rationales remain prone to arithmetic errors, making them an unreliable supervision source for distillation. Building on programmatic distillation, we develop an approach that transfers reliable numerical reasoning from a large teacher model to a compact student using execution-verified Python programs instead of free-form textual rationales. It leverages gold derivations to guide teacher-side program synthesis and retains only programs that execute correctly and produce the gold answer, ensuring high-quality supervision. We further introduce an iterative recovery stage that revisits teacher-failed examples, enabling the student to recover and incorporate newly verified programs into training. Experiments on TAT-QA show that our framework is highly effective for hybrid financial reasoning. Our best 7B student achieves 87.00 EM / 87.18 F1 on the test set, substantially outperforming the 72B teacher (78.46 EM) as well as traditional and strong LLM-based baselines, including TAGOP and TAT-LLM. These results demonstrate that execution-verified programmatic distillation provides an effective and extensible framework for training smaller models to perform reliable numerical reasoning. △ Less

Submitted 16 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 12 pages, 7 figures

MathCoPilot: An Interactive System for Human-AI Symbiotic Paradigm of Mathematical Research

Authors: Junjie Zhang, Jiayu Liu, Wenbin Liu, Zhenya Huang, Doudou Wang, Yan Jiang, Leiye Xu, Tao Xiong, Wen Huang, Qi Liu, Guoping Hu, Enhong Chen, Mengping Zhang, Xiangdong Ye

Abstract: Existing LLM-based theorem provers have achieved impressive results on formal mathematics benchmarks, yet they remain confined to acting as autonomous agents that prove a stated proposition. In this paper, we propose MathCoPilot, a human-in-the-loop system that embodies a new human--AI symbiotic paradigm for mathematical research, in which the mathematician steers the high-level mathematical direc… ▽ More Existing LLM-based theorem provers have achieved impressive results on formal mathematics benchmarks, yet they remain confined to acting as autonomous agents that prove a stated proposition. In this paper, we propose MathCoPilot, a human-in-the-loop system that embodies a new human--AI symbiotic paradigm for mathematical research, in which the mathematician steers the high-level mathematical direction while AI agents carry out the detailed formalization and proof work under continuous human guidance. MathCoPilot unifies three core capabilities: (1) an interactive workbench where the mathematician and AI agents collaborate through a living proof blueprint that decomposes a proof into navigable steps the human can directly inspect, direct, and refine; (2) automated proving skill orchestration with adaptive knowledge base search and Lean-integrated iterative verification; and (3) topic-driven paper retrieval and automated formalization into a verified Lean knowledge base. Using MathCoPilot, we systematically compare four state-of-the-art LLMs, including Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT-5.4, and Claude~Opus~4.7, on a FormalMATH subset and on two real PDE theorems requiring deep domain expertise, evaluating their ability to produce verified Lean~4 proofs and to identify errors in deliberately incorrect proofs. Our results show that while current models can handle undergraduate-level problems with high success rates under favorable autoformalization conditions, substantial challenges remain for domain-specific theorems requiring genuine mathematical understanding. △ Less

Submitted 16 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

GDP.pdf: Benchmarking Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents

Authors: Suhaas Garre, Emily Ritchie, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen

Abstract: A large share of day-to-day work in professional domains happens inside PDF files: benefits packets, leases, datasheets, clinical guidelines, construction plans. Benchmarks for document AI have generally measured the required capabilities in isolation: OCR, layout analysis, chart reasoning, table QA, document VQA. A high score on any one of them does not necessarily reveal whether a model can answ… ▽ More A large share of day-to-day work in professional domains happens inside PDF files: benefits packets, leases, datasheets, clinical guidelines, construction plans. Benchmarks for document AI have generally measured the required capabilities in isolation: OCR, layout analysis, chart reasoning, table QA, document VQA. A high score on any one of them does not necessarily reveal whether a model can answer a realistic question that someone in the field would actually ask about a specific PDF. GDP_pdf is a benchmark built to measure this directly. It consists of question-document pairs authored by working professionals in ten fields, and a candidate question was kept only when at least two frontier multimodal models failed it in a way that mattered: a wrong answer, missed decisive evidence, or a fabricated claim, rather than a superficial difference such as style. Each item comes with a rubric of atomic criteria, so we can report a graded rubric score as well as a strict task-level pass rate, and each item is tagged against a taxonomy of eleven capabilities in three tiers, spanning text extraction and grounding, table and chart comprehension, cross-referencing, spatial reasoning, and abstention on unsupported queries. We report results for seventeen frontier models on the 100-item benchmark: the best model passes only 30.7% of the items and the worst passes 2%. Most errors trace back to a small set of recurring loss patterns: misaligned tables, misread charts, skipped footnotes and exclusions, miscounted floor-plan symbols, scan noise, and amendments that supersede earlier text. △ Less

Submitted 15 July, 2026; v1 submitted 13 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 9 pages. v2: results updated to July 2026 leaderboard (17 models). Accepted at the 2nd Workshop on Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Reasoning (KnowledgeMR) at CVPR 2026 (non-archival), under the former title "PDFParse: A Benchmark for Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents". Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/surgeai/GDP.pdf ; Code: https://github.com/surge-ai/gdp-pdf

ACM Class: I.2.7; I.2.10; I.7.5

Unlocking Parallelism in Autoregressive Language Models via Speculative Decoding with Progressive Tree Drafting

Authors: Zipeng Gao, Zhi Zheng, Qingrong Xia, Junda Lin, Ziwei Zhao, Tong Xu, Zhefeng Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Speculative decoding has significantly accelerated Large Language Model (LLM) inference by alleviating memory-bound bottlenecks. However, traditional speculative decoding typically relies on auxiliary draft modules, incurring significant training and communication overhead. Although recent methods attempt to generate drafts within the target model itself, they often fail to fully exploit its laten… ▽ More Speculative decoding has significantly accelerated Large Language Model (LLM) inference by alleviating memory-bound bottlenecks. However, traditional speculative decoding typically relies on auxiliary draft modules, incurring significant training and communication overhead. Although recent methods attempt to generate drafts within the target model itself, they often fail to fully exploit its latent parallel capacity due to a lack of structural coordination. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Progressive Tree Drafting (PTD)}, which employs a structured, guided parallel drafting strategy to harness the model's parallel potential. By coupling a progressive tree structure with a stepwise pruning mechanism, PTD actively guides the LLM to explore multiple semantic paths in a single forward pass, ensuring both draft diversity and coherence. Experiments demonstrate that PTD achieves up to $2\times$ decoding speedup across various benchmarks while remaining training-free and model-agnostic. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MINE-USTC/PTD. △ Less

Submitted 12 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

A Comparative Study of Static, Scrollytelling, and Chatbot Visualization Onboarding Techniques for UX Designers

Authors: Ester Chen, Aboli Shete, Aditya Anavekar, Roshan Peiris, Hidy Kong

Abstract: User experience (UX) designers face barriers when creating data visualizations due to limited domain expertise in visualization or unfamiliarity with specialized tools. This highlights a clear need for effective methods to build visualization literacy. To address this, we evaluated three visualization onboarding techniques -- static, scrollytelling, and chatbot -- in an experimental study with 25… ▽ More User experience (UX) designers face barriers when creating data visualizations due to limited domain expertise in visualization or unfamiliarity with specialized tools. This highlights a clear need for effective methods to build visualization literacy. To address this, we evaluated three visualization onboarding techniques -- static, scrollytelling, and chatbot -- in an experimental study with 25 UX designers and students. We measured visualization comprehension and guideline adherence during a visualization creation task, followed by surveys and interviews to capture preferences and experiences. Compared to static onboarding, the pooled interactive condition (scrollytelling or chatbot) was associated with significantly higher guideline-adherence scores during visualization creation; both interactive techniques also received higher engagement ratings. Instruction clarity ratings were significantly higher when the two interactive conditions were pooled. Comprehension did not differ significantly across conditions. While participants generally preferred the interactive techniques, no significant differences emerged between scrollytelling and chatbot in performance or onboarding experience ratings. Drawing on the findings, we discuss three design dimensions of visualization onboarding (narrative structure, visual content layout, and navigational flexibility), their design implications, and potential opportunities for future research in this field. △ Less

Submitted 3 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

RAVEN: A Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network for Financial Time Series Forecasting

Authors: Cheng He, Zhenyu Guan, Xijie Liang, Defu Lian, Jiajia Li, Enhong Chen, Patrick P. C. Lee, Geng Hu, Zehao Chen

Abstract: Financial time series forecasting presents structural challenges absent from standard benchmarks. Log-returns are non-stationary, exhibit exceptionally low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, and are governed by regime-dependent temporal dependencies. We identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series models in financial settings. A fixed context window is mismatched to the time-varying… ▽ More Financial time series forecasting presents structural challenges absent from standard benchmarks. Log-returns are non-stationary, exhibit exceptionally low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, and are governed by regime-dependent temporal dependencies. We identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series models in financial settings. A fixed context window is mismatched to the time-varying optimal look-back of non-stationary price processes. We propose the Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network (RAVEN), a Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to adaptively determine the temporal context for each input sample. Instead of relying on a fixed look-back horizon, RAVEN constructs a hierarchy of nested contiguous windows whose lengths are determined by the data itself. Specifically, RAVEN scores patches by learned importance in reverse chronological order and applies the Cumulative Importance Thresholding (CIT) mechanism to derive nested prefix windows, each routed to a scale-specialized expert. A Global Compressed Representation (GCR) branch runs in parallel over the full context, preserving global temporal coherence that local experts cannot guarantee. Because the nested routing induces structured overlap among expert inputs, we introduce a Correlation-Aware Weighting (CAW) to align variable-length expert outputs and penalize pairwise cosine similarity prior to aggregation. Experiments on cumulative log-return prediction (HS300, S&P500) and fund sales forecasting demonstrate that RAVEN achieves SOTA performances, improves Pearson correlation by 9.2% on HS300 and 20.2% on S&P500, and reduces MSE by 18.2% on fund sales forecasting, while achieving the best results in 14 of 16 metrics on four PEMS traffic benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 22 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

ScholarQuest: A Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Agentic Academic Paper Search in Open Literature Environments

Authors: Tingyue Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Daoyu Wang, Yitong Zhou, Jie Ouyang, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks are insufficient for systematically evaluating agentic academic search under realistic open literature environments. We propose ScholarQuest, a large-scale, taxonomy-guided benchmark for agent… ▽ More Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks are insufficient for systematically evaluating agentic academic search under realistic open literature environments. We propose ScholarQuest, a large-scale, taxonomy-guided benchmark for agentic academic paper search. ScholarQuest is constructed from over 1,000 computer science topics and four representative research intents, including method-oriented, setting-anchored, comparison-based, and scope-controlled queries. It further provides scalable answer construction and a shared retrieval backend ScholarBase for reproducible evaluation. Benchmarking results show that agentic methods outperform single-shot retrieval baselines, yet the best-performing agent only achieves 0.314 Recall@100 and 0.355 Recall@All, indicating substantial room for improvement. In addition, analyses of search efficiency, intent-level robustness, and failure cases further highlight the benchmark's ability to provide multi-dimensional evaluation signals for academic paper search agents. △ Less

Submitted 18 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Authors: Yanyu Yao, Shangze Li, Zhi Zheng, Hui Zheng, Qi Liu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents. △ Less

Submitted 18 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: 19 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables

ACM Class: I.2.7

Projective Graph Residualization: Variation-Allocation Frontiers for Control-Function IV

Authors: Rui Wu, Zongyuan Chen, Hong Xie, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Control-function instrumental-variable estimators pass an estimated first-stage residual to an outcome model. The residual must retain the latent control direction while leaving enough treatment variation to identify the structural effect. These demands conflict when the systematic signal is locally smooth but discontinuous across unknown feature-graph boundaries: interpolation can erase the resid… ▽ More Control-function instrumental-variable estimators pass an estimated first-stage residual to an outcome model. The residual must retain the latent control direction while leaving enough treatment variation to identify the structural effect. These demands conflict when the systematic signal is locally smooth but discontinuous across unknown feature-graph boundaries: interpolation can erase the residual, whereas isotropic smoothing can move systematic variation across a boundary. We propose Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF), which adapts edge conductance from pilot treatment contrasts, extracts a generated control with a complementary sparse resolvent, and tunes without outcomes. For a linear control-function regression, only the generated control's span matters. This projective view yields an exact finite-sample fidelity--relevance frontier, spectral identities for residualized treatment variation and coefficient distortion, and a lower bound for monotone residual filters. A connected construction shows that conductance adaptation can escape the corresponding fixed-graph obstruction. Across 54 benchmark cells, the A-IHF family wins 32 and guarded observational A-IHF reduces mean nonlinear response error by 8.3 percent, with gains concentrated in fractured designs. Exact distortion correlates 0.998 with realized linear coefficient error. Controlled graph rewiring further shows that connectivity alone is inadequate: an outcome-free compatibility screen triggers foldwise fallback and, under severe corruption, abstention. △ Less

Submitted 29 July, 2026; v1 submitted 12 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). 33 pages, 9 figures, including supplementary material

SocraticPO: Policy Optimization via Interactive Guidance

Authors: Zirui Liu, Jie Ouyang, Qi Liu, Xianquan Wang, Jiayu Liu, Tingyue Pan, Qingchuan Li, Jing Sha, Zhenya Huang, Shijin Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models usually supervises reasoning with scalar outcome rewards, such as binary correctness. Such rewards provide an optimization direction but rarely explain how a model should revise its mistaken reasoning, which can encourage shortcut learning and brittle policies. We propose \textbf{SocraticPO} (Socratic Policy Optimization), a policy-optimization… ▽ More Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models usually supervises reasoning with scalar outcome rewards, such as binary correctness. Such rewards provide an optimization direction but rarely explain how a model should revise its mistaken reasoning, which can encourage shortcut learning and brittle policies. We propose \textbf{SocraticPO} (Socratic Policy Optimization), a policy-optimization framework that augments RL rollouts with Socratic-style natural-language guidance. During rollout, the student first answers independently; if the answer is incorrect, a teacher diagnoses the attempt and provides concise corrective guidance, after which the student continues under the expanded context. Crucially, this guidance is paired with reward decay: correct answers obtained after teacher intervention only receive decayed rewards, preventing the policy from treating teacher help as a free path to reward. Since SocraticPO only modifies the rollout process while leaving the standard expected-reward objective intact, it can be plugged into existing policy-gradient backends such as Reinforce++. Moreover, because the teacher provides only text-level guidance, SocraticPO can leverage stronger black-box teacher models without requiring access to logits or distribution matching. On undergraduate-level scientific reasoning benchmarks from SciKnowEval, SocraticPO improves over strong RL and self-distillation baselines. Ablations show that both targeted guidance and reward decay are necessary, with reward decay mitigating reliance on assisted correction. △ Less

Submitted 3 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

ComplexConstraints and Beyond: Expert Rubrics for RLVR

Authors: Sushant Mehta, Liudas Panavas, Suhaas Garre, Edwin Chen

Abstract: Evaluation protocols can lag behind LLM capabilities. Programmatically verified benchmarks cover narrow surface constraints, whereas real-world instruction following and agentic workflows require judging semantic, contextual, and policy-dependent behavior. We study expert-curated rubric-based evaluation as a unified mechanism for measurement and reinforcement-learning rewards across two settings:… ▽ More Evaluation protocols can lag behind LLM capabilities. Programmatically verified benchmarks cover narrow surface constraints, whereas real-world instruction following and agentic workflows require judging semantic, contextual, and policy-dependent behavior. We study expert-curated rubric-based evaluation as a unified mechanism for measurement and reinforcement-learning rewards across two settings: complex instruction following and enterprise agentic tasks. We identify rubric-design choices that affect reward quality, including maximum viable atomicity, intent-aware criterion design, and LLM-judge calibration. We introduce ComplexConstraints, an expert-curated instruction-following suite comprising a public 75-prompt benchmark with 1,559 rubric criteria and a disjoint 1,000-prompt training set, with 10-40 atomic criteria per prompt. Empirically, rubric rewards improve training in both fixed task datasets, such as ComplexConstraints, and stateful RL environments, such as CoreCraft. Training a 4B model on ComplexConstraints improves mean criterion pass rate by +15.5 pp on a held-out split, bringing it within 0.5 pp of the untrained baseline of a roughly 60x larger Qwen3 model, and the gains transfer to external benchmarks the model never saw during training: +8.4 pp on AdvancedIF and +10.1 pp on MultiChallenge. In CoreCraft, rubric-reward RL likewise transfers to out-of-distribution benchmarks (+4.5 pp BFCL, +7.4 pp tau^2-Bench, +6.8 pp Toolathlon). These results show that expert-authored rubrics provide effective evaluation targets and scalable reward signals for improving LLM instruction following and agentic behavior. △ Less

Submitted 3 July, 2026; v1 submitted 8 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: Accepted to the GEM workshop at ACL 2026: https://gem-workshop.com/

WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints

Authors: Shalfun Li, Victor Yao, Charles Yang, Truth Qu, Regis Cheng, Ryan Yu, Howard Lu, Newton Von, Vincent Chen, Yohann Tang, Maeve Zhang, Ellie Ma, Gody Li, Sage Yang, Lorien Shu, J. W. Gao, Ethan Chen, Colin Ye, Yu Sun, Elise Mon, PS Zhang, Neo Li, Lily Li, James Wang, Ping Yang , et al. (6 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: WALL-WM is a World Action Model that shifts video-action learning from chunk-centric optimization to event-grounded Vision-Language-Action pretraining, using semantically coherent action events as the atomic unit of learning. Existing WAMs commonly initialize from multimodal or video foundation models and then optimize fixed-length action chunks conditioned directly on the current observation and… ▽ More WALL-WM is a World Action Model that shifts video-action learning from chunk-centric optimization to event-grounded Vision-Language-Action pretraining, using semantically coherent action events as the atomic unit of learning. Existing WAMs commonly initialize from multimodal or video foundation models and then optimize fixed-length action chunks conditioned directly on the current observation and instruction. Although convenient, this chunk-centric formulation creates a fundamental granularity mismatch. Language describes semantic goals and events, vision evolves through continuous scene dynamics, and actions operate at control-level timescales; forcing all three into the same fixed-length prediction window turns VLA training into short-horizon correlation fitting. WALL-WM addresses this mismatch by organizing both supervision and data around semantic events. Specifically, it pairs event-grounded VLA pretraining with a data ecosystem built from event-level captions and cluster-balanced sampling, enabling scalable learning over diverse behaviors, scenes, and task structures. From the same event-pretrained backbone, WALL-WM supports two complementary inference modes. The event mode consumes next-event descriptions and enables variable-length execution chunks, while the unified mode uses a VLM with Staircase Decoding to condition conventional fixed-length chunk inference while preserving a gradient-continuous VLA path. Together with Muon-optimizer-based large-scale pretraining infrastructure, WALL-WM provides a practical scale-up recipe for general-purpose WAMs. Experiments show that WALL-WM generalizes broadly across language, scenes, and tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in large-scale real-world generalization evaluation. △ Less

Submitted 1 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Entropy-KL Divergence-based Token Masking: A Novel Approach for Selective Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Authors: Qi Liu, Mingdi Sun, Yongyi He, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu, Yi Zheng, Zhefeng Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. This paradigm provides a cold-start for RL exploration, avoiding the inefficiency of pure RL where on-policy sampling yields insufficient positive samples. However, in practice, existing approaches often use a small amount of data for SFT initialization compa… ▽ More Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. This paradigm provides a cold-start for RL exploration, avoiding the inefficiency of pure RL where on-policy sampling yields insufficient positive samples. However, in practice, existing approaches often use a small amount of data for SFT initialization compared to the RL phase, which can cause the model to fit the limited samples and shift away from its pre-trained distribution. This distribution shift impedes the model's ability to effectively explore during subsequent RL training. To address this challenge, we propose that in low-data regimes, SFT should prioritize activating task-relevant capabilities rather than memorizing specific content. Along this line, we propose EKSFT (Entropy-KL Selective Fine-Tuning), which selectively masks tokens that exhibit either high entropy or high KL divergence from a reference model. By excluding these high-uncertainty, distribution-shifting tokens from imitation, EKSFT injects task-specific knowledge while preserving the integrity of the model's pre-trained distribution. Empirical evaluations on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that EKSFT consistently outperforms standard SFT. Further RL fine-tuning from the EKSFT model yields consistently better post-RL performance, indicating improved exploration for the RL stage. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/MINE-USTC/EKSFT. △ Less

Submitted 27 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: 17 pages

Defending LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems Against Cooperative Attacks with Sentence-Level Rectification

Authors: Yaoyang Luo, Zhi Zheng, Ziwei Zhao, Tong Xu, Zhao Jielun, Wenjun Xue, Yong Chen, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which excel at collaborative decision-making and complex problem-solving. However, malicious agents in MAS may inject misinformation to mislead other agents and disrupt system performance, giving rise to a new research direction that focuses on attack mechanisms and defense strategies in MAS.… ▽ More Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which excel at collaborative decision-making and complex problem-solving. However, malicious agents in MAS may inject misinformation to mislead other agents and disrupt system performance, giving rise to a new research direction that focuses on attack mechanisms and defense strategies in MAS. Prior studies largely assume malicious agents act independently and investigate the corresponding defense strategies. However, we argue that malicious agents may exhibit collaborative behaviors, enabling more effective attacks through internal information exchange. In this paper, we propose an adaptive cooperative attack framework, where malicious agents autonomously coordinate and dynamically adjust their attack strategies through multi-round interactions. Furthermore, we introduce Sentence-Level Trustworthiness Analysis and Rectification (STAR), a defense framework that identifies and rectifies misleading information at the sentence level within agent communications. Our experiments show that cooperative attacks lead to a significantly larger degradation in task success rate than independent attacks, resulting in a relative drop of 5.34\%. Meanwhile, STAR effectively mitigates both cooperative and independent threats and improves task success rate by an average of 36.76\%. The code is available at https://github.com/smoooom/STAR. △ Less

Submitted 27 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

MACReD: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Reasoning Framework for Reaction Diagram Parsing

Authors: Chuang Tang, Chenhao Lin, Yin Xu, Hao Wang, Jinrui Zhou, Xin Li, Mingjun Xiao, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Parsing chemical reaction diagrams from scientific literature is challenging due to heterogeneous layouts, intertwined visual elements, and the difficulty of integrating recognition and reasoning. Existing vision-language models advance multimodal understanding but still fail on complex diagrams, struggling to maintain spatial coherence and to integrate multidimensional information during reasonin… ▽ More Parsing chemical reaction diagrams from scientific literature is challenging due to heterogeneous layouts, intertwined visual elements, and the difficulty of integrating recognition and reasoning. Existing vision-language models advance multimodal understanding but still fail on complex diagrams, struggling to maintain spatial coherence and to integrate multidimensional information during reasoning. To address these issues, we propose MACReD, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that coordinates specialized agents for molecular perception, arrow understanding, text extraction, and reaction reconstruction within a unified VLM-guided architecture. The planning and perception layers use flexible, fine-grained detection to handle visual complexity, while the reasoning layer uses a multigraph fusion mechanism to integrate heterogeneous cues and enforce chemically consistent global reasoning. Experiments on the RxnScribe benchmark show that MACReD achieves state-of-the-art performance, with F1 scores of 75.2% and 84.6% under hard and soft match criteria, outperforming the RxnScribe baseline, which obtains 69.1% and 80.0%, respectively. These results demonstrate the robustness of MACReD across diverse diagram layouts, including multi-step and tree-structured reactions. △ Less

Submitted 27 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: Preprint. Code is available at https://github.com/TC9905/MACReD

Ultra-High-Definition Image Quality Assessment via Graph Representation Learning

Authors: Shaode Yu, Enqi Chen, Ming Huang, Xuemin Ren, Songnan Zhao, Zhicheng Zhang, Qiurui Sun

Abstract: Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) for ultrahighdefinition (UHD) images remains challenging because native-resolution inference is computationally expensive, whereas aggressive resizing or isolated cropping may suppress scale-sensitive distortions and weaken the relationship between local artifacts and global scene context. This paper aims to improve UHD-BIQA by explicitly modeling the structur… ▽ More Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) for ultrahighdefinition (UHD) images remains challenging because native-resolution inference is computationally expensive, whereas aggressive resizing or isolated cropping may suppress scale-sensitive distortions and weaken the relationship between local artifacts and global scene context. This paper aims to improve UHD-BIQA by explicitly modeling the structural dependencies among sampled image regions rather than treating them as independent views, and a graph representation learning framework UHD-GCN-BIQA is proposed. The framework samples aspect-ratio-aligned patches from each UHD image, encodes them as graph nodes, and constructs a hybrid k-nearest-neighbor graph using spatial proximity and feature similarity. Residual graph convolution is used to propagate contextual information across regions, and gated attention pooling aggregates patchlevel evidence into an imagelevel quality prediction. An exponential moving average normalized multiobjective loss function is adopted to stabilize the joint optimization of regression, correlation, and ranking objectives. Experiments on the UHD-IQA benchmark show that UHD-GCN-BIQA achieves PLCC = 0.7784, SRCC = 0.8019, and RMSE = 0.0519, obtaining competitive correlation performance and the lowest RMSE among the compared methods. These results indicate that graph-based region relation modeling is effective for UHD image quality assessment, particularly for improving absolute quality score estimation under high-resolution visual content. △ Less

Submitted 21 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

What Really Improves Mathematical Reasoning: Structured Reasoning Signals Beyond Pure Code

Authors: Yuze Zhao, Junpeng Fang, Lu Yu, Zhenya Huang, Kai Zhang, Qing Cui, Qi Liu, Jun Zhou, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Code has become a standard component of modern foundation language model (LM) training, yet its role beyond programming remains unclear. We revisit the claim that code improves reasoning through controlled pretraining experiments on a 10T-token corpus with fine-grained domain separation. Our findings are threefold. First, when code is restricted to standalone executable programs and Code-NL data a… ▽ More Code has become a standard component of modern foundation language model (LM) training, yet its role beyond programming remains unclear. We revisit the claim that code improves reasoning through controlled pretraining experiments on a 10T-token corpus with fine-grained domain separation. Our findings are threefold. First, when code is restricted to standalone executable programs and Code-NL data are controlled for, code substantially improves programming ability but does not act as a general reasoning enhancer; instead, it competes with knowledge-intensive tasks, especially complex mathematical reasoning. Second, the reasoning gains often attributed to code are better explained by cross-domain structured reasoning traces, such as code-text and math-text mixtures, rather than by executable code alone. Third, increasing the density of structured math-domain samples within a fixed math budget yields substantial gains on difficult mathematical reasoning while largely preserving programming performance, suggesting that cognitive scaffolds offer a targeted way to mitigate cross-domain trade-offs. Finally, routing analyses show that data-composition effects are reflected in expert-activation patterns, providing mechanism-level evidence for competitive and synergistic interactions across domains. Our results clarify which data characteristics transfer across capability dimensions and point to more precise data-centric optimization strategies. △ Less

Submitted 19 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: Accepted by ICML 2026, 22 pages, 10 figures

Learning to Hand Off: Provably Convergent Workflow Learning under Interface Constraints

Authors: Jiayu Li, Enpei Zhang, Dawei Zhou, Elynn Chen, Yujun Yan

Abstract: We study workflow learning in a setting where specialized agents hand off control through a shared artifact, each agent observes only a local function of that artifact and its own private state, and no centralized learner accesses joint trajectories -- the operating regime of multi-agent LLM pipelines that span organizational, vendor, or trust boundaries. We formalize this regime as an interface-c… ▽ More We study workflow learning in a setting where specialized agents hand off control through a shared artifact, each agent observes only a local function of that artifact and its own private state, and no centralized learner accesses joint trajectories -- the operating regime of multi-agent LLM pipelines that span organizational, vendor, or trust boundaries. We formalize this regime as an interface-constrained semi-Markov decision process (IC-SMDP), whose decision epochs occur at handoff times, and design IC-$Q$, an asynchronous decentralized $Q$-learning algorithm in which cross-agent coordination at every handoff is exactly one scalar. Our main result is a finite-sample bound for neural IC-$Q$ that decomposes into three independently controllable error sources: neural function-approximation error, interface representation gap, and a mixing-time residual, under the random option-duration discount. Establishing this bound requires lifting the approximate information state (AIS) framework from single-agent primitive-step MDPs to multi-agent SMDPs and controlling Markovian noise under random duration, neither of which has been done in prior work. To our knowledge this is the first finite-sample guarantee for neural $Q$-learning under decentralized partial observability. Four experiments: a controlled synthetic IC-SMDP that validates the bound term-by-term, multi-LLM mathematical reasoning, multi-agent routing, and multi-agent CPU programming, show that IC-$Q$ matches a centralized oracle without any agent observing joint trajectories, with each of the three error sources scaling along its corresponding axis as the bound predicts. △ Less

Submitted 18 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Dual-Channel Tensor Neural Networks: Finite-Sample Theory and Conformal Structure Selection

Authors: Elynn Chen, Jiayu Li, Zheshi Zheng, Jian Pei

Abstract: Tensor-valued data arise naturally in neuroimaging, genomics, climate science, and spatiotemporal networks, where multilinear dependencies across modes carry information that is destroyed under vectorization. Existing approaches either impose a single low-rank structure, which can miss localized signal, or treat the tensor as a long vector, which discards its multiway geometry. We propose a *Dual-… ▽ More Tensor-valued data arise naturally in neuroimaging, genomics, climate science, and spatiotemporal networks, where multilinear dependencies across modes carry information that is destroyed under vectorization. Existing approaches either impose a single low-rank structure, which can miss localized signal, or treat the tensor as a long vector, which discards its multiway geometry. We propose a *Dual-Channel Tensor Neural Network* (DC-TNN) that decomposes each tensor input into a low-rank core and a sparse refinement, and processes the two components through coupled neural channels. The framework is structure-agnostic and accommodates CP, Tucker, and tensor-train cores within a single architecture. For estimation, we establish non-asymptotic risk bounds for the DC-TNN estimator that decompose into network approximation, core estimation, and refinement-selection terms, and show that the effective dimension is determined jointly by the core rank and refinement sparsity rather than by the ambient tensor size. For inference, we develop a *structure-aware conformal ROC* procedure that calibrates within the core-refinement latent space and produces ROC and AUC confidence bands with finite-sample, distribution-free coverage. Building on this, we propose a *conformal structure selector* that, to our knowledge, is the *first distribution-free procedure* for choosing among candidate tensor decompositions with finite-sample validity. Simulations and an analysis of a protein dataset demonstrate competitive predictive accuracy, reliable uncertainty quantification, and consistent recovery of the tensor structure. △ Less

Submitted 18 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

More Edits, More Stable: Understanding the Lifelong Normalization in Sequential Model Editing

Authors: Xin Ma, Wei Chen, Qi Liu, Derong Xu, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Lifelong Model Editing aims to continuously update evolving facts in Large Language Models while preserving unrelated knowledge and general capabilities, yet it remains plagued by catastrophic forgetting and model collapse. Empirically, we find that recent editors resilient over long horizons share the same core strategy: Lifelong Normalization (LN), which normalizes value gradients using running… ▽ More Lifelong Model Editing aims to continuously update evolving facts in Large Language Models while preserving unrelated knowledge and general capabilities, yet it remains plagued by catastrophic forgetting and model collapse. Empirically, we find that recent editors resilient over long horizons share the same core strategy: Lifelong Normalization (LN), which normalizes value gradients using running statistics. Removing LN causes immediate performance collapse, and we observe a counter-intuitive positive cumulative effect where early edits can promote the success of future edits. Yet the mechanism of LN remains a "black box", leaving its precise role in lifelong stability poorly understood. In this work, we provide the first theoretical account of LN in the lifelong regime. Our analysis reveals a self-reinforcing stability loop and proves that, when combined with ridge-regularized regression, LN yields parameter updates with asymptotic orthogonality and bounded norms, directly mitigating forgetting and systemic collapse. Based on these insights, we derive StableEdit, which strengthens this stability loop via an explicit warm-up stage and full whitening, improving long-horizon stability at minimal overhead. Extensive experiments validate our theory and demonstrate competitive performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/MINE-USTC/StableEdit. △ Less

Submitted 21 July, 2026; v1 submitted 12 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: Accepted to ICML 2026

TS-Verkle: A TypeScript Native Verkle Library With On-chain Verifier

Authors: Zhikai Li, Xuekai Liu, Boyuan Xu, Eric Chen, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

Abstract: Blockchain systems face significant scalability challenges due to growing data volumes and increasing transaction demands, necessitating more efficient data structures and verification mechanisms. Verkle trees, a novel data structure combining the efficiency of Merkle trees with the compactness of vector commitments, have gained attention for their potential to optimize blockchain storage and impr… ▽ More Blockchain systems face significant scalability challenges due to growing data volumes and increasing transaction demands, necessitating more efficient data structures and verification mechanisms. Verkle trees, a novel data structure combining the efficiency of Merkle trees with the compactness of vector commitments, have gained attention for their potential to optimize blockchain storage and improve scalability. However, their practical implementation, especially at the smart contract level, has remained unexplored. To address these challenges, we present TS-verkle, the first known TypeScript-native implementation of Verkle trees designed for web3 backend compatibility, coupled with a corresponding on-chain verifier written in Solidity. Our work bridges this gap by providing a concrete implementation of Verkle trees and demonstrating their feasibility for on-chain verification. While previous literature suggests Verkle trees should outperform Merkle trees due to their succinct proof size, our empirical evaluation reveals that basic implementations of Verkle trees actually incur higher costs than Merkle trees without advanced optimization techniques. This finding represents a crucial insight for blockchain developers and researchers considering Verkle tree adoption. The paper discusses implementation strategies and performance characteristics while exploring implications for scaling and data availability in decentralized blockchain systems. △ Less

Submitted 9 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Inverse Quadratic Decay in Random Subset Sum

Authors: Edwin Chen, Christof Teuscher

Abstract: The Subset Sum Problem is a fundamental NP-complete problem in cryptography and combinatorial optimization, with many real-world applications. The Random Subset Sum Problem (RSSP) is a more applicable version of subset sum, where numbers are drawn from some i.i.d input distribution. We present an algorithm that, with probability $1-δ$, constructs the same $O(B/w)$ mesh as Da Cunha et al. (2023), w… ▽ More The Subset Sum Problem is a fundamental NP-complete problem in cryptography and combinatorial optimization, with many real-world applications. The Random Subset Sum Problem (RSSP) is a more applicable version of subset sum, where numbers are drawn from some i.i.d input distribution. We present an algorithm that, with probability $1-δ$, constructs the same $O(B/w)$ mesh as Da Cunha et al. (2023), while trimming to $w$ elements throughout and running in $O(w\log w)$ time. Then, we present a novel beam search heuristic running in linearithmic time w.r.t list size $n$ and beam width $w$ using the mesh that gives an expected error of $O\!\left(\frac{B}{nw^2}\right)$ under a standard mean-field assumption with equal standard deviation, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of meshing to achieve error decay. The algorithm is empirically robust to multiple input distributions and can naturally extend to variants with simple changes to the scoring heuristic, establishing a new practical baseline for robust subset sum error decay and $ε$-approximation theory. △ Less

Submitted 20 May, 2026; v1 submitted 5 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: Under Review at ACM TALG

GeoDecider: An Evidence-Grounded Agent for Geological Interpretation via Deliberative Reasoning

Authors: Xiaoyu Tao, Mingyue Cheng, Jiahao Wang, Yitong Zhou, Qingyang Mao, Yimin Dou, Qi Liu, Shijin Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Geological interpretation infers subsurface properties and structures from indirect geophysical observations. Well-log classification provides a measurable setting by assigning geological classes to depth-indexed petrophysical records. The task is difficult because different subsurface units may exhibit similar logging responses, whereas accurate interpretation often depends on local measurements,… ▽ More Geological interpretation infers subsurface properties and structures from indirect geophysical observations. Well-log classification provides a measurable setting by assigning geological classes to depth-indexed petrophysical records. The task is difficult because different subsurface units may exhibit similar logging responses, whereas accurate interpretation often depends on local measurements, depth-wise context, domain knowledge, and reasonable transitions between neighboring layers. Existing automated methods mainly follow fixed prediction pipelines, leaving little room to gather additional evidence for difficult samples. In this work, we propose GeoDecider, an evidence-grounded agent for deliberative geological interpretation. GeoDecider retains efficient numerical prediction as the first stage, then selectively invokes tool-assisted reasoning for difficult intervals. A lightweight classifier produces point-wise predictions and estimates sample difficulty from its prediction scores. High-difficulty points act as routing anchors, triggering interval-level analysis so that nearby observations can be examined together. For each activated interval, specialized tools build an Evidence Profile that summarizes geological knowledge, depth-wise trends, previous predictions from the same well, and similar cases retrieved from training wells. Three complementary scientific views generate candidate interpretations. GeoDecider compares their supporting evidence, resolves disagreements, then applies geology-informed checks on continuity, boundary cues, and petrophysical consistency. Experiments on four public well-log benchmarks show that GeoDecider consistently outperforms representative baselines, demonstrating the value of selective evidence gathering and deliberative reasoning for geological interpretation.~\footnote{Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/GeoDecider} △ Less

Submitted 27 July, 2026; v1 submitted 5 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory

Authors: Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents require long-term user memory for consistent personalization, but limited context windows hinder tracking evolving preferences over long interactions. Existing memory systems mainly rely on static, hand-crafted update rules; although reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents learn memory updates, sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstabl… ▽ More Large language model (LLM) agents require long-term user memory for consistent personalization, but limited context windows hinder tracking evolving preferences over long interactions. Existing memory systems mainly rely on static, hand-crafted update rules; although reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents learn memory updates, sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. Drawing on memory schema theory and the functional division between prefrontal regions and hippocampus regions, we introduce MemCoE, a cognition-inspired two-stage optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. In the first stage, we propose Memory Guideline Induction to optimize a global guideline via contrastive feedback interpreted as textual gradients; in the second stage, Guideline-Aligned Memory Policy Optimization uses the induced guideline to define structured process rewards and performs multi-turn RL to learn a guideline-following memory evolution policy. We evaluate on three personalization memory benchmarks, covering explicit/implicit preference and different sizes and noise, and observe consistent improvements over strong baselines with favorable robustness, transferability, and efficiency. △ Less

Submitted 1 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

CastFlow: Learning Role-Specialized Agentic Workflows for Time Series Forecasting

Authors: Bokai Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Zhiding Liu, Shuo Yu, Xiaoyu Tao, Yuchong Wu, Qi Liu, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in time series forecasting. However, most existing LLM-based forecasting methods still follow a static generative paradigm that directly maps historical observations to future values in a single pass. Under this paradigm, forecasting is constrained by limited temporal pattern extraction, single-round acquisition of contextual features… ▽ More Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in time series forecasting. However, most existing LLM-based forecasting methods still follow a static generative paradigm that directly maps historical observations to future values in a single pass. Under this paradigm, forecasting is constrained by limited temporal pattern extraction, single-round acquisition of contextual features, one-shot forecast generation, and lack of support from ensemble forecasts. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose CastFlow, a dynamic agentic forecasting framework that enables multi-view temporal pattern extraction, multi-round contextual features acquisition, iterative forecast refinement, and forecasting with ensemble forecasts. First, CastFlow organizes the forecasting process into planning, action, forecasting, and reflection, establishing an agentic workflow. Second, this workflow is supported by a memory module that retrieves prior experience and a multi-view toolkit that constructs diagnostic evidence and provides a reliable ensemble forecast baseline. Third, CastFlow adopts a role-specialized design that combines general-purpose reasoning with specialized numerical forecasting. Under this design, a frozen LLM preserves general-purpose reasoning, while a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM performs evidence-guided numerical forecasting based on the ensemble forecast baseline, rather than from scratch. To optimize a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM, we further develop a two-stage workflow-oriented training that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). To evaluate the effectiveness of CastFlow, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets and show that it achieves superior overall results against strong baselines. We hope that this work can serve as a step toward more adaptive and accurate time series forecasting. △ Less

Submitted 4 May, 2026; v1 submitted 30 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Understanding DNNs in Feature Interaction Models: A Dimensional Collapse Perspective

Authors: Jiancheng Wang, Mingjia Yin, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: DNNs have gained widespread adoption in feature interaction recommendation models. However, there has been a longstanding debate on their roles. On one hand, some works claim that DNNs possess the ability to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. Conversely, recent studies have highlighted the limitations of DNNs in effectively learning dot products, specifically second-order interact… ▽ More DNNs have gained widespread adoption in feature interaction recommendation models. However, there has been a longstanding debate on their roles. On one hand, some works claim that DNNs possess the ability to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. Conversely, recent studies have highlighted the limitations of DNNs in effectively learning dot products, specifically second-order interactions, let alone higher-order interactions. In this paper, we present a novel perspective to understand the effectiveness of DNNs: their impact on the dimensional robustness of the representations. In particular, we conduct extensive experiments involving both parallel DNNs and stacked DNNs. Our evaluation encompasses an overall study of complete DNN on two feature interaction models, alongside a fine-grained ablation analysis of components within DNNs. Experimental results demonstrate that both parallel and stacked DNNs can effectively mitigate the dimensional collapse of embeddings. Furthermore, a gradient-based theoretical analysis, supported by empirical evidence, uncovers the underlying mechanisms of dimensional collapse. △ Less

Submitted 29 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 6 pages

BioMiner: A Multi-modal System for Automated Mining of Protein-Ligand Bioactivity Data from Literature

Authors: Jiaxian Yan, Jintao Zhu, Yuhang Yang, Qi Liu, Kai Zhang, Zaixi Zhang, Xukai Liu, Boyan Zhang, Kaiyuan Gao, Jinchuan Xiao, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Protein-ligand bioactivity data published in the literature are essential for drug discovery, yet manual curation struggles to keep pace with rapidly growing literature. Automated bioactivity extraction remains challenging because it requires not only interpreting biochemical semantics distributed across text, tables, and figures, but also reconstructing chemically exact ligand structures (e.g., M… ▽ More Protein-ligand bioactivity data published in the literature are essential for drug discovery, yet manual curation struggles to keep pace with rapidly growing literature. Automated bioactivity extraction remains challenging because it requires not only interpreting biochemical semantics distributed across text, tables, and figures, but also reconstructing chemically exact ligand structures (e.g., Markush structures). To address this bottleneck, we introduce BioMiner, a multi-modal extraction framework that explicitly separates bioactivity semantic interpretation from ligand structure construction. Within BioMiner, bioactivity semantics are inferred through direct reasoning, while chemical structures are resolved via a chemical-structure-grounded visual semantic reasoning paradigm, in which multi-modal large language models operate on chemically grounded visual representations to infer inter-structure relationships, and exact molecular construction is delegated to domain chemistry tools. For rigorous evaluation and method development, we further establish BioVista, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 16,457 bioactivity entries curated from 500 publications. BioMiner validates its extraction ability and provides a quantitative baseline, achieving an F1 score of 0.32 for bioactivity triplets. BioMiner's practical utility is demonstrated via three applications: (1) extracting 82,262 data from 11,683 papers to build a pre-training database that improves downstream models performance by 3.9%; (2) enabling a human-in-the-loop workflow that doubles the number of high-quality NLRP3 bioactivity data, helping 38.6% improvement over 28 QSAR models and identification of 16 hit candidates with novel scaffolds; and (3) accelerating protein-ligand complex bioactivity annotation, achieving a 5.59-fold speed increase and 5.75% accuracy improvement over manual workflows in PoseBusters dataset. △ Less

Submitted 23 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 20 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

Adaptive Instruction Composition for Automated LLM Red-Teaming

Authors: Jesse Zymet, Andy Luo, Swapnil Shinde, Sahil Wadhwa, Emily Chen

Abstract: Many approaches to LLM red-teaming leverage an attacker LLM to discover jailbreaks against a target. Several of them task the attacker with identifying effective strategies through trial and error, resulting in a semantically limited range of successes. Another approach discovers diverse attacks by combining crowdsourced harmful queries and tactics into instructions for the attacker, but does so a… ▽ More Many approaches to LLM red-teaming leverage an attacker LLM to discover jailbreaks against a target. Several of them task the attacker with identifying effective strategies through trial and error, resulting in a semantically limited range of successes. Another approach discovers diverse attacks by combining crowdsourced harmful queries and tactics into instructions for the attacker, but does so at random, limiting effectiveness. This article introduces a novel framework, Adaptive Instruction Composition, that combines crowdsourced texts according to an adaptive mechanism trained to jointly optimize effectiveness with diversity. We use reinforcement learning to balance exploration with exploitation in a combinatorial space of instructions to guide the attacker toward diverse generations tailored to target vulnerabilities. We demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms random combination on a set of effectiveness and diversity metrics, even under model transfer. Further, we show that it surpasses a host of recent adaptive approaches on Harmbench. We employ a lightweight neural contextual bandit that adapts to contrastive embedding inputs, and provide ablations suggesting that the contrastive pretraining enables the network to rapidly generalize and scale to the massive space as it learns. △ Less

Submitted 22 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Accepted to ACL 2026 Main Conference

Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data

Authors: Fengxian Dong, Zhi Zheng, Xiao Han, Wei Chen, Jingqing Ruan, Tong Xu, Yong Chen, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Automated feature generation extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. Traditional methods rely on predefined operator libraries and cannot leverage task semantics, limiting their ability to produce diverse, high-value features for complex tasks. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches int… ▽ More Automated feature generation extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. Traditional methods rely on predefined operator libraries and cannot leverage task semantics, limiting their ability to produce diverse, high-value features for complex tasks. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches introduce richer semantic signals, but still suffer from a restricted feature space due to fixed generation patterns and from the absence of feedback from the learning objective. To address these challenges, we propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (\textbf{MALMAS}) for automated feature generation. MALMAS decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities, and a Router Agent activates an appropriate subset of agents per iteration, further broadening exploration of the feature space. We further integrate a memory module comprising procedural memory, feedback memory, and conceptual memory, enabling iterative refinement that adaptively guides subsequent feature generation and improves feature quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets against state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/fxdong24/MALMAS △ Less

Submitted 22 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 16 pages (including appendix), 4 main figures, 15 tables. Accepted to ACL 2026

CAPO: Critic-Guided Action-Aligned Policy Optimization for Advancing LLM Agent Capabilities

Authors: Daoyu Wang, Qingchuan Li, Mingyue Cheng, Jie Ouyang, Shuo Yu, Chunli Liu, Shijin Wang, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for improving the agentic capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although critic-free methods such as GRPO are increasingly popular, we argue that critic-based methods remain well suited to long-horizon agentic tasks because their critic models can assess each state and assign credit to different decisions. However, representative criti… ▽ More Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for improving the agentic capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although critic-free methods such as GRPO are increasingly popular, we argue that critic-based methods remain well suited to long-horizon agentic tasks because their critic models can assess each state and assign credit to different decisions. However, representative critic-based methods such as PPO still organize value estimation, credit assignment, and policy updates at token granularity, whereas the environment state changes only after the agent completes a full action. In this work, we propose CAPO, a critic-guided action-aligned policy optimization method for advancing LLM agent capabilities. CAPO introduces two action-aligned designs. First, it estimates the state value at the action boundary using a critic model and assigns the corresponding advantage to the complete action rather than individual tokens. Second, CAPO introduces a novel action-aware policy ratio that aggregates token ratios within each action with length calibration for consistent updates across actions of different lengths. These two designs effectively achieve fine-grained credit assignment and consistent policy updates while remaining compatible with token-level gradient computation. Experiments across multi-hop QA, academic paper search, and text-world action tasks show that CAPO consistently outperforms representative RL methods. Further analyses validate both designs and reveal how action-aligned optimization improves multi-turn RL training. We hope this work provides a practical path for training more capable LLM agents. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2026; v1 submitted 20 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

EviDep: Trustworthy Multimodal Depression Estimation via Disentangled Evidential Learning

Authors: Fangyuan Liu, Sirui Zhao, Zeyu Zhang, Jinyang Huang, Feng-Qi Cui, Bin Luo, Meng Li, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Automated multimodal depression estimation in unconstrained environments is inherently challenged by naturalistic noise and complex behavioral variability. Prevailing deterministic methods, however, produce uncalibrated point estimates without quantifying predictive uncertainty, exposing decision-making to the risk of overconfident, untrustworthy estimates. To establish a reliable and trustworthy… ▽ More Automated multimodal depression estimation in unconstrained environments is inherently challenged by naturalistic noise and complex behavioral variability. Prevailing deterministic methods, however, produce uncalibrated point estimates without quantifying predictive uncertainty, exposing decision-making to the risk of overconfident, untrustworthy estimates. To establish a reliable and trustworthy estimation paradigm, we propose EviDep, an evidential learning framework that jointly quantifies depression severity alongside aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties via a Normal-Inverse-Gamma distribution. To ensure the integrity of the extracted behavioral evidence and prevent artificial confidence inflation during multimodal fusion, EviDep introduces two tailored mechanisms. First, addressing the temporal-frequency heterogeneity of behavioral cues, a Frequency-aware Feature Extraction module leverages a wavelet-based Mixture-of-Experts to dynamically decouple stable macro-level affective baselines from transient micro-level behavioral bursts, effectively filtering out task-irrelevant artifacts. Second, a Disentangled Evidential Learning strategy enforces explicit decorrelation of features in these purified representations. By separating the cross-modal shared consensus from modality-specific behavioral nuances before Bayesian fusion, this rigorous disentanglement strictly prevents the model from double-counting overlapping information. Extensive experiments on the AVEC 2013, AVEC 2014, DAIC-WOZ, and E-DAIC datasets confirm that EviDep achieves state-of-the-art predictive accuracy and superior uncertainty calibration, thereby delivering a trustworthy, risk-aware decision-support tool for depression estimation. △ Less

Submitted 8 May, 2026; v1 submitted 17 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

IE as Cache: Information Extraction Enhanced Agentic Reasoning

Authors: Hang Lv, Sheng Liang, Hongchao Gu, Wei Guo, Defu Lian, Yong Liu, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Information Extraction aims to distill structured, decision-relevant information from unstructured text, serving as a foundation for downstream understanding and reasoning. However, it is traditionally treated merely as a terminal objective: once extracted, the resulting structure is often consumed in isolation rather than maintained and reused during multi-step inference. Moving beyond this, we p… ▽ More Information Extraction aims to distill structured, decision-relevant information from unstructured text, serving as a foundation for downstream understanding and reasoning. However, it is traditionally treated merely as a terminal objective: once extracted, the resulting structure is often consumed in isolation rather than maintained and reused during multi-step inference. Moving beyond this, we propose \textit{IE-as-Cache}, a framework that repurposes IE as a cognitive cache to enhance agentic reasoning. Drawing inspiration from hierarchical computer memory, our approach combines query-driven extraction with cache-aware reasoning to dynamically maintain compact intermediate information and filter noise. Experiments on challenging benchmarks across diverse LLMs demonstrate significant improvements in reasoning accuracy, indicating that IE can be effectively repurposed as a reusable cognitive resource and offering a promising direction for future research on downstream uses of IE. △ Less

Submitted 16 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 8pages, 2figures

Learning from Emptiness: De-biasing Listwise Rerankers with Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration

Authors: Hang Lv, Hongchao Gu, Ruiqing Yang, Liangyue Li, Zulong Chen, Defu Lian, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Generative listwise reranking leverages global context for superior retrieval but is plagued by intrinsic position bias, where models exhibit structural sensitivity to input order independent of relevance. Existing mitigations present a dilemma: inference-time aggregation incurs prohibitive latency, while training-based methods often fail to eradicate ingrained priors, particularly in compact mode… ▽ More Generative listwise reranking leverages global context for superior retrieval but is plagued by intrinsic position bias, where models exhibit structural sensitivity to input order independent of relevance. Existing mitigations present a dilemma: inference-time aggregation incurs prohibitive latency, while training-based methods often fail to eradicate ingrained priors, particularly in compact models. To resolve this dilemma, we propose CapCal (Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration), a training-free framework that mechanically decouples positional bias from ranking decisions. By estimating the bias distribution via content-free placeholders, CapCal rectifies output logits through an entropy-adaptive contrastive mechanism. Evaluations across 10 benchmarks confirm that CapCal achieves superior performance among training-free methods while preserving single-pass efficiency. Notably, it unlocks the latent potential of lightweight models (e.g., 0.6B), delivering absolute NDCG gains exceeding 10 points and outperforming both permutation-based aggregation and data-augmentation baselines. △ Less

Submitted 11 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: ACL2026