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Chen Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Chen Zhu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

RxnExBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Structured Chemical Reaction Extraction from Scientific Literature

Screen Tables and Substrate Scopes are information-dense figures widely used in synthetic chemistry literature, yet automated extraction of structured reaction data from them remains challenging. We introduce RxnExBench, a multimodal benchmark for fine-grained reaction-level evaluation. Built from high-impact chemistry journals, it contains 3,565 expert-annotated reactions and 2,361 molecular structures. The dataset adopts a unified schema with 15 reaction roles and 26 core fields, supporting downstream AI-for-Chemistry tasks such as retrosynthetic planning, yield prediction, and reaction condition recommendation. RxnExBench further provides a reasoning-driven difficulty taxonomy, a modular annotation pipeline, and the Oracle-MolRec protocol, which disentangles molecular recognition from higher-level reasoning. Evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art VLMs shows that performance degrades substantially as schema complexity and reasoning demands increase. Under the Oracle-MolRec setting, results further reveal that accurate molecular recognition alone is insufficient, with multimodal integration and chemistry-aware reasoning remaining the primary bottlenecks. We release all data and code to facilitate future research in chemistry-aware multimodal understanding and AI-for-Chemistry dataset construction. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/opendatalab/RxnExBench.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Coordination-Free Workload Regularization for Variable-Cost Distributed Training

Synchronous data-parallel training usually assigns every rank the same number of records, even when record costs vary by orders of magnitude. For variable-length models, this converts input variation into idle time because each step waits for its most expensive rank-local batch. We present Batch Cost Lookahead (BCL), a coordination-free data-loading policy that buffers a bounded rank-local window and repartitions it into fixed-cardinality packs with balanced estimated cost. BCL preserves the trainer's record-count contract and requires neither cross-rank metadata exchange nor runtime modification. In simulation over public workload distributions, enabling BCL reduces per-rank estimated batch-cost variability by up to 82.8%. Across 13 NeMo-RL SFT corpora on eight H200 GPUs, rank-local BCL runs 1.050 to 1.167 times faster than pooled MFFD. Compiled H200 measurements on an internal sequence workload show speedups of 1.197 to 1.343 times over packed execution from one to four nodes. We also identify a memory-feasibility boundary: a p99 cap for high-variance or OOM-prone data bounds outliers before BCL balances the rest. These results show that substantial variable-cost imbalance can be removed at the data-loader boundary, while clarifying when data preparation or broader coordination is still necessary.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

DeepTelecom: A Differentiable Multimodal Framework for Channel Twinning in Dynamic Heterogeneous Wireless Environments

Large-scale multimodal data are a key enabler for integrating large generative artificial intelligence models into wireless networks. However, existing wireless datasets offer limited support for heterogeneous environments, particularly in terms of reusable high-fidelity scenes, scalable differentiable ray tracing, and synchronized multimodal data. These limitations are more pronounced in mobile and aerial scenarios with time-varying environments and channels. To address these limitations, we propose DeepTelecom, a material-aware, high-fidelity multimodal channel dataset and reproducible generation framework for networks involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. DeepTelecom refines coarse indoor/outdoor reconstructions and uses a large language model to map segmented surfaces to frequency-dependent electromagnetic parameters, yielding material-aware Level of Detail 3 digital twins. Then, a differentiable GPU-accelerated Sionna ray tracer simulates propagation across the sub-6 GHz/millimeter-wave/sub-terahertz bands, and specifically captures rotor-induced micro-Doppler signatures of stationary or moving UAVs at different pitch angles and translational velocities. The framework synchronously produces channel tensors, coverage maps, transmission videos, multi-view images, and weather-conditioned renderings, and supports differentiable material calibration from sparse channel anchors. The released dataset contains 10 material-aware indoor/outdoor scenes and 50,000 synchronized UAV samples; the framework supports scalable generation of additional data for user-defined scenes and system configurations. In 3D UAV localization, DeepTelecom reduces the 90th-percentile error from 31.05 m to 2.43 m compared with schemes considering only channel state information, demonstrating its significance for artificial-intelligence-enabled wireless systems.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Plausibility: Verifiable Fine-Grained Image Editing on Structured Assets

Fine-grained image editing requires more than producing a visually plausible result: an editor must execute the requested attribute change precisely while leaving everything else intact. However, existing benchmarks leave a critical gap between realism and verifiability: benchmarks built on realistic images typically rely on human or vision--language model judgments, while deterministic evaluation has largely focused on synthetic shape canvases, with application-oriented extensions primarily limited to charts. This makes it difficult to determine precisely how much of a requested edit was executed, where unintended changes occurred, and whether small differences between models reflect genuine editing capability or evaluator uncertainty. To bridge this gap, we present VeriEdit-Bench, a benchmark for fine-grained, instruction-faithful image editing across realistic structured assets with deterministic, four-axis evaluation. Its 1,740 cases are compiled from the source code of 153 Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) graphics, charts, web interfaces, and presentation slides. Controlled source-code edits preserve the original visual context while yielding exact target images, pixel-level edit masks, and explicit edit specifications, enabling reproducible scoring along four axes: edit fidelity, preservation, localization, and magnitude. Evaluating eleven editors, we find that even the strongest model remains far from full credit; rankings for the same recoloring operation reverse between charts and SVG graphics; and outputs with similar pixel-accuracy profiles can still differ substantially in localization and change magnitude. This decomposition yields graded, verifiable feedback and exposes model-specific capability and failure profiles that holistic scores or evaluator-dependent judgments may obscure.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

An Industrial-Scale Sequential Recommender for LinkedIn Feed Ranking

LinkedIn Feed enables professionals worldwide to discover relevant content, build connections, and share knowledge at scale. We present Feed Sequential Recommender (Feed SR), a transformer-based sequential ranking model for LinkedIn Feed that replaces a DCNv2-based ranker and meets strict production constraints. We detail the modeling choices, training techniques, and serving optimizations that enable deployment at a scale of 1.2 billion members. Feed SR has been serving the majority of LinkedIn's Feed traffic for over three months and shows significant improvements in member engagement (+2.10% time spent, +3.52% like, comments, or reshares) in online A/B tests compared to the existing production model. We also describe our deployment experience with alternative sequential and LLM-based ranking architectures and why Feed SR provided the best combination of online metrics and production efficiency.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

DianShi-RxnDB: A Large-Scale, Fine-Grained Organic Reaction Data Platform Built via a Fully Automated Pipeline for Researchers and AI Agents

High-quality structured organic reaction data are essential for developing artificial intelligence for chemistry (AI4Chem), yet much of this knowledge remains dispersed across patent text, images, and reaction schemes. We present DianShi-RxnDB, a large-scale, fine-grained organic reaction data platform built via a fully automated extraction and normalization pipeline integrating patent text, images, and reaction schemes. Its corpus covers organic synthesis patents from the USPTO and EPO published between 1976 and 2025, yielding approximately 24 million reaction instances, of which approximately 14.8 million (61.7%) pass automated qualification checks. Each instance represents a specific single-step experiment recording participants, roles, quantities, temperatures, reaction times, yields, experimental procedures, and provenance links to source patents. In a manual evaluation of 1,300 sampled qualified instances, the micro-averaged field-level accuracy was 92.95%. A matched comparison with Pistachio further indicated advantages in deduplicated record counts, representation granularity, and field-level exact agreement. The platform provides a Web research workbench for searching, filtering, comparing, and source-verifying records, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service offering AI agents composable structured retrieval tools. DianShi-RxnDB is available at https://dianshi.opendatalab.org.cn/ .

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

MinerU.Chem: A High-Precision System for Optical Chemical Structure and Reaction Recognition

In organic chemistry papers and patents, molecular structures, reaction schemes, and experimental conditions are often presented as molecular structure depictions, reaction diagrams, and complex tables or figures. Such information is difficult for general-purpose document parsing systems to directly convert into machine-readable data. This limits data production for organic chemistry knowledge base construction and for AI for Chemistry tasks such as reaction prediction, retrosynthesis, condition recommendation, molecular property prediction, and drug molecule design. This report introduces MinerU-Chem, a document parsing system for organic chemistry literature integrated into the MinerU online platform. Built on top of MinerU's general document parsing pipeline, MinerU-Chem adds five chemistry-specific modules: chemistry relevance filtering, molecular structure detection, molecule identifier extraction, molecular structure recognition, and reaction scheme parsing. Together, these modules convert organic-chemistry-related image regions in documents into a Molecule Summary List and a Reaction Summary List. For molecular structure recognition, MinerU-Chem uses CARBON (Complex Atomic Representation and Bonding Object Notation) as its core representation. CARBON enables recognition results to preserve both the visual layout of the original image and complex chemical semantics, while supporting the export of standard downstream formats such as MolFile and SMILES. On the SMILES-evaluable subset of MolRecBench-Wild (N=2,392), MinerU-Chem's molecular structure recognition module achieves a SMILES exact-match accuracy of 93.02%, outperforming the best evaluated comparison system, GPT-5.6-Sol (74.87%), by 18.15 percentage points. The system has been integrated into the MinerU online platform and is available at https://mineru.net/OpenSourceTools/Extractor .

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

SCTA: An Agentic Framework for Stable and Interpretable Target Gene Discovery from Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

Identifying therapeutic target genes from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains a fundamental challenge in translational biology. Unlike bulk assays, scRNA-seq captures heterogeneous cellular states and rare subpopulations, but this same heterogeneity makes target discovery highly sensitive to analytical choices throughout the pipeline, including preprocessing, cell population selection, differential expression analysis, and downstream biological interpretation. As a result, existing workflows and general-purpose analysis agents often produce unstable or difficult-to-interpret target hypotheses, limiting their reliability for disease-focused discovery. We present SCTA (Single-Cell Target Agent), a decision-centric agentic framework for stable and interpretable target gene discovery from scRNA-seq data. Rather than treating analysis as a single general-purpose reasoning task, SCTA decomposes target discovery into specialized agents aligned with key decision points in the single-cell pipeline and constrains downstream reasoning with structured biological evidence. In a representative ablation study on hereditary chronic pancreatitis, we demonstrate that SCTA's full evidence integration yields the most stable target selection across independent runs among the tested configurations, while recovering biologically coherent, disease-relevant mechanisms validated in prior studies. These results suggest that decision-aware agent orchestration tailored to the structure of single-cell analysis can improve the robustness, interpretability, and practical utility of target discovery in precision medicine.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

pAI-Econ-claude: A Gated Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Architecture for AI-Assisted Economic Theory Development

In many social-science research tasks, such as economics, LLM-based agents must produce outputs for which no cheap, task-complete, machine-readable correctness signal exists. This creates a distinctive reliability problem for multi-agent systems: how should generation, critique, coordination, and human judgment be organized when no component can certify the final result? We address this problem through pAI-Econ-claude, a gated, human-in-the-loop multi-agent architecture for AI-assisted economic theory development. Agents coordinate through a shared workspace of inspectable intermediate records; specialized gates diagnose targeted failure modes and recommend loopbacks without certifying correctness; and human checkpoints retain authority over decisions that are costly to reverse. We evaluate the architecture on five matched economic-theory tasks against an ungated baseline. Two evaluators blinded to configuration agreed on all five pairwise rankings, preferring the gated architecture in four tasks and the baseline in one. Mean failure severity fell from 1.58 to 1.16, while overall usefulness rose from 2.60 to 3.10. The largest observed gain occurred when a reality check rejected a false market-structure premise and a proof review prompted revision of a false welfare claim. The negative case shows that scaffolding can also compress an economically important mechanism too aggressively. The results support a bounded claim: gated oversight improves the auditability of AI-assisted economic theory without substituting for formal verification, and the allocation of irreversible human judgment is a more informative design variable than pure agent autonomy. The workflow is publicly available at https://github.com/maxwell2732/pAI-Econ-claude.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Spectral Decomposition: Bayesian Contrastive Learning and its Non-negative Formulation via Factor Analysis

Factor analysis, often regarded as a Bayesian variant of matrix factorization, offers superior capabilities in capturing uncertainty, modeling complex dependencies, and ensuring robustness. As the deep learning era arrives, factor analysis is receiving less and less attention due to their limited expressive ability. On the contrary, contrastive learning has emerged as a potent technique with demonstrated efficacy in unsupervised representational learning. While the two methods are different paradigms, recent theoretical analysis has revealed the mathematical equivalence between contrastive learning and matrix factorization, providing a potential possibility for factor analysis combined with contrastive learning. Motivated by the interconnectedness of contrastive learning, matrix factorization, and factor analysis, this paper introduces a novel Contrastive Factor Analysis framework, aiming to leverage factor analysis's advantageous properties within the realm of contrastive learning. To further leverage the interpretability properties of non-negative factor analysis, which can learn disentangled representations, contrastive factor analysis is extended to a non-negative version. Finally, extensive experimental validation showcases the efficacy of the proposed contrastive (non-negative) factor analysis methodology across multiple key properties, including expressiveness, robustness, interpretability, and accurate uncertainty estimation.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

(Human) Attention Is (Still) All You Need: Human oversight makes AI-assisted social science reliable

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p<0.001. Reliability gains were largest on the least publicly represented dataset, a Qing-dynasty population register, consistent with a task-based production model with Frechet-distributed output quality. An 80-run ablation suggests that deterministic computation and human gates contribute independently, with exploratory evidence of complementarity. We interpret HLER as a research harness rather than an autonomous AI scientist: it sharply reduces failures, makes residual weaknesses more visible, and prevents unreliable claims from being advanced as publication-ready outputs.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Joint Communication and Computation Design for Mobile Embodied AI Network (MEAN)

This letter investigates the problem of energy efficient collaborative strategy for mobile embodied artificial intelligence network (MEAN) over wireless communication. In the considered model, the agents execute the tasks through collaboration, and they can switch between two operating modes based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and global collaboration. The dual-mode comprises the base station (BS)-assisted collaborative mode, in which agents make decisions through semantic communication with BS and then collaborate on tasks, and the local computing mode, in which the agents make decisions and execute tasks independently. Due to the dynamic wireless communication and flexible collaboration strategy, we jointly consider computation energy, communication energy, and task-execution energy with specific collaborative gains into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the total system energy consumption. To solve it, we propose a lower-complexity enumeration algorithm: first, we get the optimal closed-form solution for semantic compression ratio and transmit power by proving the strict convexity. Second, we determine the scale of collaboration and the operating mode of each agent by a greedy sorting algorithm based on individual energy-saving potentials. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the total energy consumption compared to benchmark schemes.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

MolRecBench-Wild: A Real-World Benchmark for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) aims to translate molecular diagrams in scientific literature into machine-readable formats, but current systems remain unreliable on real-world images due to substantial visual and chemical complexity. We introduce MOSAIC, a dual-dimensional difficulty framework with 37 fine-grained labels that jointly characterize visual interference and chemical semantic challenges in molecular diagrams. Based on this framework, we construct MolRecBench-Wild, a benchmark of 5,029 structures from 820 recent chemistry papers, covering the full difficulty spectrum observed in real publications. To enable faithful semantic evaluation beyond SMILES and MolFile, we propose CARBON, a representation language capable of expressing valence variations, icon-based groups, and other non-standard chemical semantics. We further adopt a dual-track evaluation protocol supporting both CARBON and SMILES outputs for broad model compatibility. Comprehensive experiments over 18 OCSR-capable models reveal severe performance degradation on MolRecBench-Wild, exposing a large gap between previous patent benchmarks and real-world academic scenarios.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Scalable Hyperparameter-Divergent Ensemble Training with Automatic Learning Rate Exploration for Large Models

Training large neural networks with data-parallel stochastic gradient descent allocates N GPU replicas to compute effectively identical updates -- a practice that leaves the rich space of learning rate configurations entirely unexplored during training. We propose Hyperparameter-Divergent Ensemble Training (HDET), a method that repurposes these replicas for simultaneous learning rate exploration at negligible communication overhead. HDET operates in alternating phases: a fan-out stage in which replicas train independently under a structured, symmetric spread of learning rates, and a converge stage in which parameters are averaged across all replicas via AllReduce every T steps. Building on this ensemble substrate, we further propose an automatic learning rate (auto-LR) controller that treats the relative training loss across replicas as a performance signal, updating the shared base schedule toward higher-performing configurations via a momentum-based gradient-free meta-update. The combined method produces a self-adapting learning rate schedule that improves both optimization quality and generalization without additional hyperparameter sweeps or training budget. Crucially, the framework generalizes beyond learning rate: any scalar hyperparameter that does not alter model architecture -- such as dropout rate, attention scale temperature, or weight-decay coefficient -- can be explored across replicas using the same fan-out/converge protocol, with inter-replica loss differences serving as zero-order hypergradients that guide the search direction. HDET is implemented as a drop-in replacement for PyTorch's OneCycleLR scheduler, requiring no changes to model architecture, optimizer, or data pipeline.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation

Few-step generation has been a long-standing goal, with recent one-step generation methods exemplified by MeanFlow achieving remarkable results. Existing research on MeanFlow primarily focuses on class-to-image generation. However, an intuitive yet unexplored direction is to extend the condition from fixed class labels to flexible text inputs, enabling richer content creation. Compared to the limited class labels, text conditions pose greater challenges to the model's understanding capability, necessitating the effective integration of powerful text encoders into the MeanFlow framework. Surprisingly, although incorporating text conditions appears straightforward, we find that integrating powerful LLM-based text encoders using conventional training strategies results in unsatisfactory performance. To uncover the underlying cause, we conduct detailed analyses and reveal that, due to the extremely limited number of refinement steps in the MeanFlow generation, such as only one step, the text feature representations are required to possess sufficiently high discriminability. This also explains why discrete and easily distinguishable class features perform well within the MeanFlow framework. Guided by these insights, we leverage a powerful LLM-based text encoder validated to possess the required semantic properties and adapt the MeanFlow generation process to this framework, resulting in efficient text-conditioned synthesis for the first time. Furthermore, we validate our approach on the widely used diffusion model, demonstrating significant generation performance improvements. We hope this work provides a general and practical reference for future research on text-conditioned MeanFlow generation. The code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/EMF.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Near-Field Integrated Sensing, Computing and Semantic Communication in Digital Twin-Assisted Vehicular Networks

Digital twin (DT) technology offers transformative potential for vehicular networks, enabling high-fidelity virtual representations for enhanced safety and automation. However, seamless DT synchronization in dynamic environments faces challenges such as massive data transmission, precision sensing, and strict computational constraints. This paper proposes an integrated sensing, computing, and semantic communication (ISCSC) framework tailored for DT-assisted vehicular networks in the near-field (NF) regime. Leveraging a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) configuration, each roadside unit (RSU) employs semantic communication to serve vehicles while simultaneously utilizing millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar for environmental mapping. We implement particle filtering at RSUs to achieve high-precision vehicle tracking. To optimize performance, we formulate a joint optimization problem balancing semantic communication rates and sensing accuracy under limited computational resources and power budget. Our solution includes a hybrid heuristic algorithm for vehicle-to-RSU assignment and an alternating optimization approach for determining semantic extraction ratios and beamforming matrices. Performance is extensively evaluated via the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for angle and distance estimation, semantic transmission rates, and resource utilization. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed ISCSC framework achieves a 20% improvement in transmission rate while maintaining the sensing accuracy of existing integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) schemes under constrained resource conditions.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

HLER: Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research via Multi-Agent Pipelines for Empirical Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agent-based systems that aim to automate scientific research workflows. Most existing approaches focus on fully autonomous discovery, where AI systems generate research ideas, conduct analyses, and produce manuscripts with minimal human involvement. However, empirical research in economics and the social sciences poses additional constraints: research questions must be grounded in available datasets, identification strategies require careful design, and human judgment remains essential for evaluating economic significance. We introduce HLER (Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research), a multi-agent architecture that supports empirical research automation while preserving critical human oversight. The system orchestrates specialized agents for data auditing, data profiling, hypothesis generation, econometric analysis, manuscript drafting, and automated review. A key design principle is dataset-aware hypothesis generation, where candidate research questions are constrained by dataset structure, variable availability, and distributional diagnostics, reducing infeasible or hallucinated hypotheses. HLER further implements a two-loop architecture: a question quality loop that screens and selects feasible hypotheses, and a research revision loop where automated review triggers re-analysis and manuscript revision. Human decision gates are embedded at key stages, allowing researchers to guide the automated pipeline. Experiments on three empirical datasets show that dataset-aware hypothesis generation produces feasible research questions in 87% of cases (versus 41% under unconstrained generation), while complete empirical manuscripts can be produced at an average API cost of $0.8-$1.5 per run. These results suggest that Human-AI collaborative pipelines may provide a practical path toward scalable empirical research.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Stochastic Self-Guidance for Training-Free Enhancement of Diffusion Models

Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique in modern diffusion models for enhancing sample quality and prompt adherence. However, through an empirical analysis on Gaussian mixture modeling with a closed-form solution, we observe a discrepancy between the suboptimal results produced by CFG and the ground truth. The model's excessive reliance on these suboptimal predictions often leads to semantic incoherence and low-quality outputs. To address this issue, we first empirically demonstrate that the model's suboptimal predictions can be effectively refined using sub-networks of the model itself. Building on this insight, we propose S$^2$-Guidance, a novel method that leverages stochastic block-dropping during the forward process to construct stochastic sub-networks, effectively guiding the model away from potential low-quality predictions and toward high-quality outputs. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on text-to-image and text-to-video generation tasks demonstrate that S$^2$-Guidance delivers superior performance, consistently surpassing CFG and other advanced guidance strategies. Our code will be released.

cs.CV↗