arXiv subjects

Jia Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Jia Zhu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MuPlon: Multi-Path Causal Optimization for Claim Verification through Controlling Confounding

As a critical task in data quality control, claim verification aims to curb the spread of misinformation by assessing the truthfulness of claims based on a wide range of evidence. However, traditional methods often overlook the complex interactions between evidence, leading to unreliable verification results. A straightforward solution represents the claim and evidence as a fully connected graph, which we define as the Claim-Evidence Graph (C-E Graph). Nevertheless, claim verification methods based on fully connected graphs face two primary confounding challenges, Data Noise and Data Biases. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, Multi-Path Causal Optimization (MuPlon). MuPlon integrates a dual causal intervention strategy, consisting of the back-door path and front-door path. In the back-door path, MuPlon dilutes noisy node interference by optimizing node probability weights, while simultaneously strengthening the connections between relevant evidence nodes. In the front-door path, MuPlon extracts highly relevant subgraphs and constructs reasoning paths, further applying counterfactual reasoning to eliminate data biases within these paths. The experimental results demonstrate that MuPlon outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Final Decisions: A Process-Centric Benchmark for Transparent AI-Assisted Peer Review

Peer review is central to quality control in science. However, existing evaluations of AI-assisted peer review mainly focus on the overall quality of generated reviews or the accuracy of final decisions. They therefore provide limited evidence about whether model decisions are supported by sufficient and reliable review evidence. We introduce a process-centric diagnostic benchmark for AI-assisted peer review. It uses (x,$z_s$,$z_c$,$z_r$,y) to represent the paper content, summary, critique, suggestion, and decision. We convert heterogeneous review records from PeerRead, NLPeer ARR-22, and OpenReview-ICLR into process-aligned data. Our benchmark uses direct decision prediction from the paper content (Direct) as its baseline. It compares the decision value of Gold-process variables and Predicted-process variables, and conducts stage-level evaluation, chain-consistency evaluation, and interventional sensitivity analysis. Experiments across three datasets and six models show that Gold-process variables generally have higher decision value. For the main analysis model, the Gold--Predicted gap remains stable across datasets and random seeds. This gap is also reproduced in most model--dataset combinations. Although model-generated intermediate review texts show relatively high local consistency across adjacent stages, the final decisions are not consistently supported by the preceding review evidence. Our benchmark targets AI systems designed to assist rather than replace human reviewers. It provides a transparent and auditable diagnostic tool for evaluating the reliability of their review processes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PeroMAS: A Multi-agent System of Perovskite Material Discovery

As a pioneer of the third-generation photovoltaic revolution, Perovskite Solar Cells (PSCs) are renowned for their superior optoelectronic performance and cost potential. The development process of PSCs is precise and complex, involving a series of closed-loop workflows such as literature retrieval, data integration, experimental design, and synthesis. However, existing AI perovskite approaches focus predominantly on discrete models, including material design, process optimization,and property prediction. These models fail to propagate physical constraints across the workflow, hindering end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system for perovskite material discovery, named PeroMAS. We first encapsulated a series of perovskite-specific tools into Model Context Protocols (MCPs). By planning and invoking these tools, PeroMAS can design perovskite materials under multi-objective constraints, covering the entire process from literature retrieval and data extraction to property prediction and mechanism analysis. Furthermore, we construct an evaluation benchmark by perovskite human experts to assess this multi-agent system. Results demonstrate that, compared to single Large Language Model (LLM) or traditional search strategies, our system significantly enhances discovery efficiency. It successfully identified candidate materials satisfying multi-objective constraints. Notably, we verify PeroMAS's effectiveness in the physical world through real synthesis experiments.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

MEDR: Query-Independent Frame Selection via Multi-Signal Event Modeling and Dynamic Rescoring

Frame selection is a fundamental component of multimodal large language models, enabling long videos to be processed under limited visual-token and computational budgets. Uniform sampling preserves temporal coverage but may miss informative content that appears only briefly. To alleviate this limitation, query-dependent methods can retrieve question-relevant frames. However, because the selected frames depend on the current question, the same visual input cannot be directly shared across different questions, and frame selection must be repeated in multi-turn video dialogue. This motivates us to seek a query-independent frame selection method that preserves the reusability of a fixed visual input while improving the coverage of informative events beyond uniform sampling. We propose Multi-Signal Event Modeling and Dynamic Rescoring (MEDR), a training-free and query-independent frame selection method. Multi-Signal Event Modeling organizes complementary visual, motion, and text signals into signal-specific temporal events. Dynamic Rescoring then iteratively reevaluates each candidate relative to the current selected set, updating its score according to frame-level signal strength, additional event coverage, and temporal proximity. The resulting fixed frame set is constructed without observing the query and can be reused across different questions. On the standard benchmark evaluations, MEDR improves model accuracy by 0.63%-0.89% on Video-MME. On the long-video subset of LongVideoBench, it improves accuracy by up to 1.23% with Qwen3-VL-8B. MEDR further improves overall accuracy by 0.53%, while reusing exactly the same frame set for every question about a video.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RobustFlow: Towards Robust Agentic Workflow Generation

The automated generation of agentic workflows is a promising frontier for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks. However, the empirical study reveals that existing agentic workflow generation methods are not robust. They often generate inconsistent workflows when provided with instructions that are semantically equivalent but phrased differently. This brittleness severely undermines their reliability in real-world applications. To tackle this challenge, we propose RobustFlow, a robust agentic workflow generation system that leverages preference optimization to learn invariance across instruction variations. We also introduce a benchmark of semantically equivalent instruction variants with node-level and graph-level metrics for evaluating workflow generation robustness. By training on these instruction variants, RobustFlow achieves workflow generation robustness scores of 70\%--90\% across diverse perturbations, outperforming existing approaches including AFlow and ScoreFlow. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/DEFENSE-SEU/RobustFlow.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

DREvo: Distilling Recalibrated Historical Experience for Harness Self-Evolution

Harness plays a critical role in large language model agent performance, and building a high-performing harness requires substantial expert effort. Therefore, recent research has increasingly explored harness self-evolution, which iteratively proposes, evaluates, and improves harnesses using historical trial experience. However, accumulated historical experience does not always translate into stable search guidance, and performance often fluctuates substantially across evolution iterations, making it difficult to reliably discover high-performing harnesses under a limited evolution budget. We identify two limitations in how existing harness self-evolution methods leverage historical experience: (1) Lack of dynamic reassessment of whether historical experience remains valid for the current harness, and (2) Lack of explicit mechanisms for translating valid historical experience into actionable search directions. To address these limitations, we propose a new harness self-evolution method, named DREvo, which integrates function-level evidence anchoring, state-dependent evidence recalibration, and role-conditioned search intent distillation to determine which historical evidence remains valid and where the harness should evolve next. Under limited evolution budgets, DREvo exhibits smoother evolution trajectories, achieves the highest accuracy on all five benchmarks, and delivers average gains of 16.2% and 14.2% over the evaluated baselines on domain reasoning and agentic tasks, respectively.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

ToolRosella: Translating Code Repositories into Standardized Tools for Scientific Agents

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent systems are increasingly used for scientific tasks, yet their practical capability remains constrained by the narrow scope of manually curated tools they can invoke. Much scientific computational functionality already exists in open-source code repositories, but these resources remain difficult to standardize, operationalize, and invoke reliably for agent use. Here we present ToolRosella, a framework that automatically transforms heterogeneous scientific code repositories into standardized, agent-invocable tools. ToolRosella combines repository analysis, tool interface construction, execution testing, and iterative repair to address the problem of repository-to-tool standardization. Across 122 GitHub repositories spanning 35 subdisciplines in six domains, ToolRosella reaches a 61.5\% repository conversion success rate after iterative repair, with a 4.4 speedup over human engineers. The resulting 1,580 callable tools support a downstream task success rate of 84.0\% and improve performance when integrated into other agent frameworks, particularly on tasks whose required tools are absent from fixed, curated inventories.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

QCFuse: Query-Aware Cache Fusion via Compressed View for Efficient RAG Serving

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language model (LLM) answer quality by grounding generation in external evidence, but processing retrieved contexts makes the prefill stage a dominant serving cost. RAG cache fusion reduces this cost by reusing precomputed key-value (KV) caches for retrieved chunks and selectively recomputing tokens under the current prompt. Existing selectors, however, face a dilemma between quality and efficiency: fast query-agnostic or final-layer query-to-context selectors can miss request-relevant evidence, whereas full-view query-aware selectors require broad context and layer visibility before recomputation and therefore stall the layer-wise cache-fusion pipeline. We present QCFuse, a compressed-view query-aware selector for RAG cache fusion. QCFuse uses chunk-anchor query probing to condition user-query states on compact per-chunk anchors and critical-layer profiling to identify recomputation tokens without all-layer inspection. We implement QCFuse in SGLang and evaluate it on four open-weight LLMs across six datasets. QCFuse reaches full-prefill-level quality. At matched quality, QCFuse achieves an average prefill-time speedup of 1.7x over full prefill and 1.5x over ProphetKV, the strongest quality-preserving baseline.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SpecBlock: Block-Iterative Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3 preserve dependence along each draft path but call the drafter once per tree depth, making drafting a non-trivial share of per-iteration latency. Parallel drafters cut drafter calls by predicting multiple future positions in one forward, but each position is predicted without seeing the others, producing paths the verifier rejects. In this paper, we propose SpecBlock, a block-iterative drafter that combines path dependence with cheap drafting. Each drafter forward produces K dependent positions and we call this a block. The draft tree grows through repeated block expansions. Two mechanisms explicitly carry path dependence to keep later draft positions accurate. Within each block, a layer-wise shift carries the previous position's hidden state into every decoder layer. Across blocks, each new block can start from any position of the previous block, inheriting its hidden state to extend the path. To spend verifier budget where acceptance is likely, a co-trained rank head replaces the fixed top-k tree by allocating per-position branching during drafting. To avoid training the drafter on prefixes it never produces at inference, a valid-prefix mask drops the loss at later positions once an earlier one is wrong. Beyond static drafting, a cost-aware bandit at deployment uses free verifier feedback to update the drafter selectively, only when the expected throughput gain exceeds the update cost. Experiments show that SpecBlock improves mean speedup by 8-13% over EAGLE-3 at 44-52% of its drafting cost, and cost-aware adaptation extends this lead to 11-19%.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Cognitive-Uncertainty Guided Knowledge Distillation for Accurate Classification of Student Misconceptions

Accurately identifying student misconceptions is crucial for personalized education but faces three challenges: (1) data scarcity with long-tail distribution, where authentic student reasoning is difficult to synthesize; (2) fuzzy boundaries between error categories with high annotation noise; (3) deployment parado-large models overlook unconventional approaches due to pretraining bias and cannot be deployed on edge, while small models overfit to noise. Unlike traditional methods that increase diversity through large-scale data synthesis, we propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that mines high-value samples from existing data. The first stage performs standard distillation to transfer task capabilities. The second stage introduces a dual-layer marginal selection mechanism based on cognitive uncertainty, identifying four types of critical samples based on teacher model uncertainty and confidence differences. For different data subsets, we design difficulty-adaptive mechanism to balance hard/soft label contributions, enabling student models to inherit inter-class relationships from teacher soft labels while distinguishing ambiguous error types. Experiments show that with augmented training on only 10.30% of filtered samples, we achieve MAP@3 of 0.9585 (+17.8%) on the MAP-Charting dataset, and using only a 4B parameter model, we attain 84.38% accuracy on cross-topic tests of middle school algebra misconception benchmarks, significantly outperforming sota LLM (67.73%) and standard fine-tuned 72B models (81.25%). Our code is available at https://github.com/RoschildRui/acl2026_map.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

LoopGuard: Breaking Self-Reinforcing Attention Loops via Dynamic KV Cache Intervention

Through systematic experiments on long-context generation, we observe a damaging failure mode in which decoding can collapse into persistent repetition loops. We find that this degeneration is driven by collapsed attention patterns, where a subset of heads locks onto a narrow suffix of the history, and is further stabilized by inference-time KV cache reuse. Crucially, since many existing KV cache policies rely on attention-based importance, this collapse can produce spuriously high scores for repetitive tokens, causing cache management to inadvertently amplify repetition. To study this phenomenon in a controlled and reproducible manner, we introduce LoopBench, a benchmark with explicit loop-inducing conditions and loop-oriented metrics that quantify repetition severity and generation instability beyond downstream task scores. Building on these insights, we propose LoopGuard, a lightweight, plug-in KV cache guard that detects loop onset online and disrupts the feedback cycle by pruning repetitive tail spans under a fixed cache budget. Experiments on LoopBench show that LoopGuard reduces loop incidence by over 90 percentage points, while restoring output diversity and reducing token waste.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Head-wise Modality Specialization within MLLMs for Robust Fake News Detection under Missing Modality

Multimodal fake news detection (MFND) aims to verify news credibility by jointly exploiting textual and visual evidence. However, real-world news dissemination frequently suffers from missing modality due to deleted images, corrupted screenshots, and similar issues. Thus, robust detection in this scenario requires preserving strong verification ability for each modality, which is challenging in MFND due to insufficient learning of the low-contribution modality and scarce unimodal annotations. To address this issue, we propose Head-wise Modality Specialization within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for robust MFND under missing modality. Specifically, we first systematically study attention heads in MLLMs and their relationship with performance under missing modality, showing that modality-critical heads serve as key carriers of unimodal verification ability through their modality specialization. Based on this observation, to better preserve verification ability for the low-contribution modality, we introduce a head-wise specialization mechanism that explicitly allocates these heads to different modalities and preserves their specialization through lower-bound attention constraints. Furthermore, to better exploit scarce unimodal annotations, we propose a Unimodal Knowledge Retention strategy that prevents these heads from drifting away from the unimodal knowledge learned from limited supervision. Experiments show that our method improves robustness under missing modality while preserving performance with full multimodal input.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

QCFuse: Query-Centric Cache Fusion for Efficient RAG Inference

Cache fusion accelerates generation process of LLMs equipped with RAG through KV caching and selective token recomputation, thereby reducing computational costs and improving efficiency. However, existing methods primarily rely on local perspectives for token selection and lack global awareness from the user query. Utilizing this global awareness is challenging due to the high cost of obtaining context-aware query representations and the strict pipeline constraints required for efficient attention analysis. Thus, this demonstration introduces QCFuse, an innovative KV cache fusion system centered on the user query. QCFuse leverages semantic summary anchors to enhance query representations and selectively recomputes query-related tokens to improve accuracy, updating tokens based on the attention distribution of the most critical Transformer layer to preserve the high efficiency of the pipeline structure. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that QCFuse significantly improves the response efficiency of LLMs by 40\% while maintaining equivalent accuracy compared to current methods. Additionally, in certain scenarios, QCFuse achieves an attention denoising effect that yields higher response accuracy, demonstrating substantial potential in the optimization of LLM inference.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

BootSeer: Analyzing and Mitigating Initialization Bottlenecks in Large-Scale LLM Training

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a cornerstone of modern AI, driving breakthroughs in natural language processing and expanding into multimodal jobs involving images, audio, and video. As with most computational software, it is important to distinguish between ordinary runtime performance and startup overhead. Prior research has focused on runtime performance: improving training efficiency and stability. This work focuses instead on the increasingly critical issue of startup overhead in training: the delay before training jobs begin execution. Startup overhead is particularly important in large, industrial-scale LLMs, where failures occur more frequently and multiple teams operate in iterative update-debug cycles. In one of our training clusters, more than 3.5% of GPU time is wasted due to startup overhead alone. In this work, we present the first in-depth characterization of LLM training startup overhead based on real production data. We analyze the components of startup cost, quantify its direct impact, and examine how it scales with job size. These insights motivate the design of Bootseer, a system-level optimization framework that addresses three primary startup bottlenecks: (a) container image loading, (b) runtime dependency installation, and (c) model checkpoint resumption. To mitigate these bottlenecks, Bootseer introduces three techniques: (a) hot block record-and-prefetch, (b) dependency snapshotting, and (c) striped HDFS-FUSE. Bootseer has been deployed in a production environment and evaluated on real LLM training workloads, demonstrating a 50% reduction in startup overhead.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

DynaGen: Unifying Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Dynamic Subgraphs and Generative Regularization

Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) aims to complete missing factual elements along the timeline. Depending on the temporal position of the query, the task is categorized into interpolation and extrapolation. Existing interpolation methods typically embed temporal information into individual facts to complete missing historical knowledge, while extrapolation techniques often leverage sequence models over graph snapshots to identify recurring patterns for future event prediction. These methods face two critical challenges: limited contextual modeling in interpolation and cognitive generalization bias in extrapolation. To address these, we propose a unified method for TKGR, dubbed DynaGen. For interpolation, DynaGen dynamically constructs entity-centric subgraphs and processes them with a synergistic dual-branch GNN encoder to capture evolving structural context. For extrapolation, it applies a conditional diffusion process, which forces the model to learn underlying evolutionary principles rather than just superficial patterns, enhancing its ability to predict unseen future events. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show DynaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance. On average, compared to the second-best models, DynaGen improves the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) score by 2.61 points for interpolation and 1.45 points for extrapolation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

ACR: Adaptive Context Refactoring via Context Refactoring Operators for Multi-Turn Dialogue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in multi-turn dialogue. However, in multi-turn dialogue, models still struggle to stay aligned with what has been established earlier, follow dependencies across many turns, and avoid drifting into incorrect facts as the interaction grows longer. Existing approaches primarily focus on extending the context window, introducing external memory, or applying context compression, yet these methods still face limitations such as \textbf{contextual inertia} and \textbf{state drift}. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{C}ontext \textbf{R}efactoring \textbf{(ACR)} Framework, which dynamically monitors and reshapes the interaction history to mitigate contextual inertia and state drift actively. ACR is built on a library of context refactoring operators and a teacher-guided self-evolving training paradigm that learns when to intervene and how to refactor, thereby decoupling context management from the reasoning process. Extensive experiments on multi-turn dialogue demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines while reducing token consumption.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Approaching the Low Optical Loss Limit of Plasmonics using Potassium Metals

Plasmonics enables the miniaturization of photonic devices beyond the optical diffraction limit,yet its potential is hindered by inherently large ohmic losses. Hence, it is prudent to explore low loss alternatives to the current mainstay of plasmonics-the noble metals. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of potassium as a plasmonic material with intrinsically low losses in the optical region. The ultraflat, high quality potassium film, fabricated via a rapid slipping-assisted oxide-free crystallization process, achieves an experimentally observed optical damping rate of 3.7 meV,with a measured imaginary permittivity of approximately 0.1 across the entire visible to near-infrared range (400-2000 nm). Near field optical spectroscopic measurements further confirmed the reduced losses by revealing deeply subwavelength confinement of optical modes. This result enhances our understanding of the factors governing plasmonic materials and devices and establishes a new platform for exploring extreme light-matter interactions in a variety of plasmonic systems.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

EduEval: A Hierarchical Cognitive Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Chinese Education

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential for educational applications. However, their unscrutinized deployment poses risks to educational standards, underscoring the need for rigorous evaluation. We introduce EduEval, a comprehensive hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Chinese K-12 education. This benchmark makes three key contributions: (1) Cognitive Framework: We propose the EduAbility Taxonomy, which unifies Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge to organize tasks across six cognitive dimensions including Memorization, Understanding, Application, Reasoning, Creativity, and Ethics. (2) Authenticity: Our benchmark integrates real exam questions, classroom conversation, student essays, and expert-designed prompts to reflect genuine educational challenges; (3) Scale: EduEval comprises 24 distinct task types with over 11,000 questions spanning primary to high school levels. We evaluate 14 leading LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings, revealing that while models perform well on factual tasks, they struggle with classroom dialogue classification and exhibit inconsistent results in creative content generation. Interestingly, several open source models outperform proprietary systems on complex educational reasoning. Few-shot prompting shows varying effectiveness across cognitive dimensions, suggesting that different educational objectives require tailored approaches. These findings provide targeted benchmarking metrics for developing LLMs specifically optimized for diverse Chinese educational tasks.

cs.CL↗