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Chuang Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Chuang Ma.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Every Token Needs Its Own Teacher: Multi-teacher Adaptive On-policy Self-distillation

On-policy Self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models by constructing a teacher conditioned on privileged references. However, existing approaches keep the teacher fixed either throughout training by consistently exposing it to the full reference, or within each response by adaptively varying partial reference exposure only across responses. In this paper, we argue that neither of them is sufficient. Instead, every token needs its own teacher, as the teacher preference can vary token by token within the same response. Through a teacher-intervention pilot study, we validate that the teacher preference differs across tokens, and reveal that a preferred teacher can be identified for each token through majority voting and KL-based selection. Motivated by these findings, we propose Multi-teacher Adaptive On-policy Self-Distillation (MTA-OPSD), the first token-level adaptive OPSD method. Our method constructs a multi-teacher pool consisting of candidate teachers, and enables every token to adaptively select its preferred teacher during training. Experiments with Qwen3 models on mathematical reasoning tasks show that MTA-OPSD consistently outperforms existing OPSD approaches with an average gain of up to $+5.9$ over the base model, highlighting the importance of adapting teacher supervision at the token level. The code is available at https://github.com/xingzhejun/MTA-OPSD.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

What Can't Jev Decide? Probing the Limits of One-Pass Decision Models

Jev and its open replicas choose among the options a caller supplies with a single forward pass, fast enough to decide inside an agent loop. We ask what such a model cannot decide, and find a simple limit: Jev cannot make a decision that an LLM makes only by writing out intermediate steps. On a benchmark that varies one factor at a time, Jev finds and selects records without error up to 20k tokens and 64 options, but once the answer depends on two or more updates of one user, accuracy falls, to 53-80% at sixteen updates, because similar records interfere. Given a stale summary of the state, Jev follows it. On real decision items graded by how many thinking tokens a reference LLM needs, Jev answers 97.5% of the items that one forward pass of that LLM solves, but only 74% of the others. Jev also does not know its limit: its confidence flags the errors it makes itself but not those it inherits from a stale input, and neither an explicit nor a trained hand-off option catches the latter. The open models we evaluate share these limits. Checking the state such models rely on requires a model that reasons.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Understanding Head Geometry and Dynamics in Federated Regression through a Natural Solution Selection Rule: An Unconstrained Feature Model Analysis

In federated averaging, local objectives can admit multiple optimal heads, making the aggregate depend on which heads clients return. We study this ambiguity in federated multivariate regression with private backbones and a shared linear head, using an unconstrained feature model (UFM) that treats training-sample features as free variables. We introduce a natural selection rule: each client returns the optimal head closest to the broadcast head. We show that global minimization with a vanishing proximal penalty on the head realizes this rule. When the clients' optimal Gram matrices and the initial shared Gram matrix are positive definite, the shared Gram matrix follows a closed recursion and converges to the unique Bures-Wasserstein barycenter of the clients' optimal Gram matrices. Even with this alignment, the limit generally differs from the centralized optimal Gram matrix. We decompose this gap into three positive-semidefinite terms arising from differences in client target means, covariance heterogeneity, and averaging the aligned heads. A correction based on a one-time exchange of target means and covariances recovers the centralized optimal Gram matrix in one round under exact local optimization and the same selection rule. We verify these results numerically in the UFM and test its predictions on five tabular and five image regression datasets using deep networks with feature regularization and long local training. In these experiments, ordinary training approaches the predicted barycenter, while a weak proximal penalty improves endpoint agreement and yields trajectories that closely follow the predicted Gram dynamics. The correction moves the final Gram matrices close to the centralized UFM prediction.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

How to Loop MoE: Flatten the Experts, Untie the Attention

Looped Transformers reuse one block of layers several times: by spending extra computation they push a model of fixed size further, and so use its parameters more fully; while sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models activate only a few of many experts for each token. Looped MoE bridges these two design philosophies and gives MoE models new potential for better expert usage, but it raises a question: how to loop a MoE? We answer it with Foil. With the expert parameters and the expert compute per token held fixed, Foil (1) flattens the experts, halving the expert layers, doubling the experts per layer and doubling the passes, so that every routing decision chooses from a larger pool, and (2) unties the attention, giving each pass its own attention parameters while the experts and routers stay shared. Experiments show that Foil clearly outperforms the unflattened looped baseline: at 20B tokens every Foil model has lower pretraining loss than the baseline; at 100B tokens the loss improves monotonically with the degree of flattening, the most flattened Foil ending 0.012 nat below the baseline at equal parameters and compute, with downstream accuracy on par or better; untying the attention also yields more balanced and more confident routing at equal shape. Our ablations analyse why Foil works and turn the findings into design guidance for looped MoE: the returns of looping and of widening the expert layers amplify each other, routing confidence tracks healthy expert use better than load balance, and a sparse looped MoE should therefore use more experts per layer and more passes. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/SR-A-W/how-to-loop-moe.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Mechanistic Diagnostics of Spatial Lexical Bias in Multimodal Large Language Model Spatial Reasoning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on spatial multiple-choice questions, and their failures are often attributed to poorly attended visual information. We identify a complementary failure mode, spatial lexical bias: a spatial relation word added to the answer options can act as a lexical-semantic distractor that draws the model's decision toward that option. Using nine open-weight MLLMs, we show that this phenomenon is widespread. We then isolate diagnostic cases in which a model answers a binary spatial question correctly yet consistently chooses a newly added third spatial option, which we call binary-stable but ternary-fragile cases. Leveraging mechanistic interpretability tools on these cases, we find that the failure arises on the language side rather than the visual side: visual attention analyses and residual-stream probes show the correct spatial relation remains internally available, while irrelevant-option controls, activation patching, and sparse component interventions trace the bias to specific LLM-side channels and neurons. Accordingly, we show that a lightweight LLM-only DPO update on tiny single-object-pair synthetic data mitigates the bias, lifting four-way robust accuracy by up to 100 points on synthetic data, and by 68.0, 32.6, and 20.1 points on broader evaluation datasets WhatsUp, SpatialMQA-Direct, and VSR.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Path-Lock Expert: Separating Reasoning Mode in Hybrid Thinking via Architecture-Level Separation

Hybrid-thinking language models expose explicit /think and /no_think modes, but current designs do not separate them cleanly. Even in /no_think mode, models often emit long and self-reflective responses, causing reasoning leakage. Existing work reduces this issue through better data curation and multi-stage training, yet leakage remains because both modes are still encoded in the same feed-forward parameters. We propose Path-Lock Expert (PLE), an architecture-level solution that replaces the single MLP in each decoder layer with two semantically locked experts, one for /think and one for /no_think, while keeping attention, embeddings, normalization, and the language-model head shared. A deterministic control-token router selects exactly one expert path for the entire sequence, so inference preserves the dense model's per-token computation pattern and each expert receives mode-pure updates during supervised fine-tuning. Across math and science reasoning benchmarks, PLE maintains strong /think performance while producing a substantially stronger mode separation, a /no_think mode with higher accuracy and far less reasoning leakage. On Qwen3-4B, for example, compared to the SFT-only baseline on AIME24, PLE generates 17x fewer reflective tokens (6.01 vs. 0.35 per answer) and 2x shorter outputs (8665 vs. 4101 tokens), and improves /no_think accuracy from 35.33% to 44.67%, while maintaining /think-mode performance (61.33% vs. 60.00%). These results suggest that controllable hybrid thinking is fundamentally an architectural problem, and separating mode-specific feed-forward pathways is a simple and effective solution.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Awakening the Hydra: Stabilizing Multi-Concept Backdoor Injection in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly developed through open-source reuse and repeated downstream fine-tuning, where reused checkpoints are difficult to verify and thus more susceptible to hidden backdoor behaviors. In such ecosystems, a single pretrained model may be sequentially adapted and redistributed by multiple independent parties, allowing multiple concept-specific trigger-target associations to accumulate in the same model. When these associations coexist, semantic conflicts can be amplified in the shared representation space, leading to cross-concept entanglement and degraded generation quality. Notably, instead of strengthening the attack, such accumulation can destabilize previously injected behaviors and reduce attack reliability. In this work, we systematically investigate backdoor attacks under this interference-prone setting and propose Hydra, a unified framework for robust and controlled multi-concept backdoor injection under cumulative and decentralized reuse. Our core insight is that stable backdoor injection under large-scale multi-concept settings requires explicitly constraining trigger semantics while coordinating cross-task interactions during optimization. Specifically, Hydra performs evolutionary trigger search in the text encoder space to identify triggers that are semantically aligned with their target concepts while remaining stable across other injected concepts. It further combines multi-task fine-tuning with trigger-clean regularization to improve training stability under dense multi-concept injection. Extensive experiments across multiple diffusion backbones under rigorous multi-concept settings show that Hydra maintains effective backdoor activation while preserving clean generation fidelity and image quality. For instance, across 8 attackers and 500 concept pairs, Hydra maintains ~95% ASR and strong clean generation.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

AgentCE-Bench: Agent Configurable Evaluation with Scalable Horizons and Controllable Difficulty under Lightweight Environments

Existing Agent benchmarks suffer from two critical limitations: high environment interaction overhead (up to 41\% of total evaluation time) and imbalanced task horizon and difficulty distributions that make aggregate scores unreliable. To address these issues, we propose AgentCE-Bench built around a unified grid-based planning task, where agents must fill hidden slots in a partially completed schedule subject to both local slot constraints and global constraints. Our benchmark offers fine-grained control through two orthogonal axes: \textbf{Scalable Horizons}, controlled by the number of hidden slots $H$, and \textbf{Controllable Difficulty}, governed by a decoy budget $B$ that determines the number of globally misleading decoy candidates. Crucially, all tool calls are resolved via static JSON files under a \textbf{Lightweight Environment} design, eliminating setup overhead and enabling fast, reproducible evaluation suitable for training-time validation. We first validate that $H$ and $B$ provide reliable control over task horizon and difficulty, and that AgentCE-Bench exhibits strong domain consistency and model discriminability. We then conduct comprehensive experiments across 13 models of diverse sizes and families over 6 domains, revealing significant cross-model performance variation and confirming that AgentCE-Bench provides interpretable and controllable evaluation of agent reasoning.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Large-data solutions in multi-dimensional thermoviscoelasticity with temperature-dependent viscosities

This paper investigates a quasilinear parabolic system arising in thermoviscoelasticity of Kelvin-Voigt type with temperature-dependent viscosity and coupled terms. The system, given by \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} u_{tt}=\nabla\cdot\big(γ(Θ)\nabla u_t\big)+aΔu-\nabla\cdot f(Θ), & x \in Ω,\ t > 0, Θ_t=ΔΘ+γ(Θ)|\nabla u_t|^2-f(Θ)\nabla u_t, & x \in Ω,\ t > 0, u=0,\quad\frac{\partialΘ}{\partialν}=0, & x \in \partialΩ,\ t > 0, u(x,0)=u_0(x),\; u_t(x,0)=u_{0t}(x),\;Θ(x,0)=Θ_0(x), & x \in Ω, \end{cases} \end{equation*} models heat generation by acoustic waves in solid materials and can be derived as a scalar simplification of more complex piezoelectric-thermoviscoelastic model. Under the assumptions that $u_0\in H_0^1(Ω)$, $u_{0t}\in L^2(Ω)$, $Θ_0\in L^1(Ω)$ with $Θ_0\geqslant0$ a.e.~in $Ω$, that $γ,f\in C^0([0,\infty))$ satisfy $f(0)=0$, and that there exist constants $k_γ,K_γ,K_f>0$ and $0<α<\frac{N+2}{2N}$ such that $$k_γ\leqslantγ(ξ)\leqslant K_γ\quad\text{and}\quad |f(ξ)|\leqslant K_f(1+ξ)^α\qquad\forall~ξ\geqslant0,$$ we establish the global existence of weak solutions for arbitrarily large initial data in bounded domains $Ω\subset\mathbb{R}^N$ ($N\geqslant1$). The result extends recent one-dimensional finding \cite{WinklerZAMP} to the multi-dimensional setting without requiring any smallness condition on the data.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

Asymptotic behavior of the solution with positive temperature in nonlinear 3D thermoelasticity

In this paper, we study a hyperbolic-parabolic coupled system arising in nonlinear three-dimensional thermoelasticity. We establish the global well-posedness and asymptotic behavior of solutions. Our main result shows that, a thermoelastic body asymptotically converges to an equilibrium state with a uniform temperature distribution for every initial data, determined by energy conservation. The proof of the global well-posedness is divided into some steps. To begin with, we introduce an approximate problem and derive its solvability. Next, we establish a time-independent upper bound for the temperature via Moser iteration technique. Together with an estimate of gradient of entropy, we use a functional involving the Fisher information of the temperature, which enables us to handle a delicate Gronwall-type inequality, to obtain required estimates of the higher-order derivatives. Further, we prove the strict positivity of temperature by applying Moser iteration again on the negative part of the logarithm of the temperature, followed by a uniqueness argument for the weak solution. Finally, we define a dynamical system on a proper functional phase space and analyze the $ω$-limit set for every initial data. This work provides a complete proof of the global well-posedness and the long-time behavior in the nonlinear three-dimensional thermoelasticity system.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

When Domains Interact: Asymmetric and Order-Sensitive Cross-Domain Effects in Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a key technique for improving reasoning abilities in large language models, yet its behavior under different domain sequencing strategies is poorly understood. In particular, the impact of sequential (one domain at a time) versus mixed-domain (multiple domain at a time) training in GRPO has not been systematically studied. We provide the first systematic analysis of training-order effects across math, science, logic, and puzzle reasoning tasks. We found (1) single-domain generalization is highly asymmetric: training on other domains improves math reasoning by approximately 25\% accuracy, while yielding negligible transfer to logic and puzzle; (2) cross-domain interactions are highly order-dependent: training in the order math$\rightarrow$science achieves 83\% / 41\% accuracy on math / science, while reversing the order to science$\rightarrow$math degrades performance to 77\% / 25\%; (3) no single strategy is universally optimal in multi-domain training: sequential training favors math (up to 84\%), mixed training favors science and logic, and poor ordering can incur large performance gaps (from 70\% to 56\%). Overall, our findings demonstrate that GRPO under multi-domain settings exhibits pronounced asymmetry, order sensitivity, and strategy dependence, highlighting the necessity of domain-aware and order-aware training design.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Neural Collapse in Cumulative Link Models for Ordinal Regression: An Analysis with Unconstrained Feature Model

A phenomenon known as ''Neural Collapse (NC)'' in deep classification tasks, in which the penultimate-layer features and the final classifiers exhibit an extremely simple geometric structure, has recently attracted considerable attention, with the expectation that it can deepen our understanding of how deep neural networks behave. The Unconstrained Feature Model (UFM) has been proposed to explain NC theoretically, and there emerges a growing body of work that extends NC to tasks other than classification and leverages it for practical applications. In this study, we investigate whether a similar phenomenon arises in deep Ordinal Regression (OR) tasks, via combining the cumulative link model for OR and UFM. We show that a phenomenon we call Ordinal Neural Collapse (ONC) indeed emerges and is characterized by the following three properties: (ONC1) all optimal features in the same class collapse to their within-class mean when regularization is applied; (ONC2) these class means align with the classifier, meaning that they collapse onto a one-dimensional subspace; (ONC3) the optimal latent variables (corresponding to logits or preactivations in classification tasks) are aligned according to the class order, and in particular, in the zero-regularization limit, a highly local and simple geometric relationship emerges between the latent variables and the threshold values. We prove these properties analytically within the UFM framework with fixed threshold values and corroborate them empirically across a variety of datasets. We also discuss how these insights can be leveraged in OR, highlighting the use of fixed thresholds.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

A Penny for Your Thoughts: Decoding Speech from Inexpensive Brain Signals

We explore whether neural networks can decode brain activity into speech by mapping EEG recordings to audio representations. Using EEG data recorded as subjects listened to natural speech, we train a model with a contrastive CLIP loss to align EEG-derived embeddings with embeddings from a pre-trained transformer-based speech model. Building on the state-of-the-art EEG decoder from Meta, we introduce three architectural modifications: (i) subject-specific attention layers (+0.15% WER improvement), (ii) personalized spatial attention (+0.45%), and (iii) a dual-path RNN with attention (-1.87%). Two of the three modifications improved performance, highlighting the promise of personalized architectures for brain-to-speech decoding and applications in brain-computer interfaces.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2025

MMME: A Spontaneous Multi-Modal Micro-Expression Dataset Enabling Visual-Physiological Fusion

Micro-expressions (MEs) are subtle, fleeting nonverbal cues that reveal an individual's genuine emotional state. Their analysis has attracted considerable interest due to its promising applications in fields such as healthcare, criminal investigation, and human-computer interaction. However, existing ME research is limited to single visual modality, overlooking the rich emotional information conveyed by other physiological modalities, resulting in ME recognition and spotting performance far below practical application needs. Therefore, exploring the cross-modal association mechanism between ME visual features and physiological signals (PS), and developing a multimodal fusion framework, represents a pivotal step toward advancing ME analysis. This study introduces a novel ME dataset, MMME, which, for the first time, enables synchronized collection of facial action signals (MEs), central nervous system signals (EEG), and peripheral PS (PPG, RSP, SKT, EDA, and ECG). By overcoming the constraints of existing ME corpora, MMME comprises 634 MEs, 2,841 macro-expressions (MaEs), and 2,890 trials of synchronized multimodal PS, establishing a robust foundation for investigating ME neural mechanisms and conducting multimodal fusion-based analyses. Extensive experiments validate the dataset's reliability and provide benchmarks for ME analysis, demonstrating that integrating MEs with PS significantly enhances recognition and spotting performance. To the best of our knowledge, MMME is the most comprehensive ME dataset to date in terms of modality diversity. It provides critical data support for exploring the neural mechanisms of MEs and uncovering the visual-physiological synergistic effects, driving a paradigm shift in ME research from single-modality visual analysis to multimodal fusion. The dataset will be publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

MPFNet: A Multi-Prior Fusion Network with a Progressive Training Strategy for Micro-Expression Recognition

Micro-expression recognition (MER), a critical subfield of affective computing, presents greater challenges than macro-expression recognition due to its brief duration and low intensity. While incorporating prior knowledge has been shown to enhance MER performance, existing methods predominantly rely on simplistic, singular sources of prior knowledge, failing to fully exploit multi-source information. This paper introduces the Multi-Prior Fusion Network (MPFNet), leveraging a progressive training strategy to optimize MER tasks. We propose two complementary encoders: the Generic Feature Encoder (GFE) and the Advanced Feature Encoder (AFE), both based on Inflated 3D ConvNets (I3D) with Coordinate Attention (CA) mechanisms, to improve the model's ability to capture spatiotemporal and channel-specific features. Inspired by developmental psychology, we present two variants of MPFNet--MPFNet-P and MPFNet-C--corresponding to two fundamental modes of infant cognitive development: parallel and hierarchical processing. These variants enable the evaluation of different strategies for integrating prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MPFNet significantly improves MER accuracy while maintaining balanced performance across categories, achieving accuracies of 0.811, 0.924, and 0.857 on the SMIC, CASME II, and SAMM datasets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SMIC and SAMM datasets.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Computing persistent homology by spanning trees and critical simplices

Topological data analysis can extract effective information from higher-dimensional data. Its mathematical basis is persistent homology. The persistent homology can calculate topological features at different spatiotemporal scales of the dataset; that is, establishing the integrated taxonomic relation among points, lines and simplices. Here, the simplicial network composed of all-order simplices in a simplicial complex is essential. Because the sequence of nested simplicial subnetworks can be regarded as a discrete Morse function from the simplicial network to real values, a method based on the concept of critical simplices can be developed by searching all-order spanning trees. Employing this new method, not only the Morse function values with the theoretical minimum number of critical simplices can be obtained, but also the Betti numbers and composition of all-order cavities in the simplicial network can be calculated quickly. Finally, this method is used to analyze some examples and compared with other methods, showing its effectiveness and feasibility.

math.AT↗
arXiv2021

Stiffness minimisation of graded microstructural configurations using asymptotic analysis and machine learning

The article is aimed to address a mutually boosting use of asymptotic analysis and machine learning, for fast stiffness design of configurations infilled with smoothly-varying graded microstructures. The discussion is conducted in the context of an improved asymptotic-homogenisation topology optimisation (AHTO plus) framework. It is demonstrated that on one hand, machine learning can be employed to represent the key but implicit inter-relationships revealed from asymptotic analysis, and the evaluations of the homogenised quantities, as well as the sensitivities of the design variables, become quite efficient. On the other hand, the use of asymptotic analysis identifies a computational routine for data acquisition, thus the training data here are inexhaustible in theory. Key issues regarding integration of the two methods, such as ensuring the positive definiteness of the homogenised elasticity tensor represented with neural networks, are also discussed. The accuracies and the efficiencies of the present scheme are numerically demonstrated. For two-dimensional optimisation, it takes the present algorithm roughly 300 seconds on a standard desktop computer, and this qualifies the present scheme as one of the most efficient algorithms used for the compliance optimisation of configurations infilled with complex microstructures.

math.NA↗