arXiv subjects

Feng Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Ask on Demand: Targeted Peer Communication for Parallel Agentic Systems

Parallel LLM agents tackle complex tasks by exploring multiple trajectories, yet useful discoveries remain isolated in individual execution histories. Existing sharing methods often select or summarize information before other agents' needs become clear, potentially overlooking details that become important later. We propose Ask on Demand (AOD), a communication framework that enables agents to seek targeted peer assistance when specific information needs arise. Upon an approved request, AOD retrieves relevant evidence from peer execution histories, selects a suitable peer, and generates a response tailored to the request. To determine when such assistance is worthwhile, we train a lightweight gate using paired team continuations, with supervision derived from final team outcomes and inference cost. Experiments on AppWorld and WebShop demonstrate that AOD consistently improves task performance over independent parallel execution while achieving lower inference cost than existing information-sharing baselines. These findings highlight the benefits of aligning peer communication with agents' evolving information needs to achieve more effective and efficient collaboration.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Disclosure-Gated User Simulation for Companion-Agent Evaluation

Playing the user with a large language model is standard in scalable evaluation, and has a repeatedly diagnosed failure: the simulated user is excessively cooperative, so a system under test can score by the number of questions it asks rather than by making the user willing to speak. We answer with a disclosure gate conditioning information release on the companion agent's behaviour: its state is a ladder of five ordered gates, merged onto three observable depth layers. We specify, ablate, and audit it. The gate is a load-bearing component of the environment: on a published companion-agent benchmark's English corpus, withdrawing per-example gate statements from training displaces the ranking of the 12 systems beyond the noise band of a seed re-run, while per-system scores show no detectable change. We state two acceptance criteria: a ranking must be order-preserving, and absolute scores must be scale-stable. Only one candidate passes both -- the simulator we release -- correlating at 0.993 with the published leaderboard. Prompting a frontier model instead barely moves the ranking while shifting every score up, invisible to ranking-only checks; we supply the specification, ablations, and downstream sensitivity analysis the benchmark's environment lacked.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

InfoMamba: An Attention-Free Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model

Balancing fine-grained local modeling with long-range dependency capture under computational constraints remains a central challenge in sequence modeling. While Transformers provide strong token mixing, they suffer from quadratic complexity, whereas Mamba-style selective state-space models (SSMs) scale linearly but often struggle to capture high-rank and synchronous global interactions. We present a consistency boundary analysis that characterizes when diagonal short-memory SSMs can approximate causal attention and identifies structural gaps that remain. Motivated by this analysis, we propose InfoMamba, an attention-free hybrid architecture. InfoMamba replaces token-level self-attention with a concept bottleneck linear filtering layer that serves as a minimal-bandwidth global interface and integrates it with a selective recurrent stream through information-maximizing fusion (IMF). IMF dynamically injects global context into the SSM dynamics and encourages complementary information usage through a mutual-information-inspired objective. Extensive experiments on classification, dense prediction, and non-vision tasks show that InfoMamba consistently outperforms strong Transformer and SSM baselines, achieving competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-offs while maintaining near-linear scaling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Sliding contact creates universal self-affine fractal surfaces

Surface roughness evolves during sliding, a process known as run-in, and the resulting topography controls friction, leakage, and failure from machines to geological faults. Yet the physical rule selecting this state remains unclear. We show that metals, rocks, and glasses develop universal self-similar roughness at short wavelengths, while retaining a material-dependent roll-off. A two-process model explains this behavior: junction formation and rupture drive universal roughening, whereas larger-scale deformation and/or fracture limit its growth.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2026

A review of simulation, measurement techniques, and development in chip thermal design

As integrated circuits advance toward higher power densities, three-dimensional integration, and heterogeneous packaging, chip thermal management has become a key bottleneck limiting device performance, reliability, and lifetime. This article systematically reviews numerical simulation methods and experimental measurement techniques for chip thermal design, with particular emphasis on the technical challenges associated with multiscale and multiphysics coupling, thermal boundary resistance measurement, and high-heat-flux cooling. We first introduce macro- and device-scale thermal simulation methods, including equivalent thermal-circuit models, the finite element method, and computational fluid dynamics, and discuss the application of phonon transport theory and molecular dynamics at microscopic scales. We then examine the advantages and limitations of infrared thermography, thermoreflectance, Raman thermometry, and embedded sensors. Current limitations include the enormous computational cost, inaccurate multiscale coupling, expensive experimental facilities, and the physical limits of conventional cooling technologies. Finally, we discuss emerging directions, including AI-accelerated thermal simulation, embedded microchannel liquid cooling, two-phase cooling, advanced high-thermal-conductivity materials, and multiphysics co-design, with the aim of advancing chip thermal management toward greater efficiency and intelligence.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

3DGAA: Realistic and Robust 3D Gaussian-based Adversarial Attack for Autonomous Driving

Camera-based perception in connected and autonomous vehicles remains exposed to physical adversarial attacks. Prior attacks often either optimize image-plane textures, weakening cross-view consistency, or rely on shape modifications that are difficult to fabricate and deploy. Both cases limit their value for security and safety assessment of camera-based perception. This paper introduces a fabrication-first framework that learns view-consistent, geometry-preserving adversarial wraps for vehicles. The method performs three-dimensional multi-view optimization with a 3D Gaussian splatting surrogate to enforce consistency under an expectation over viewpoint, illumination, and occlusion, while the final artifact is constrained to print-only textures that keep vehicle geometry unchanged. We evaluate the framework through matched CARLA simulations, controlled miniature-vehicle physical evidence, and tests on multiple modern detectors. The wraps produce substantial and stable reductions in detection confidence and average precision across views while maintaining perceptual realism. Ablation studies isolate the effects of physical filtering, physical augmentation, and shape-consistency regularization, while efficiency analyses report convergence time and memory profiles. Additional experiments report ASR, mIoU-based segmentation degradation, cross-detector transfer against physical attack baselines, perturbation-area fairness diagnostics, and robustness under common input preprocessing defenses. By coupling three-dimensional optimization with a geometry-preserving realization, the study supports a practical pathway to systematically stress-test camera perception in safety-critical autonomous driving systems and provides evidence that can inform defense design and evaluation protocols in information forensics and security.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RAGMesh with FaME-G2E: Long-Form Text-Driven 3D Face Generation and Editing

Text-driven 3D face generation and editing remains challenging due to the difficulty of translating long-form descriptions into fine-grained facial geometry. Existing methods primarily align global textual semantics with facial structures but often struggle to capture subtle local deformations, such as eyebrow tension, cheek contraction, and asymmetric mouth motions, resulting in limited geometric fidelity and editing precision. To facilitate fine-grained text-driven facial modeling, we first construct FaME-G2E, a large-scale multimodal dataset containing detailed text--mesh annotations and paired text--blendshape samples for unified 3D facial generation and editing. Based on this dataset, we propose RAGMesh, a retrieval-augmented framework that leverages text-correlated geometric priors to improve high-fidelity facial synthesis and editing. Specifically, the Multi-Scale Retrieval Fusion (MSRF) module retrieves semantically consistent global and regional facial priors and fuses them in the blendshape space, suppressing conflicting local deformations while preserving coherent deformation patterns. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive RAG-guided Supervision (AdaRAGS), a region-aware constraint that explicitly aligns textual semantics with corresponding facial regions, enhancing regional controllability and editing accuracy. Extensive experiments on FaME-G2E demonstrate that RAGMesh achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in local geometric accuracy, text-guided controllability, regional editing precision, and inference efficiency. Video demo is available at https://youtu.be/Yr0_XkpWcNk, and the source code and dataset will be released upon paper acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Diving into Kronecker Adapters: Component Design Matters

Kronecker adapters have emerged as a promising approach for fine-tuning large-scale models, enabling high-rank updates through tunable component structures. However, existing work largely treats the component structure as a fixed or heuristic design choice, leaving the dimensions and number of Kronecker components underexplored. In this paper, we identify component structure as a key factor governing the capacity of Kronecker adapters. We perform a fine-grained analysis of both the dimensions and number of Kronecker components. In particular, we show that the alignment between Kronecker adapters and full fine-tuning depends on component configurations. Guided by these insights, we propose Component Designed Kronecker Adapters (CDKA). We further provide parameter-budget-aware configuration guidelines and a tailored training stabilization strategy for practical deployment. Experiments across various architectures and modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of CDKA. Code is available at https://github.com/rainstonee/CDKA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

PM-KVQ: Progressive Mixed-precision KV Cache Quantization for Long-CoT LLMs

Recently, significant progress has been made in developing reasoning-capable Large Language Models (LLMs) through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. However, this long-CoT reasoning process imposes substantial memory overhead due to the large Key-Value (KV) Cache memory overhead. Post-training KV Cache quantization has emerged as a promising compression technique and has been extensively studied in short-context scenarios. However, directly applying existing methods to long-CoT LLMs causes significant performance degradation due to the following two reasons: (1) Large cumulative error: Existing methods fail to adequately leverage available memory, and they directly quantize the KV Cache during each decoding step, leading to large cumulative quantization error. (2) Short-context calibration: Due to Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE), the use of short-context data during calibration fails to account for the distribution of less frequent channels in the Key Cache, resulting in performance loss. We propose Progressive Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization (PM-KVQ) for long-CoT LLMs to address the above issues in two folds: (1) To reduce cumulative error, we design a progressive quantization strategy to gradually lower the bit-width of KV Cache in each block. Then, we propose block-wise memory allocation to assign a higher bit-width to more sensitive transformer blocks. (2) To increase the calibration length without additional overhead, we propose a new calibration strategy with positional interpolation that leverages short calibration data with positional interpolation to approximate the data distribution of long-context data. Extensive experiments on 7B-70B long-CoT LLMs show that PM-KVQ improves reasoning benchmark performance by up to 8% over SOTA baselines under the same memory budget and achieves 2.73-5.18x throughput over the original 16-bit LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Temporal Point Processes via Monotone Alternating Splines

Temporal point processes (TPPs) have widespread applications across various domains. Compared to modeling the conditional intensity of a TPP, modeling its cumulative conditional intensity function (CCIF) improves computational efficiency and eliminates numerical approximation errors. However, current CCIF parameterizations uniformly rely on Monotone Neural Networks (MNNs), which we identify as suffering from three structural deadlocks--convexity restrictions, saturation limits, and violations of CCIF modeling requirements--that fundamentally restrict their representational capacity for complex temporal dynamics. To resolve these bottlenecks, this paper proposes a novel framework called Monotone Alternating Splines (MAS). By leveraging distinct interpolation and extrapolation components, MAS provides a flexible and efficient framework for modeling CCIFs. Theoretically, MAS's interpolation provides strong fitting accuracy, while its extrapolation supports robust generalization, reducing the irreducible approximation gaps of MNNs. Extensive experiments show that MAS achieves superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Flexformer: Flexible Linear Transformer with Learnable Attention Kernel

Transformer models rely on attention mechanism to capture long-range dependencies but suffer from quadratic complexity, limiting their scalability to long sequences. Kernel-based linear attention reduces this complexity but typically relies on fixed or weakly learnable kernels, restricting expressiveness and performance. In this work, we propose Flexformer, a flexible linear Transformer that learns attention kernels in a fully data-driven manner. Flexformer builds on random Fourier feature-based linear attention and treats spectral frequencies as trainable parameters, enabling the model to learn a broad family of attention kernels. We develop both stationary and nonstationary variants, with the latter offering strictly greater expressiveness. Extensive experiments on language modeling and sequence classification demonstrate that Flexformer consistently outperforms baselines. Moreover, Flexformer can be effectively distilled from pretrained Transformers to recover softmax attention and exhibits strong kernel transferability across domains, achieving both high efficiency and competitive performance on long-sequence tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Cross-Head Attention Uplift Network with Inverse Propensity Score under Unobserved Confounding

Uplift modeling, crucial for estimating individual treatment effects (ITE), faces dual challenges: flexibly leveraging inter-group similarity to enhance discriminative power and debiasing under unobserved confounding scenarios. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Head Attention Uplift Network (CHAUN) and Robust Adversarial Inverse Propensity Score (RA-IPS) method to address these limitations. CHAUN employs shared feature embeddings and cross-head attention mechanisms to dynamically integrate treatment-specific and control-specific representations, enhancing inter-group correlation modeling. Theoretically, we prove that access to the true propensity scores ensures ITE identifiability even with unobserved confounders. For practical scenarios lacking true propensity scores, RA-IPS adversarially optimizes propensity weights within constrained uncertainty sets to mitigate bias from unobserved variables. Experiments on public datasets (CRITEO-UPLIFT, LAZADA) and a production e-commerce dataset demonstrate CHAUN's superiority over state-of-the-art uplift models, achieving relative improvements of up to 25.6% in QINI scores. RA-IPS further enhances robustness, outperforming standard IPS by 5.4% under unobserved confounding. The results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in real-world causal inference tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Advances in Temporal Point Processes: Bayesian, Neural, and LLM Approaches

Temporal point processes (TPPs) are stochastic process models used to characterize event sequences occurring in continuous time. Traditional statistical TPPs have a long-standing history, with numerous models proposed and successfully applied across diverse domains. In recent years, advances in deep learning have spurred the development of neural TPPs, enabling greater flexibility and expressiveness in capturing complex temporal dynamics. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further sparked excitement, offering new possibilities for modeling and analyzing event sequences by leveraging their rich contextual understanding. This survey presents a comprehensive review of recent research on TPPs from three perspectives: Bayesian, deep learning, and LLM approaches. We begin with a review of the fundamental concepts of TPPs, followed by an in-depth discussion of model design and parameter estimation techniques in these three frameworks. We also revisit classic application areas of TPPs to highlight their practical relevance. Finally, we outline challenges and promising directions for future research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

How does Bayesian Sampling help Membership Inference Attacks?

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to estimate whether a specific data point was used in the training of a given model. Existing state-of-the-art attacks typically rely on training multiple reference models to approximate the conditional score distribution for individual data points, which leads to significant computational overhead and limits their practical applicability. In this work, we propose a novel approach -- Bayesian Membership Inference Attack (BMIA), which performs conditional attack through Bayesian sampling. Specifically, we apply Laplace approximation to a single reference model to obtain a posterior over model parameters, enabling direct estimation of the conditional score distribution. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Bayesian sampling reduces intra-model variance, thereby improving attack power. This insight naturally motivates the multi-reference variant that further enhances performance when additional reference models are available. Extensive experiments across image, text, and tabular datasets indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both effectiveness and efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Structuring Human-AI Productive Interdependence by Strategic Level of Automation Selection for Qualitative Inquiry

While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a solution to the scale-versus-depth dilemma in qualitative analysis, the paradigm of maximizing automation is fundamentally at odds with the interpretive nature of qualitative inquiry. We argue that effective Human-AI collaboration is not an automation problem, but an interdependence problem. This paper reframes the design of "co-data" systems through the lens of Interdependence Theory, proposing a formal framework to structure human-AI productive interdependence. The framework guides the selection of an appropriate Level of Automation (LoA) for different stages of the qualitative analysis process by assessing task risk and the cost of validation. We present a case study where this framework led to a deliberately interdependent workflow, fostering the calibrated trust necessary for rigorous analysis. We conclude by presenting three design principles that instantiate this framework, demonstrating how to leverage AI as a powerful partner while preserving the human researcher's irreplaceable role in the transformation process of meaning-making.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Physics-Aware 3D Gaussian Editing for Driving Scene Generation

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown great potential in autonomous driving simulation and data generation, enabling photorealistic reconstruction and flexible scene manipulation. However, existing 3DGS scene editing methods have limited support for road geometry editing (e.g., inserting speed humps or sunken roads), and generally do not couple such edits with plausible vehicle-road interaction dynamics. Such editing is essential for generating training data under extreme driving scenarios or evaluating system reliability under these road irregularities. Moreover, many optimization-based methods require minutes of per-edit refinement, while existing efficient alternatives mainly focus on appearance-level or object-level manipulation rather than physics-aware road irregularity editing. To address these limitations, we propose RoVES, a Road-and-Vehicle Editing System for physics-aware 3D Gaussian editing in driving scenes. RoVES enables single-image-driven road geometry insertion and couples the edited road profile with a 4-DOF half-car vehicle dynamics model to achieve physics-aware vehicle pose correction in vertical displacement and pitch. RoVES inserts road elements in a one-shot, optimization-free pipeline (1.84s), and the full pipeline (including color transfer and vehicle-dynamics-based pose correction) completes in 6.24s; it edits dynamic vehicles via pose editing and corrects poses frame-by-frame to approximate dynamics-consistent vertical displacement and pitch responses. Experiments on the Waymo dataset show that RoVES provides practical efficiency and competitive visual consistency for physics-aware driving scene generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

On positive solutions of Lane-Emden equations on the integer lattice graphs

In this paper, we investigate the existence and nonexistence of positive solutions to the Lane-Emden equations $$ -Δu = Q |u|^{p-2}u $$ on the $d$-dimensional integer lattice graph $\mathbb{Z}^d$, as well as in the half-space and quadrant domains, under the zero Dirichlet boundary condition in the latter two cases. Here, $d \geq 2$, $p > 0$, and $Q$ denotes a Hardy-type positive potential satisfying $Q(x) \sim (1+|x|)^{-α}$ with $α\in [0, +\infty]$. \smallskip We identify the Sobolev super-critical regions of the parameter pair $(α, p)$ for which the existence of positive solutions is established via variational methods. In contrast, within the Serrin sub-critical regions of $(α, p)$, we demonstrate nonexistence by iteratively analyzing the decay behavior at infinity, ultimately leading to a contradiction. Notably, in the full-space and half-space domains, there exists an intermediate regions between the Sobolev critical line and the Serrin critical line where the existence of positive solutions remains an open question. Such an intermediate region does not exist in the quadrant domain.

math.AP↗

arXiv2026

Meow-Omni 1: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Feline Ethology

Deciphering animal intent is a fundamental challenge in computational ethology, largely because of semantic aliasing, the phenomenon where identical external signals (e.g., a cat's purr) correspond to radically different internal states depending on physiological context. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are blind to high-frequency biological time-series data, restricting them to superficial behavioural pattern matching rather than genuine latent-state reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce Meow-Omni 1, the first open-source, quad-modal MLLM purpose-built for computational ethology. It natively fuses video, audio, and physiological time-series streams with textual reasoning. Through targeted architectural adaptation, we integrate specialized scientific encoders into a unified backbone and formalize intent inference via physiologically grounded cross-modal alignment. Evaluated on MeowBench, a novel, expert-verified quad-modal benchmark, Meow-Omni 1 achieves state-of-the-art intent-recognition accuracy (71.16%), substantially outperforming leading vision-language and omni-modal baselines. We release the complete open-source pipeline including model weights, training framework, and the Meow-10K dataset, to establish a scalable paradigm for inter-species intent understanding and to advance foundation models toward real-world veterinary diagnostics and wildlife conservation.

cs.CL↗