arXiv subjects

Haoran Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Haoran Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Frequency-matching quantum key distribution

Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables information-theoretically secure communication against eavesdropping. However, phase instability remains a challenge across many QKD applications, particularly in schemes such as twin-field QKD and measurement-device-independent QKD. The most dominant source of phase fluctuation arises from the frequency offset between independent lasers. Here we propose a method to address this issue by employing a classical photodiode to compensate for the laser frequency difference. As an application of this method, we implement this technique in a mode-pairing QKD system, achieving an error rate approaching the theoretical limit and surpassing the linear key-rate bound over a fiber distance of 296.8 km. This approach provides a practical solution for frequency matching between independent lasers and can be extended to other fields requiring precise phase stabilization.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

In-Orbit Computing for Remote Sensing: Task-Oriented Processing and Transmission

The growing volume and timeliness requirements of remote sensing data are exposing the limitations of the conventional "transmit-then-process" architecture, particularly under intermittent satellite-ground connectivity, constrained downlink bandwidth, and limited onboard computing resources. This article presents a semantic-aware space-ground collaborative remote sensing (SSGC-RS) framework, in which remote sensing data are processed to different semantic depths according to task requirements and available communication-computing resources. Three operating modes are considered, ranging from fully onboard task inference to semantic representation delivery and space-ground split inference. A land-cover recognition case study illustrates how these modes address different communication and computing bottlenecks. Finally, emerging challenges and future directions for intelligent remote sensing systems are discussed.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Reverse Engineering: From I/O to Code with Discovery Agent

The automatic synthesis of a program from any form of specification is regarded as a holy grail of computer science. Fueled by LLMs, NL2Code has achieved tremendous success, yet the fundamentally more challenging task of synthesizing programs from input-output behavior, which we refer to as IO2Code, remains largely unsolved. Whereas NL2Code can exploit the semantic alignment between natural language and code acquired during pretraining, IO2Code requires recovering underlying principles from concrete computational behavior, navigating a vast and underspecified hypothesis space. To address this, we propose DIO-Agent, a discovery agent that performs agentic reverse engineering from input-output behavior to code. Our method frames IO2Code as an evolutionary search over discrete program space, in which an LLM serves as the mutation operator and concrete error signals from execution guide each mutation. To prevent the search from wandering into structurally complex yet incorrect dead ends, we introduce the Transformation Priority Premise as a mutation prior that biases the LLM toward the simplest hypothesis consistent with current evidence, progressively escalating from constants to conditionals to iteration only when simpler constructs are insufficient. To facilitate systematic study, we further construct an IO2CodeBench spanning multiple difficulty levels. Extensive experiments show that DIO-Agent consistently outperforms both traditional program-by-example method and SOTA evolution-agent baselines across all difficulty levels and various LLMs, while substantially surpassing test-time scaling strategies with equivalent sampling budgets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting the Relation Between Language Model Perplexity and ASR Word Error Rate for Modern End-to-End Speech Recognition

Language model (LM) perplexity (PPL) has historically been used as a proxy for automatic speech recognition (ASR) word error rate (WER), with prior work reporting an approximately linear relation in log-log space. Modern end-to-end ASR systems challenge this assumption because they already contain internal language modeling capacity, are often evaluated without external language models, and can now be combined with neural LMs and large language models (LLMs) through different recognition strategies. This paper revisits the relation between PPL and WER for modern ASR systems. We study whether external LMs still improve current end-to-end ASR systems, whether the PPL-WER relation remains linear in log-log space, how encoder context length affects this relation, and how LLM perplexities fit into the trend observed for standard neural LMs. We further investigate internal language modeling (ILM) in attention-based encoder-decoder systems and show that ILM subtraction changes the observed PPL-WER relation, indicating that the decoder's internal LM must be considered when interpreting the effect of external LM quality.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Exact Quantum Query Complexity of the Five-Bit Symmetric Boolean Function $\Exact^5_{3,4}$

Let $f = \text{EXACT}^5_{3,4}$ be the Boolean function that equals 1 exactly on inputs of Hamming weight 3 or 4. Earlier numerical studies reported success probabilities close to one using three queries, but the existence of an exact three-query algorithm had remained unresolved. This paper settles this problem by proving that the exact quantum query complexity of $f$ is $4$. For the lower bound, we express every three-query algorithm through layer-by-layer Gram matrices of low-degree Fourier coefficients. We then construct a fixed rational dual certificate whose slack matrices are all positive definite. This certificate separates the necessary Gram-matrix region from the exact-output condition and therefore rules out every exact algorithm using at most three queries in the stated model. The positivity verification reduces to five small rational matrices and Sylvester's criterion. For the upper bound, we invoke the previously known four-query algorithm for the seven-bit function $\text{EXACT}^7_{3,4}$ and apply the standard padding reduction. To quantify the near-exact behavior, we use the same certificate to derive a valid, though not claimed tight, lower bound $\frac{25600}{43779488192449}>0$ on the worst-case error of every algorithm using at most three queries. This positive error gap is compatible with the near-unit success probabilities reported in earlier numerical studies, which do not establish exact computation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Architecting for Hardware Diversity: Meta's End-to-End Co-Design for High-Performance AI Training on AMD GPUs

Meta deploys a heterogeneous fleet comprising NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, and proprietary MTIA accelerators to reduce costs and mitigate vendor lock-in. However, the extensive history of NVIDIA-specific optimizations hinders performance portability to other hardware. This paper presents our methods for optimizing alternative accelerators, using AMD Instinct MI350X versus NVIDIA B200 for recommendation model training as a case study. We propose three reusable principles. First, hardware-model co-design is essential: rather than directly porting models from NVIDIA GPUs, revising model structures and software recipes allows full exploitation of accelerator-specific strengths (e.g., MI350X's 1.6x HBM capacity relative to B200). Second, our analytical performance model enables zero-warmup optimal kernel selection across diverse datatypes and matrix shapes in production models, drastically simplifying tuning. Third, increasingly mature agentic workflows have lowered the barrier to porting from the CUDA ecosystem; we extend these workflows for microarchitecture-aware kernel optimizations and custom shim generation. Compared to the directly ported baseline, these methods deliver up to 1.5x improvement in end-to-end training throughput. To our knowledge, this is the first hyperscaler report on productionizing AMD GPUs for large-scale training. Our contributions have been upstreamed to the open-source PyTorch, Triton, and ROCm ecosystems.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Visualizing surface-reaction-driven chloride migration and cascading failure in sulfide solid electrolytes

Moisture instability of sulfide solid electrolytes limits practical use in all-solid-state batteries. Spatially resolving gas--solid reactions during moisture exposure remains challenging. Here, cryogenic four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (cryo-4D-STEM) maps nanoscale degradation in low- and high-Cl argyrodite electrolytes, Li$_6$PS$_5$Cl and Li$_{5.5}$PS$_{4.5}$Cl$_{1.5}$. Li$_6$PS$_5$Cl undergoes predominantly surface-localized degradation that progressively extends inward, whereas Li$_{5.5}$PS$_{4.5}$Cl$_{1.5}$ exhibits rapid interior amorphization accompanied by outward chloride redistribution. Density functional theory calculations indicate a lower chloride-migration barrier along the modeled pathway in the higher-Cl composition, while chloride removal and vacancy formation distort the PS$_4^{3-}$ framework and may destabilize the lattice. Surface treatment suppresses detectable large-scale chloride segregation and improves moisture tolerance, retaining 99.9% of the capacity measured at the start of 0.33 C cycling after 150 cycles. These results identify chloride redistribution as a key process in degradation propagation and suggest a route toward moisture-tolerant solid-state batteries.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Timer-M1: A Multivariate Time Series Foundation Model via Learning Primitives

We introduce Timer-M1, a pretrained multivariate time series foundation model that learns with primitives for zero-shot forecasting. Across domains, time series share elementary temporal and relational patterns, termed primitives, yet differ in how these primitives manifest and evolve across different contexts. Despite progress in zero-shot and task-general forecasting, existing foundation models may still struggle to generalize to complex real-world scenarios. To this end, we develop a primitive-based data synthesis and pretraining pipeline. The synthesis pipeline generates series with temporal primitives shared across domains and then assembles real and generated series into multivariate samples using relational primitives. Afterwards, samples are organized into episodes by assigning distinct channel roles as target variates, past-only covariates, and known-future covariates, ensuring that the model is optimized on predictable variates using available exogenous information. Technically, Timer-M1 further adapts gated two-dimensional Transformer blocks that dynamically allocate cross-variate attention across layers. Across three large-scale forecasting benchmarks, Timer-M1 ranks first on both FEV and TIME and second on GIFT-Eval among most recent time series foundation models. These results support effective primitive-based pretraining as a route to robust general forecasting technique across domains and task settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

DiTS: Multimodal Diffusion Transformers Are Time Series Forecasters

While generative modeling facilitates probabilistic time series forecasting, incorporating heterogeneous exogenous information remains challenging. Diffusion Transformers (DiT) provide a scalable framework for conditional generation, yet their adaptation to forecasting calls for conditioning mechanisms tailored to time series. Endogenous targets and exogenous covariates differ in sources, semantics, and statistical characteristics, while sharing temporal coordinates that support fine-grained conditional guidance. Covariates can describe future variability and temporal dependence beyond the conditional mean targeted by direct regression. Motivated by these considerations, we propose Diffusion Transformers for Time Series (DiTS), a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for covariate-aware forecasting. DiTS models endogenous targets and exogenous covariates as distinct modalities, jointly conditioning future generation on target history and available covariates. Flow matching makes covariate-dependent distributional information relevant to velocity prediction conditioned on noisy future states. We introduce Time-aligned Modulation, extending AdaLN with the temporal-alignment prior to generate patch-wise modulation parameters from aligned covariates and diffusion time. Across diverse covariate-aware forecasting tasks, DiTS achieves strong performance in both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting, demonstrating the effectiveness of conditional generation for both point and distributional forecasting.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

JOVE: Joint Execution and Verification for Resource-Aware LLM Task Graphs

Complex reasoning queries can be decomposed into directed acyclic task graphs and distributed across heterogeneous LLMs, reducing latency through parallelism and enabling smaller models to solve complex tasks. In practice, however, the suitability of an LLM for a given subtask may be a priori unknown, and execution alone does not reveal output correctness. We propose JOVE, an online framework that jointly assigns executor LLMs and selects intermediate outputs for paid verification. Verification runs asynchronously and is used to improve future allocations, so the system must balance spending on execution now against learning for later. We study how to optimize this trade-off under a long-term budget and a per-query latency constraint, with stochastic, initially unknown LLM service quality, invocation costs, and execution times. JOVE makes execution and verification decisions by solving a sequence of per-query mixed-integer linear programs. Online learning updates task-dependent estimates of LLM quality based on verification feedback, while an information-gain bonus incorporates the value of learning into allocation decisions. Under a natural set of assumptions, we establish sublinear quality-learning regret for JOVE. Across four reasoning benchmarks, JOVE achieves competitive accuracy against standard inference baselines while reducing average cost and latency by at least 3.17 times.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

4DMulti: automated multicomponent identification at complex material interfaces

Mapping crystalline phases at heterogeneous interfaces is essential for understanding material performance and degradation. However, structural heterogeneity, phase overlap, and local disorder complicate diffraction interpretation, while growing data volumes make manual analysis increasingly impractical. We introduce 4DMulti, a physics-guided learning framework for automated multicomponent identification from large-scale four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) data. The supporting diffraction data resource comprises over 6 million high-quality experimental patterns and labeled patterns generated by Sim2real. A retrieval-conditioned latent diffusion transformer (Sim2real) translates simulated patterns into experimental-style examples under constraints designed to preserve Bragg geometry, while a rotation-invariant coordinate convolutional network identifies phases across in-plane rotations. 4DMulti achieves 98.82% classification accuracy on a five-phase experimental nanoparticle benchmark, with ablation studies supporting the complementary benefits of domain adaptation and rotation-invariant classification. We define diffraction-inferred structural complexity (DISC), a normalized predictive entropy score that quantifies phase-assignment ambiguity within a specified candidate phase library. We apply 4DMulti to generate structural maps of superconducting heterostructures, corroded alloy surfaces, and degraded solid-state battery interfaces down to single-nanometer spatial resolution. 4DMulti connects simulation-derived crystallographic knowledge to automated experimental interpretation, establishing a foundation for scalable analysis of complex interfaces and data-driven discovery of interfacial design principles.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Sense and Sensitivity: Benchmarking LLM Clinical Triage Recommendations with Physician Experts

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical settings, it is critical to evaluate their reliability under realistic variation in clinical text. We study this question in clinical triage, comparing LLMs to practicing physicians under text perturbations that preserve the underlying clinical setting. We introduce a benchmark of over 6,000 clinical scenarios, 7,000 physician annotations, and 225,000 model responses. Using this benchmark, we make two key observations. First, LLMs are more likely than physicians to recommend unnecessary care at baseline, and this tendency increases under perturbed inputs. Further, we find that LLM recommendations are more sensitive to gender and tone perturbations than human recommendations. Together, these results demonstrate that LLMs can vary under clinically irrelevant textual changes, highlighting the need for deployment-oriented evaluations grounded in expert physician behavior.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Exo2EgoHOI: Hand-Object-Interaction Aware Exocentric-to-Egocentric Video Generation

Egocentric videos of human manipulation provide valuable visual experience for embodied intelligence, yet collecting such data at scale is costly. Exocentric-to-egocentric video generation offers a scalable alternative by transforming abundant third-person manipulation videos into first-person observations. However, existing methods often struggle to faithfully preserve demonstrated hand-object interactions (HOI) across large viewpoint changes due to insufficient fine-grained interaction guidance and weak object-centric anchoring. We present Exo2EgoHOI, an HOI-aware video generative framework for interaction-preserving exocentric-to-egocentric translation. To preserve fine-grained HOI, we introduce a unified 4D HOI prior that combines scene geometry, articulated hand renderings, and dense hand-object relation fields, together with a dual-branch residual adapter for injecting structural and relational cues into the video generation backbone. To preserve object consistency, we introduce Decomposed Gated Cross-Attention, which separately encodes object and background references and adaptively integrates global semantic and local appearance features as object-centric anchors. Experiments on ARCTIC-HOI and Ego-Exo4D demonstrate substantial improvements in object consistency and HOI preservation while maintaining competitive visual fidelity. In particular, on ARCTIC-HOI, Exo2EgoHOI improves object mIoU by 32.3% and reduces MPJPE and PA-MPJPE by 34.7% and 50.0%, respectively, relative to the respective best baseline results. Project page: https://rcl-robotics.github.io/Exo2EgoHOI/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Sliced $L^p$ Distributional Balancing

A popular class of causal inference methods addresses confounding through weighting, which reweights treated and control groups to balance their covariate distributions without using outcome information, thereby preserving a design-based perspective. In this paper, we propose sliced $L^p$ distributional balancing (SLDB), a family indexed by $p\in[1,\infty)$ that measures imbalance by averaging squared $L^p$ distances between the cumulative distribution functions of one-dimensional linear projections. The Cramér--Wold device ensures that this criterion identifies equality of multivariate distributions, while projection reduces its computation to sorting-based one-dimensional operations. Because our method lies outside the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) framework underlying many existing distributional balancing methods, their theoretical and computational tools do not directly apply. We therefore develop a computationally efficient projected subgradient descent algorithm for estimating balancing weights, offering improved computational complexity over MMD-based methods. Furthermore, we establish a novel theoretical framework for SLDB-based causal effect estimation and prove, under suitable conditions, root-n consistency and asymptotic normality, with the asymptotic variance attaining the semiparametric efficiency bound. Finally, we develop inferential procedures that do not require augmentation with an outcome model, thereby retaining the design-based principle. Simulation studies and a real-world application demonstrate that SLDB performs competitively with existing methods.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Approved Actions: Runtime Validation of Persistent Outcomes in Agent Workflows

Large language model agents increasingly act on software systems, no longer merely generating text but also changing databases and online services. However, an approved database update may succeed yet leave an unapproved notification because execution can produce persistent effects beyond the requested change. Current safeguards can approve an action or record its aftermath, but without checking the persistent result before continuation, an unapproved outcome can be accepted as success and propagated to later steps. We present EffectMatch, a runtime that collects persistent changes within a controlled execution boundary and compares them with what the application approved for the current state and execution. The comparison governs commit and dependent execution. In comparative evaluation on 206 public business tasks, EffectMatch preserved all clean executions and prevented all tested incorrect commits. Six 20-run ablations exposed the failure caused by each removed mechanism, while 80 task-topology cases preserved truthful handoffs and blocked invalid continuation. Together, these results show that EffectMatch blocks the silent acceptance and downstream propagation of persistent outcomes inconsistent with application approval.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

SPID: Distilled Protein Backbone Generation

Diffusion- and flow-based generative models have recently demonstrated strong performance in protein backbone generation tasks, offering unprecedented capabilities for de novo protein design. However, despite their generation quality, these models are constrained by slow sampling, often requiring hundreds of iterative steps. This computational bottleneck limits their practical utility in large-scale protein discovery, where thousands to millions of candidate structures are needed. To address this challenge, we explore the techniques of score distillation, which has shown great success in reducing the number of sampling steps in the vision domain while maintaining high generation quality. However, a straightforward adaptation of these methods results in unacceptably low designability. We introduce Score Protein identity Distillation (SPID), which resolves this incompatibility by combining few-step generation with inference-time noise scaling. SPID adapts the Score identity Distillation (SiD) framework to both diffusion- and flow-based models without requiring access to pretraining data. Applied to the Proteina flow-matching model, our 16-step generator achieves 94.4% designability, matching the 400-step teacher, while delivering more than a 20-fold reduction in effective backbone-generation time and maintaining comparable diversity and novelty. SPID generalizes across unconditional generation, fold-class conditional generation, and motif scaffolding, and extends to equivariant diffusion architectures, achieving significant reduction in generation time with comparable generation quality to the teacher in all tasks. The resulting reduction in inference cost could facilitate large-scale in silico protein design, thereby advancing diffusion-based models toward real-world protein engineering applications. The PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/LY-Xie/SiD_Protein

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Future-Aware Flow Planning for Safe UAV Target Following

UAV target following in cluttered environments requires anticipating target motion. Followers that use only the current target state can lag behind turns or choose blocked corridors. They may also trade safe near-horizon motion for lower tracking error. We propose a future-aware flow planning framework for state-informed UAV target following. Predicted target futures guide clean UAV trajectory generation through residual signals aligned with the planning horizon. Risk-scored repair of the executable prefix is embedded in the sampling loop. On fixed in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) receding-horizon benchmarks, the planner improves the safety--tracking trade-off. It matches zero measured ID collision rate and achieves the highest ID safe-tracking time fraction. It also gives the lowest OOD macro-average collision rate and final tracking error among the compared methods. It does not dominate every metric: Future-MPC remains smoother and stronger on some threshold-based OOD success metrics under its hand-designed objective. Controlled comparisons show that future conditioning with the adapter improves candidate generation before safety repair. Simulator-facing tests examine interface perturbations, sensing, and controller execution. These results support horizon-aligned future guidance and embedded prefix repair as complementary components for safe UAV target following under the tested simulation conditions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Draft-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Speculative Draft Models

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on target-generated trajectories. However, we observe that SFT quickly plateaus: the draft model's acceptance length on test data stops improving. The reason is an offline-to-inference mismatch: In SFT, the drafter learns from fixed target-generated trajectories, whereas during speculative decoding it is evaluated on blocks proposed under its own policy. This motivates on-policy distillation (OPD), where the target model supervises the drafter on draft-induced states. Yet OPD remains difficult for draft models, as they cannot reliably roll out complete sequences independently, whereas target-assisted generation makes the collected sequences follow the target distribution and thus eliminates the on-policy signal. We therefore propose Draft-OPD, which uses target-assisted rollout for stable continuations and replays drafting from the verification-exposed error positions. This allows the drafter to learn from target feedback on both accepted and rejected proposals, focusing training on the draft-induced errors that limit speculative acceptance. Experiments show that Draft-OPD achieves over $5\times$ lossless acceleration for thinking models across diverse tasks, improving over EAGLE-3 and DFlash by 23\% and 13\%.

cs.CL↗