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Chen Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Chen Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Exact Ehrhart Series of Birkhoff Polytopes via Constant Terms and Finite-Field Evaluation

The Ehrhart series of the $n$th Birkhoff polytope is $\sum_{r\geq0}H_n(r)z^r$, where $H_n(r)$ counts nonnegative integer $n\times n$ matrices whose row and column sums all equal $r$. We present an exact method for computing this series using constant terms and finite fields. A root filter expresses $H_n(r)$ as a weighted sum of the values $h_r(M)^n$, where $h_r$ is the complete homogeneous symmetric polynomial and $M$ ranges over multisets of $m$th roots of unity with $m=r+1$. Constant-term cancellation reduces the evaluation of $h_r(M)$ to a sum over repeated elements $a$ of $M$. For a particular $a$ of multiplicity $μ_a$, the computation uses a generalized Todd coefficient of degree $μ_a-2$. Sums of $h_r(M)^n$ over selected multiplicity classes are handled using symmetric function techniques. Together with the remaining individual evaluations, this gives $O_n(m^{n-5}+m^4)$ field operations for each admissible prime and fixed $n\geq5$. An explicit bound and the Chinese remainder theorem recover the integer counts, and Ehrhart symmetry determines the full series. The same method applies to the World Cup problem, which counts the same matrices with diagonal entries required to be $0$. We prove correctness and compute complete series for both families through order $12$. The Birkhoff series for orders $10$--$12$ and the World Cup series for orders $9$--$12$ are tabulated in the appendices.

math.CO↗

ScaleMPA: Rethinking Scalable RRT* Acceleration With a Grid-Native Representation

Real-time motion planning remains challenging in large and high-dimensional environments. Prior acceleration of RRT* follows tree-centric state organization, which reduces per-query cost but preserves superlinear end-to-end complexity and limits parallelism through structural dependencies. This paper presents ScaleMPA, a motion-planning accelerator that rethinks RRT* with a grid-native representation. By replacing hierarchical traversal with direct grid-based access, ScaleMPA reduces the planner critical path and exposes fine-grained parallelism. To make this reformulation practical under sparse high-dimensional planning, ScaleMPA further proposes a multi-resolution grid search engine and a hash-grid memory system. Implemented in 28 nm CMOS, ScaleMPA achieves millisecond-level planning latency and delivers 4.7$\times$--44.4$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art motion-planning accelerators.

cs.RO↗

The "Rough" HAR Model

This paper proposes discrete-time approximations to rough continuous-time models of realized variance (RV). The leading rough models can be viewed as autoregressive processes driven by fractional Gaussian noise. We show that the Wold representation of this noise concentrates its dependence at the first lag when the Hurst parameter is below one half. Augmenting the autoregressive (AR) and heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models with a first-order moving-average (MA(1)) component therefore approximates the roughness, and the MA coefficient maps almost linearly into the Hurst parameter. We refer to these extensions as the "rough" AR and "rough" HAR models. Estimating them on the log RV of ten ETFs, we find negative MA coefficients for every asset, and the implied Hurst parameters align closely with the estimates from the continuous-time models. In the HAR literature, the negative MA(1) component is a significant feature that has been largely overlooked. In out-of-sample comparisons, the "rough" models outperform their classical counterparts for nearly every asset and horizon, with the largest gains at short horizons, and their accuracy is comparable to that of the rough continuous-time models but much easier to estimate by standard off-the-shelf software.

econ.EM↗

Calibrating the Heston model with deep differential networks

We propose a gradient-based deep learning framework to calibrate the Heston option pricing model (Heston, 1993). Our neural network, henceforth deep differential network (DDN), learns both the Heston pricing formula for plain-vanilla options and the partial derivatives with respect to the model parameters. The price sensitivities estimated by the DDN are not subject to the numerical issues that can be encountered in computing the gradient of the Heston pricing function. Thus, our network is an excellent pricing engine for fast gradient-based calibrations. Extensive tests on selected equity markets show that the DDN significantly outperforms non-differential feedforward neural networks in terms of calibration accuracy. In addition, it dramatically reduces the computational time with respect to global optimizers that do not use gradient information.

q-fin.CP↗

FlashGPU-sim: Enabling GPU Modeling for Modern Architectures and AI Workloads

As AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, modern AI systems are shaped by a tight software-hardware co-design loop. Later GPUs expose features such as asynchronous data movement, tensor core pipelines, and fine-grained synchronization that high-performance kernels aggressively exploit, while emerging application behaviors increasingly influence the next generation of hardware design. Unfortunately, the latest open-source simulators for NVIDIA GPUs focus on architectures and software stacks from roughly six years ago. Therefore, they cannot support many state-of-the-art AI kernels generated by modern compiler stacks, e.g. Triton, or accurately model the hardware features they depend on. As a result, architects lack a credible platform for analyzing bottlenecks in this flywheel or evaluating design trade-offs for future AI systems. To bridge this gap, we present FlashGPU-sim, an open-source, execution-driven, cycle-accurate GPU simulator for modern AI workloads. FlashGPU-sim faithfully models modern hardware features such as asynchronous data movement, fine-grained synchronization, tensor-core execution, and distributed shared memory. A Triton extraction front-end allows direct simulation of optimized AI operators without manual porting, while multi-threaded execution makes large-scale software-hardware co-design practical. Across 131 workload configurations on RTX 5090, H100, and B200, FlashGPU-sim achieves a cycle-level MAPE of 5.24%, while multi-threaded simulation reaches a 7.86x speedup with 16 host threads. An H100 case study further demonstrates its utility for microarchitectural design exploration.

cs.AR↗

TruthInsightBench: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended Scientific Discovery Agents

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly proposed as AI-scientist systems that conduct analyses and write research reports, but executing a prescribed analysis is not the same as making a discovery. Existing benchmarks are configured for reproduction: tasks, data, and rubrics are built around a hidden target study, and recovery of its result is rewarded. We present TruthInsightBench, a benchmark configured for discovery. Its 40 blind tasks, drawn from 40 peer-reviewed studies across 10 scientific domains, expose only a neutral scientific objective and frozen data; source conclusions, expected values, and analysis paths are withheld, leaving the agent to determine what claim the data support. A fixed LLM-based judge scores the evidentiary maturity of an agent's own claims along six dimensions, operationalized as 29 artifact-grounded items, with automated, deterministic aggregation and no per-instance human grading, so evaluation can be repeated automatically as agents evolve. On one frozen base model, four coding agents form a narrow plateau (58.4-60.3 of 100) with no statistically reliable pairwise separation: they execute and document analyses competently, with comparatively strong evidence auditability and novelty, but largely lack the discriminating acts that establish a trustworthy claim (controls, robustness, falsifiability, and cross-dataset generalization). The bottleneck is scientific judgment rather than coding, and genuine discovery remains out of reach. TruthInsightBench makes this gap a measurable target; data and scoring code are at https://github.com/TruthInsight-stack/TruthInsightBench.

cs.AI↗

MemForest: Efficient Agent Memory Management via EventTree Partitioning and Progressive Merging

Agent memory systems have demonstrated significant potential in long-term dialogue, personalized assistants, and video understanding. However, continuously accumulated memory introduces substantial storage and retrieval costs during inference. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{MemForest}, a general memory compression framework adaptable to various agent memory systems. Specifically, MemForest partitions historical memory into event-centric units by leveraging global semantic similarity and local temporal continuity. For each unit, it constructs a maximum spanning tree, termed an EventTree, and progressively merges redundant memory nodes by selecting high-weight edges, reducing storage overhead. Furthermore, we introduce an anchor-guided propagation retrieval mechanism that retrieves relevant memory nodes from the temporal neighborhoods of key nodes, improving retrieval accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MemForest. Under the unimodal Mem0 framework, MemForest retains \textbf{97.1%} of the original performance while compressing \textbf{50%} of historical memory across three benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval, and PersonaMem), achieving a \textbf{1.89x} retrieval speedup. Under the multimodal M3-Agent framework, it preserves \textbf{99.7%} of the original performance with a \textbf{50%} compression ratio across two benchmarks (M3-Bench-robot and M3-Bench-web), achieving a \textbf{2.24x} retrieval speedup. \textcolor{RoyalBlue}{\textit{Our code is available at [https://github.com/Celina-love-sweet/MemForest.}}](https://github.com/Celina-love-sweet/MemForest.}})

cs.AI↗

InsightChain: Optimized Chain-of-Insight Analytics for LLM-driven Data Visualization

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated data visualization, yet existing approaches often frame visualization generation as a single-step mapping from user query to figure or code, overlooking the iterative analytical reasoning process of expert analysts. We present InsightChain, a four-stage visualization prompting pipeline (Explore--Focus--Test--Present) that emulates expert analytical workflows, together with VG-COPRO, a vision-guided automatic prompt optimization (APO) method adapted to jointly optimize such multi-stage, executable pipelines. To address the evaluation gap for complex data visualization, we introduce the Insight Progression Metric (IPM), a rubric combining four text-based dimensions with a vision-based dimension. We assess IPM through a 100-chain human pilot and an expanded 300-chain agent-based evaluation spanning all ten domains. Experiments on public datasets show that InsightChain consistently outperforms competing prompting baselines. Existing APO methods fail to yield consistent gains on this multi-stage task, whereas VG-COPRO improves performance in both in-domain and cross-domain settings.

cs.CL↗

MVWeaver: A Hierarchical Music Video Generation Agent with a Learned Song-to-Visual Bridge

Music videos are an important form of audiovisual expression in contemporary culture. They translate and extend the expressive content of songs through deliberate visual design. Existing automatic music video (MV) generation systems can generate visually plausible shots, yet often struggle with long-form coherence and song-grounded visual development. We present MVWeaver, a music video generation agent that integrates hierarchical planning with a learned song-to-visual bridge that translates song understanding into executable shot plans. The MVWeaver architecture comprises a comprehensive song analysis module, a visual planner that constructs hierarchical plans, and downstream image and video generation models that render the planned content. To equip a general-purpose LLM with MV-specific song-to-visual knowledge, we learn a bridge between song analysis and visual planning from real-MV-derived supervision and curate 1,861 real-world song--MV pairs with structured song-side, MV-side, and teacher-inferred song-to-visual rationale annotations. Using these annotations, we perform LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a large language model to predict song-to-visual bridges that guide hierarchical visual planning. Our experiments demonstrate stronger song-grounded visual translation, richer visual development, and greater conceptual and shot-to-shot coherence, while ablations support the benefits of learned bridge conditioning.

cs.MM↗

Complete Topological Classification with P and T Symmetries: Revealing a Topological Invariant Invisible to K-Theory

The K-theoretic framework provides a complete topological classification of the tenfold symmetry classes and has been generalized to incorporate crystalline symmetries. Here, we show that this classification is incomplete even in the elementary case of spinless systems possessing both P and T symmetries. We obtain the complete classification through a first-principles analysis of the topological classes of P- and T-symmetric bands, namely, by classifying the corresponding symmetric clutching data. We identify a topological invariant that is invisible from the K-theoretic perspective when the occupied states at each inversion-invariant momentum have uniformly positive or uniformly negative parity. In special cases, such as when all inversion-invariant momenta have uniformly positive parity, this invariant can be interpreted as the second Stiefel--Whitney class or the Euler number defined over an inversion fundamental domain, namely, half of the Brillouin zone. Our work not only reveals a new topological invariant that cannot be determined from the parity spectra at inversion-invariant momenta under P and T symmetries, but also demonstrates the existence of crystalline topological phases that are absent from the K-theoretic classification.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Do simulated agents move like real people?

Human mobility is increasingly represented using synthetic populations that offer scalable alternatives when individual-level observations are unavailable or sensitive. Yet validation typically emphasizes aggregate statistics, which can obscure whether simulated agents traverse transportation networks in ways that resemble real travelers. Here, we develop a path-centric framework that combines direct path-level comparisons with higher-order network models to compare observed and simulated mobility on a shared metropolitan road network. Observed and simulated paths share broad statistical regularities and short-range memory. Beyond these similarities, however, simulated mobility underrepresents long paths, exhibits greater redundancy among long route sequences, covers a smaller and partly different portion of the network, and is more predictable overall. These discrepancies show that agreement in aggregate mobility patterns does not imply fidelity in how travelers move through the underlying infrastructure. Higher-order path analysis therefore offers a framework for validating synthetic mobility at the spatial and sequential scales relevant to scientific inference, urban planning, and policy.

cs.CE↗

ContextPipe: Database-Inspired Context Assembly for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents require context assembly: the runtime must decide what to include in each prompt, in what order, and when to compact history under a hard context-window budget and a byte-sensitive prompt cache. In production agentic systems, this logic is scattered across prompt builders, ad hoc compaction routines, cache-break workarounds, and per-provider shims. We argue that context assembly is structurally isomorphic to query execution in a relational database: both execute under a hard budget, exploit a tiered cache, and leverage statistics. We adopt this discipline in ContextPipe: a five-phase pipeline (Plan Bind Optimize Execute Feedback) backed by a structured data-source catalog, a deterministic cache-aware optimizer, and an EXPLAIN ANALYZE trace. We show that context in ContextPipe is auditable, replayable, and failure-isolated. A preliminary evaluation using the SWE-bench Pro Qutebrowser subset shows that, compared with the append-only context construction policy, ContextPipe reduces total token volume by 31%, LLM calls by 23%, and response time by 9%, at the cost of a lower KV cache-hit ratio.

cs.AI↗

Harness-of-Harness: Multi-Day Autonomous Software Development with Continual Improvement

This paper studies autonomous software development, in which LLM-based coding agents transform high-level requirements into complete, functional, and usable software systems without human intervention. We introduce Harness-of-Harness (HoH), a framework that enables coding agents to continually improve software during autonomous development. HoH operates on existing coding-agent harnesses, and organizes their executions into iterative planning-coding-testing loops. To sustain improvement across loops, HoH balances repair with capability growth, scopes development into small and verifiable increments, separates implementation-time testing from independent evaluation, and constrains verifiable outputs rather than prescribing agent workflows. It progressively exposes deliverables, role-specific tools, and skills, encourages reuse rather than recreation, and maintains versioned project histories. On GameCraft-Bench, FrontierSWE, and ProgramBench, three harness-model pairs (Codex with GPT-5.5, OpenCode with DeepSeek-V4-Pro, and Pi with MiniMax-M3), HoH consistently outperforms the corresponding standalone harnesses, achieving an average relative gain of 52.25 percent and a maximum gain of 82.86 percent after three iterations. In a multi-day deployment with more than 70 iterations, HoH autonomously develops a first-person-shooter game, featuring a coherent storyline, fully implemented core mechanics, human-playable experience, polished visuals and integrated audio. Github: https://github.com/Flesymeb/HarnessOfHarness Project Page: https://flesymeb.github.io/HarnessOfHarness/

cs.AI↗

Skill-as-API: Confidential Multi-Agent Coordination for Agentic Software Engineering

AI coding agents are evolving from solitary tools into collaborative teammates that discover and invoke one another's specialized skills. But the coordination channel itself can leak a skill's intellectual property. Protocols such as MCP and A2A run implementations server-side, yet they still publish each skill's description and typed schemas to every peer, offer no way to hide a skill's existence, and cannot guarantee that a wrapped system prompt stays off the wire. Application-layer privacy filters help, but act only after the model has decided to emit sensitive text. We take a complementary, protocol-layer route: Skill-as-API, a coordination protocol whose public view of a skill is limited to its name, description, typed input/output schemas, and trust tier. The skill body is closure-captured in the owner's process and never crosses the wire. Four layers add access control and narrow the prompt-injection surface structurally rather than by filtering content. We provide an open-source Python implementation over XMTP with 1.8-2.9 s cross-continent hot-reconnect latency, and a software-engineering case study in which three agents coordinate a pull-request review while each retains ownership of its proprietary analysis prompts.

cs.CR↗

Closing the Verification Loop: Self-Check Captioning for Long-Paragraph Detailed Audio Captioning

Long-paragraph detailed audio captioning, which requires dense and transcript-faithful descriptions of fine-grained audio content, remains unsolved for current audio-visual multimodal language models. We attribute this failure to two structural problems. The first is data poverty, as no public corpus jointly provides long clips, paragraph captions, and verbatim-transcript fidelity. The second is generation-mode failure, evidenced by a 44.8 to 46.4 percentage-point gap between right-audio and shuffled-audio multiple-choice question (MCQ) accuracy. We address both within Self-Check Captioning (SCC), a unified framework that instantiates audio-grounded question answering as the verification primitive at every lifecycle stage. SCC yields three artifacts. Long-paragraph Audio Caption 50k (LACap-50k) is a 50,222-clip audio-visual corpus with 491.5-word captions and a post-hoc automatic speech recognition (ASR) audit. Layer-Curvature Supervised Fine-Tuning (LC-SFT) is the first on-policy supervised fine-tuning method to weight tokens by intermediate-layer evidence, motivated by our identification of Late-Layer Semantic-Entropy Collapse (SEC). SCC-Verifier arbitrates among caption rollouts via audio-grounded self-answering at inference. Across multiple benchmarks, our system attains state-of-the-art among open-source captioners and is competitive with proprietary baselines. We release LACap-50k to fill the resource gap for long-paragraph detailed audio captioning research.

cs.SD↗

A variation of the Morris constant term

The Morris constant term identity is important due to its equivalence with the well-known Selberg integral. We find a variation of the Morris constant term, denoted $h_n(t)$, in the study of the Ehrhart polynomial $H_n(t)$ of the $n$-th Birkhoff polytope, which consists of all doubly stochastic matrices of order $n$. The constant term $h_n(t)$ corresponds to a particular constant term in the study of $H_n(t)$. We give a characterization of $h_n(t)$ as a polynomial of degree $(n-1)^2$ with additional nice properties involving the Morris constant term. We also construct a recursion for $h_n(t)$ using a similar technique for the proof of the Morris constant term identity by Baldoni-Silva and Vergne, and by Xin. Using this method, we have produced explicit formulas for $h_n(t)$ for $3 \le n \le 29$ without difficulty.

math.CO↗

Large-Scale Bayesian Tensor Reconstruction via Approximate Message Passing

While CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition (CPD) is fundamental for tensor reconstruction, Bayesian CPD often scales poorly because variational updates require repeated matrix inversions. We develop CP generalized approximate message passing (CP-GAMP) for incomplete noisy Bayesian CPD. The algorithm uses Gaussian message approximations to avoid high-dimensional inversions, and it combines a Bernoulli-Gaussian prior with expectation-maximization updates to estimate effective CP rank and noise variance. We also give a formal state evolution (SE) recursion and relate its fixed points to replica-symmetric saddle points, so CP-GAMP's SE-predicted error can be compared with the formal replica-symmetric minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) benchmark in the matched limit. Synthetic and image-inpainting experiments show that CP-GAMP substantially reduces runtime relative to variational Bayesian CPD while maintaining competitive reconstruction accuracy.

cs.LG↗