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Ge Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ge Zhang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

WorldTravel: A Realistic Multimodal Travel-Planning Benchmark with Tightly Coupled Constraints

Real-world autonomous planning requires coordinating tightly coupled constraints where a single decision dictates the feasibility of all subsequent actions. However, existing benchmarks predominantly feature loosely coupled constraints solvable through local greedy decisions and rely on idealized data, failing to capture the complexity of extracting parameters from dynamic web environments. We introduce \textbf{WorldTravel}, a benchmark comprising 150 real-world travel scenarios across 5 cities that demand navigating an average of 15+ interdependent temporal and logical constraints. To evaluate agents in realistic deployments, we develop \textbf{WorldTravel-Webscape}, a multi-modal environment featuring over 2,000 rendered webpages where agents must perceive constraint parameters directly from visual layouts to inform their planning. Our evaluation of 10 frontier models reveals a significant performance collapse: even the state-of-the-art GPT-5.2 achieves only 32.67\% feasibility in text-only settings, which plummets to 19.33\% in multi-modal environments. We identify a critical Perception-Action Gap and a Planning Horizon threshold at approximately 10 constraints where model reasoning consistently fails, suggesting that perception and reasoning remain independent bottlenecks. These findings underscore the need for next-generation agents that unify high-fidelity visual perception with long-horizon reasoning to handle brittle real-world logistics.

cs.CL↗

Dynamic Vocabulary Pruning: Stable LLM-RL by Taming the Tail

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a fundamental tension: the numerical divergence between high-throughput inference engines and numerically precise training engines. Although these systems share the same parameters, they produce slightly different probability distributions, creating a training-inference mismatch. We prove that the bound on the log-probability divergence arising from this mismatch scales as $(1-p)$, where $p$ is the token probability. This scaling induces a highly asymmetric effect: the bound vanishes for high-probability tokens but remains significant for low-probability tokens in the distribution tail. When sampled, these tail tokens introduce systematically biased errors that accumulate over sequences, thereby destabilizing gradient estimation. Instead of applying post-hoc corrections, we propose Dynamic Vocabulary Pruning (DVP), which constrains the RL objective to a dynamically determined ''safe'' vocabulary that excludes the extreme tail. This strategy trades large, destabilizing numerical errors for a small, bounded optimization bias. We validate DVP empirically by demonstrating stable training, and theoretically by deriving strict bounds on the induced bias.

cs.LG↗

BABE: Biology Arena BEnchmark

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has expanded their capabilities from basic dialogue to advanced scientific reasoning. However, existing benchmarks in biology often fail to assess a critical skill required of researchers: the ability to integrate experimental results with contextual knowledge to derive meaningful conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce BABE(Biology Arena BEnchmark), a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the experimental reasoning capabilities of biological AI systems. BABE is uniquely constructed from peer-reviewed research papers and real-world biological studies, ensuring that tasks reflect the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of actual scientific inquiry. BABE challenges models to perform causal reasoning and cross-scale inference. Our benchmark provides a robust framework for assessing how well AI systems can reason like practicing scientists, offering a more authentic measure of their potential to contribute to biological research.

cs.AI↗

Context Forcing: Consistent Autoregressive Video Generation with Long Context

Recent approaches to real-time long video generation typically employ streaming tuning strategies, attempting to train a long-context student using a short-context (memoryless) teacher. In these frameworks, the student performs long rollouts but receives supervision from a teacher limited to short 5-second windows. This structural discrepancy creates a critical \textbf{student-teacher mismatch}: the teacher's inability to access long-term history prevents it from guiding the student on global temporal dependencies, effectively capping the student's context length. To resolve this, we propose \textbf{Context Forcing}, a novel framework that trains a long-context student via a long-context teacher. By ensuring the teacher is aware of the full generation history, we eliminate the supervision mismatch, enabling the robust training of models capable of long-term consistency. To make this computationally feasible for extreme durations (e.g., 2 minutes), we introduce a context management system that transforms the linearly growing context into a \textbf{Slow-Fast Memory} architecture, significantly reducing visual redundancy. Extensive results demonstrate that our method enables effective context lengths exceeding 20 seconds -- 2 to 10 times longer than state-of-the-art methods like LongLive and Infinite-RoPE. By leveraging this extended context, Context Forcing preserves superior consistency across long durations, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines on various long video evaluation metrics.

cs.CV↗

Retrieval-Infused Reasoning Sandbox: A Benchmark for Decoupling Retrieval and Reasoning Capabilities

Despite strong performance on existing benchmarks, it remains unclear whether large language models can reason over genuinely novel scientific information. Most evaluations score end-to-end RAG pipelines, where reasoning is confounded with retrieval and toolchain choices, and the signal is further contaminated by parametric memorization and open-web volatility. We introduce DeR2, a controlled deep-research sandbox that isolates document-grounded reasoning while preserving core difficulties of deep search: multi-step synthesis, denoising, and evidence-based conclusion making. DeR2 decouples evidence access from reasoning via four regimes--Instruction-only, Concepts (gold concepts without documents), Related-only (only relevant documents), and Full-set (relevant documents plus topically related distractors)--yielding interpretable regime gaps that operationalize retrieval loss vs. reasoning loss and enable fine-grained error attribution. To prevent parametric leakage, we apply a two-phase validation that requires parametric failure without evidence while ensuring oracle-concept solvability. To ensure reproducibility, each instance provides a frozen document library (drawn from 2023-2025 theoretical papers) with expert-annotated concepts and validated rationales. Experiments across a diverse set of state-of-the-art foundation models reveal substantial variation and significant headroom: some models exhibit mode-switch fragility, performing worse with the Full-set than with Instruction-only, while others show structural concept misuse, correctly naming concepts but failing to execute them as procedures.

cs.AI↗

ConceptMoE: Adaptive Token-to-Concept Compression for Implicit Compute Allocation

Large language models allocate uniform computation across all tokens, ignoring that some sequences are trivially predictable while others require deep reasoning. We introduce ConceptMoE, which dynamically merges semantically similar tokens into concept representations, performing implicit token-level compute allocation. A learnable chunk module identifies optimal boundaries by measuring inter-token similarity, compressing sequences by a target ratio $R$ before they enter the compute-intensive concept model. Crucially, the MoE architecture enables controlled evaluation: we reallocate saved computation to match baseline activated FLOPs (excluding attention map computation) and total parameters, isolating genuine architectural benefits. Under these conditions, ConceptMoE consistently outperforms standard MoE across language and vision-language tasks, achieving +0.9 points on language pretraining, +2.3 points on long context understanding, and +0.6 points on multimodal benchmarks. When converting pretrained MoE during continual training with layer looping, gains reach +5.5 points, demonstrating practical applicability. Beyond performance, ConceptMoE reduces attention computation by up to $R^2\times$ and KV cache by $R\times$. At $R=2$, empirical measurements show prefill speedups reaching 175\% and decoding speedups up to 117\% on long sequences. The minimal architectural modifications enable straightforward integration into existing MoE, demonstrating that adaptive concept-level processing fundamentally improves both effectiveness and efficiency of large language models.

cs.LG↗

Beyond Correctness: Evaluating Subjective Writing Preferences Across Cultures

Current preference learning methods achieve high accuracy on standard benchmarks but exhibit significant performance degradation when objective quality signals are removed. We introduce WritingPreferenceBench, a dataset of 1,800 human-annotated preference pairs (1,200 English, 600 Chinese) across 8 creative writing genres, where responses are matched for objective correctness, factual accuracy, and length. On this benchmark, sequence-based reward models--the standard architecture for RLHF--achieve only 52.7% mean accuracy, while zero-shot language model judges perform at 53.9%. In contrast, generative reward models that produce explicit reasoning chains achieve 81.8% accuracy. We observe high within-model variance across genres: individual models range from 18.2% to 81.8% accuracy across different writing categories, with standard deviations averaging 10.1%. This variance persists regardless of model scale, with 27B parameter models showing no consistent improvement over 8B variants. Our results suggest that current RLHF methods primarily learn to detect objective errors rather than capture subjective quality preferences (e.g., creativity, stylistic flair, and emotional resonance), and that successful preference modeling may require intermediate reasoning representations rather than direct classification.

cs.CL↗

TabularMath: Evaluating Computational Extrapolation in Tabular Learning via Program-Verified Synthesis

Standard tabular benchmarks mainly focus on the evaluation of a model's capability to interpolate values inside a data manifold, where models good at performing local statistical smoothing are rewarded. However, there exists a very large category of high-value tabular data, including financial modeling and physical simulations, which are generated based upon deterministic computational processes, as opposed to stochastic and noisy relationships. Therefore, we investigate if tabular models can provide an extension from statistical interpolation to computational extrapolation. We propose TabularMath, a diagnostic benchmark of 114 deterministic problems (233,472 rows) generated from verified programs based on GSM8K and AIME. We evaluate 9 tabular architectures and in-context learning (ICL) with GPT-OSS-120B. On standard regression metrics, TabPFN v2.5 performs remarkably well, achieving R^2=0.998 in-distribution and maintaining positive R^2 even under distribution shift, which is unique among the tabular models we tested. When we measure rounded consistency (exact integer match), a different picture emerges: TabPFN v2.5 drops below 10% on out-of-distribution data, while ICL maintains around 40%. This gap between R^2 and exact-match accuracy suggests that tabular models learn smooth function approximations but struggle to recover precise computational outputs under extrapolation. The two paradigms appear complementary: TabPFN scales efficiently with data; ICL achieves exact computation from few examples. We release all code and data to support further investigation.

cs.LG↗

FutureX-Pro: Extending Future Prediction to High-Value Vertical Domains

Building upon FutureX, which established a live benchmark for general-purpose future prediction, this report introduces FutureX-Pro, including FutureX-Finance, FutureX-Retail, FutureX-PublicHealth, FutureX-NaturalDisaster, and FutureX-Search. These together form a specialized framework extending agentic future prediction to high-value vertical domains. While generalist agents demonstrate proficiency in open-domain search, their reliability in capital-intensive and safety-critical sectors remains under-explored. FutureX-Pro targets four economically and socially pivotal verticals: Finance, Retail, Public Health, and Natural Disaster. We benchmark agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) on entry-level yet foundational prediction tasks -- ranging from forecasting market indicators and supply chain demands to tracking epidemic trends and natural disasters. By adapting the contamination-free, live-evaluation pipeline of FutureX, we assess whether current State-of-the-Art (SOTA) agentic LLMs possess the domain grounding necessary for industrial deployment. Our findings reveal the performance gap between generalist reasoning and the precision required for high-value vertical applications.

cs.AI↗

Structure factor realizability reveals the glass-dynamics onset temperature

When liquids are cooled rapidly, they bypass crystallization and instead enter a supercooled state and then a glass state. Previous studies have shown that the static structure factors of high-temperature liquids, supercooled liquids, and glasses exhibit only subtle differences, leading to the conclusion that the glass transition cannot be predicted solely from structure factor changes. Our research challenges this limitation. Specifically, we studied the difficulty of generating configurations corresponding to target structure factors using stochastic gradient descent optimizations. While such optimizations easily converge when targeting the structure factors of higher temperature liquids, the difficulty significantly increases for lower temperature liquids and glasses. By quantifying this difficulty through the mean squared error achieved, we found a kink at the onset temperature of glass dynamics. Our results suggest that the onset of glass dynamics can be explained by a topological change in the realizability landscape of the structure factor, even though the structure factor itself only changes smoothly. Our results are currently based on computer simulations using original and modified Dzugutov interactions, and future work will determine whether our theory is applicable to other glass-forming systems.

cond-mat.soft↗

The Molecular Structure of Thought: Mapping the Topology of Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to learn effective long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning from human or non-Long-CoT LLMs imitation. To understand this, we propose that effective and learnable Long CoT trajectories feature stable molecular-like structures in unified view, which are formed by three interaction types: Deep-Reasoning (covalent-like), Self-Reflection (hydrogen-bond-like), and Self-Exploration (van der Waals-like). Analysis of distilled trajectories reveals these structures emerge from Long CoT fine-tuning, not keyword imitation. We introduce Effective Semantic Isomers and show that only bonds promoting fast entropy convergence support stable Long CoT learning, while structural competition impairs training. Drawing on these findings, we present Mole-Syn, a distribution-transfer-graph method that guides synthesis of effective Long CoT structures, boosting performance and RL stability across benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

LPFQA: A Long-Tail Professional Forum-based Benchmark for LLM Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on standard reasoning and question-answering benchmarks, yet such evaluations often fail to capture their ability to handle long-tail, expertise-intensive knowledge in real-world professional scenarios. We introduce LPFQA, a long-tail knowledge benchmark derived from authentic professional forum discussions, covering 7 academic and industrial domains with 430 curated tasks grounded in practical expertise. LPFQA evaluates specialized reasoning, domain-specific terminology understanding, and contextual interpretation, and adopts a hierarchical difficulty structure to ensure semantic clarity and uniquely identifiable answers. Experiments on over multiple mainstream LLMs reveal substantial performance gaps, particularly on tasks requiring deep domain reasoning, exposing limitations overlooked by existing benchmarks. Overall, LPFQA provides an authentic and discriminative evaluation framework that complements prior benchmarks and informs future LLM development.

cs.AI↗

NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents

Recent advances in coding agents suggest rapid progress toward autonomous software development, yet existing benchmarks fail to rigorously evaluate the long-horizon capabilities required to build complete software systems. Most prior evaluations focus on localized code generation, scaffolded completion, or short-term repair tasks, leaving open the question of whether agents can sustain coherent reasoning, planning, and execution over the extended horizons demanded by real-world repository construction. To address this gap, we present NL2Repo Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate the long-horizon repository generation ability of coding agents. Given only a single natural-language requirements document and an empty workspace, agents must autonomously design the architecture, manage dependencies, implement multi-module logic, and produce a fully installable Python library. Our experiments across state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models reveal that long-horizon repository generation remains largely unsolved: even the strongest agents achieve below 40% average test pass rates and rarely complete an entire repository correctly. Detailed analysis uncovers fundamental long-horizon failure modes, including premature termination, loss of global coherence, fragile cross-file dependencies, and inadequate planning over hundreds of interaction steps. NL2Repo Bench establishes a rigorous, verifiable testbed for measuring sustained agentic competence and highlights long-horizon reasoning as a central bottleneck for the next generation of autonomous coding agents.

cs.CL↗

Encyclo-K: Evaluating LLMs with Dynamically Composed Knowledge Statements

Benchmarks play a crucial role in tracking the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and identifying their capability boundaries. However, existing benchmarks predominantly curate questions at the question level, suffering from three fundamental limitations: vulnerability to data contamination, restriction to single-knowledge-point assessment, and reliance on costly domain expert annotation. We propose Encyclo-K, a statement-based benchmark that rethinks benchmark construction from the ground up. Our key insight is that knowledge statements, not questions, can serve as the unit of curation, and questions can then be constructed from them. We extract standalone knowledge statements from authoritative textbooks and dynamically compose them into evaluation questions through random sampling at test time. This design directly addresses all three limitations: the combinatorial space is too vast to memorize, and model rankings remain stable across dynamically generated question sets, enabling reliable periodic dataset refresh; each question aggregates 8-10 statements for comprehensive multi-knowledge assessment; annotators only verify formatting compliance without requiring domain expertise, substantially reducing annotation costs. Experiments on over 50 LLMs demonstrate that Encyclo-K poses substantial challenges with strong discriminative power. Even the top-performing OpenAI-GPT-5.1 achieves only 62.07% accuracy, and model performance displays a clear gradient distribution--reasoning models span from 16.04% to 62.07%, while chat models range from 9.71% to 50.40%. These results validate the challenges introduced by dynamic evaluation and multi-statement comprehensive understanding. These findings establish Encyclo-K as a scalable framework for dynamic evaluation of LLMs' comprehensive understanding over multiple fine-grained disciplinary knowledge statements.

cs.CL↗

Dynamic Large Concept Models: Latent Reasoning in an Adaptive Semantic Space

Large Language Models (LLMs) apply uniform computation to all tokens, despite language exhibiting highly non-uniform information density. This token-uniform regime wastes capacity on locally predictable spans while under-allocating computation to semantically critical transitions. We propose $\textbf{Dynamic Large Concept Models (DLCM)}$, a hierarchical language modeling framework that learns semantic boundaries from latent representations and shifts computation from tokens to a compressed concept space where reasoning is more efficient. DLCM discovers variable-length concepts end-to-end without relying on predefined linguistic units. Hierarchical compression fundamentally changes scaling behavior. We introduce the first $\textbf{compression-aware scaling law}$, which disentangles token-level capacity, concept-level reasoning capacity, and compression ratio, enabling principled compute allocation under fixed FLOPs. To stably train this heterogeneous architecture, we further develop a $\textbf{decoupled $μ$P parametrization}$ that supports zero-shot hyperparameter transfer across widths and compression regimes. At a practical setting ($R=4$, corresponding to an average of four tokens per concept), DLCM reallocates roughly one-third of inference compute into a higher-capacity reasoning backbone, achieving a $\textbf{+2.69$\%$ average improvement}$ across 12 zero-shot benchmarks under matched inference FLOPs.

cs.LG↗

Is Grokking a Computational Glass Relaxation?

Understanding neural network's (NN) generalizability remains a central question in deep learning research. The special phenomenon of grokking, where NNs abruptly generalize long after the training performance reaches a near-perfect level, offers a unique window to investigate the underlying mechanisms of NNs' generalizability. Here we propose an interpretation for grokking by framing it as a computational glass relaxation: viewing NNs as a physical system where parameters are the degrees of freedom and train loss is the system energy, we find memorization process resembles a rapid cooling of liquid into non-equilibrium glassy state at low temperature and the later generalization is like a slow relaxation towards a more stable configuration. This mapping enables us to sample NNs' Boltzmann entropy (states of density) landscape as a function of training loss and test accuracy. Our experiments in transformers on arithmetic tasks suggests that there is NO entropy barrier in the memorization-to-generalization transition of grokking, challenging previous theory that defines grokking as a first-order phase transition. We identify a high-entropy advantage under grokking, an extension of prior work linking entropy to generalizability but much more significant. Inspired by grokking's far-from-equilibrium nature, we develop a toy optimizer WanD based on Wang-landau molecular dynamics, which can eliminate grokking without any constraints and find high-norm generalizing solutions. This provides strictly-defined counterexamples to theory attributing grokking solely to weight norm evolution towards the Goldilocks zone and also suggests new potential ways for optimizer design.

cs.LG↗

Adaptive Dual-Weighted Gravitational Point Cloud Denoising Method

High-quality point cloud data is a critical foundation for tasks such as autonomous driving and 3D reconstruction. However, LiDAR-based point cloud acquisition is often affected by various disturbances, resulting in a large number of noise points that degrade the accuracy of subsequent point cloud object detection and recognition. Moreover, existing point cloud denoising methods typically sacrifice computational efficiency in pursuit of higher denoising accuracy, or, conversely, improve processing speed at the expense of preserving object boundaries and fine structural details, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve high denoising accuracy, strong edge preservation, and real-time performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an adaptive dualweight gravitational-based point cloud denoising method. First, an octree is employed to perform spatial partitioning of the global point cloud, enabling parallel acceleration. Then, within each leaf node, adaptive voxel-based occupancy statistics and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) density estimation are applied to rapidly remove clearly isolated and low-density noise points, thereby reducing the effective candidate set. Finally, a gravitational scoring function that combines density weights with adaptive distance weights is constructed to finely distinguish noise points from object points. Experiments conducted on the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions (CADC) dataset, and in-house RUBY PLUS LiDAR point clouds acquired in our laboratory demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, the proposed approach achieves consistent improvements in F1, PSNR, and Chamfer Distance (CD) across various noise conditions while reducing the single-frame processing time, thereby validating its high accuracy, robustness, and real-time performance in multi-noise scenarios.

cs.CV↗

OmniBench: Towards The Future of Universal Omni-Language Models

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have aimed to integrate and interpret data across diverse modalities. However, the capacity of these models to concurrently process and reason about multiple modalities remains underexplored, partly due to the lack of comprehensive modality-wise benchmarks. We introduce OmniBench, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate models' ability to recognize, interpret, and reason across visual, acoustic, and textual inputs simultaneously. We define language models capable of such tri-modal processing as the omni-language models (OLMs). OmniBench is distinguished by high-quality human annotations, ensuring that accurate responses require integrated understanding and reasoning across all three modalities. Our main findings reveal that: i) open-source OLMs exhibit critical limitations in instruction-following and reasoning capabilities within tri-modal contexts; and ii) most baselines models perform poorly (below 50% accuracy) even when provided with alternative textual representations of images or/and audio. These results suggest that the ability to construct a consistent context from text, image, and audio is often overlooked in existing MLLM training paradigms. To address this gap, we curate an instruction tuning dataset of 84.5K training samples, OmniInstruct, for training OLMs to adapt to tri-modal contexts. We advocate for future research to focus on developing more robust tri-modal integration techniques and training strategies to enhance OLMs. Codes, data and live leaderboard could be found at https://m-a-p.ai/OmniBench.

cs.CL↗