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Jie Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Jie Zhang.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

How Does Chunking Affect Retrieval-Augmented Code Completion? A Controlled Empirical Study

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines for code completion rely on chunking to segment source files into retrievable units, yet chunking strategies are typically adopted without empirical justification, and practitioner recommendations are notably inconsistent. We present a controlled empirical study isolating the effect of chunking on code completion quality by crossing four representative strategies (Function, Declaration, Sliding Window, and cAST) with four retrievers, five generators, and nine parameter configurations on two benchmarks (RepoEval and CrossCodeEval), totaling 864 experimental settings. Our results reveal that chunking strategy has a statistically significant effect on RAG-based code completion. Contrary to intuition, chunking based on functions underperforms all other strategies by 3.57--5.64 percentage points on RepoEval (Cliff's delta = -1.0), while the remaining chunking strategies perform comparably. Our further analysis demonstrates that this observation holds across all retriever--generator combinations. We also find that cross-file context length is the dominant parameter: doubling from 2,048 to 8,192 tokens yields up to 4.2 percentage points of improvement, whereas chunk size has a weaker, non-monotonic effect. On the cost--quality Pareto front, Sliding Window and cAST dominate both benchmarks; Function chunking is never Pareto-optimal.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

What Makes VLMs Robust? Towards Reconciling Robustness and Accuracy in Vision-Language Models

Achieving adversarial robustness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inevitably compromises accuracy on clean data, presenting a long-standing and challenging trade-off. In this work, we revisit this trade-off by investigating a fundamental question: What makes VLMs robust? Through a detailed analysis of adversarially fine-tuned models, we examine how robustness mechanisms function internally and how they interact with clean accuracy. Our analysis reveals that adversarial robustness is not uniformly distributed across network depth. Instead, unexpectedly, it is primarily localized within the shallow layers, driven by a low-frequency spectral bias and input-insensitive attention patterns. Meanwhile, updates to the deep layers tend to undermine both clean accuracy and robust generalization. Motivated by these insights, we propose Adversarial Robustness Adaptation (R-Adapt), a simple yet effective framework that freezes all pre-trained weights and introduces minimal, insight-driven adaptations only in the initial layers. This design achieves an exceptional balance between adversarial robustness and clean accuracy. R-Adapt further supports training-free, model-guided, and data-driven paradigms, offering flexible pathways to seamlessly equip standard models with robustness. Extensive evaluations on 18 datasets and diverse tasks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance under various attacks. Notably, R-Adapt generalizes efficiently to large vision-language models (e.g., LLaVA and Qwen-VL) to enhance their robustness. Our project page is available at https://summu77.github.io/R-Adapt.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

What You Think is What You See: Driving Exploration in VLM Agents via Visual-Linguistic Curiosity

To navigate partially observable visual environments, recent VLM agents increasingly internalize world modeling capabilities into their policies via explicit CoT reasoning, enabling them to mentally simulate futures before acting. However, relying solely on passive reasoning over visited states is insufficient for sparse-reward tasks, as it lacks the epistemic drive to actively uncover the ``known unknown'' required for robust generalization. We ask: Can VLM agents actively find signals that challenge and refine their internal world model through curiosity-driven exploration? In this work, we propose GLANCE, a unified framework that bridges reasoning and exploration by grounding the agent's linguistic world model into the stable visual representations of an evolving target network. Crucially, GLANCE leverages the discrepancy between linguistic prediction and visual reality as an intrinsic curiosity signal within reinforcement learning, steering the agent to actively explore areas where its internal model is uncertain. Extensive experiments across a series of agentic tasks show the effectiveness of GLANCE, and demonstrate that aligning ``what the agent thinks'' with ``what the agent sees'' is key to solving complex or sparse agentic tasks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Laundering AI Authority with Adversarial Examples

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as trusted authorities -- fact-checking images on social media, comparing products, and moderating content. Users implicitly trust that these systems perceive the same visual content as they do. We show that adversarial examples break this assumption, enabling \emph{AI authority laundering}: an attacker subtly perturbs an image so that the VLM produces confident and authoritative responses about the \emph{wrong} input. Unlike jailbreaks or prompt injections, our attacks do not compromise model alignment; the attack operates entirely at the perceptual level. We demonstrate that standard attacks against publicly available CLIP models transfer reliably to production VLMs -- including GPT-5.4, Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3, and Grok~4.2. Across four attack surfaces, we show that authority laundering can amplify misinformation, disparage individuals, evade content moderation, and manipulate product recommendations. Our attacks have high success rates: In hundreds of attacks targeting identity manipulation and NSFW evasion, we measure success rates of $22 - 100\%$ across six models. No novel attack algorithm is required: basic techniques known for over a decade suffice, establishing a lower bound on attacker capability that should concern defenders. Our results demonstrate that visual adversarial robustness is now a practical -- and still largely unsolved -- safety problem.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Acceleration of Ultrahigh Energy Particles from Fast Radio Bursts

Two extreme events in the universe, fast radio bursts (FRBs) and cosmic rays (CRs), could be correlated, where FRBs with extreme field strength near their sources may contribute to CRs. This study investigates localized particle acceleration driven by FRB-like ultra-relativistic electromagnetic pulses in an electron--positron--ion plasma system. It is found ultra-high energy neutral plasma sheets form constantly via the front erosion of an FRB pulse. There are two regimes of ion acceleration depending upon the field strength and the plasma density: the piston regime driven by the Lorentz force of the pulse, and the wakefield regime dominated by charge separation field. The predicted energy scalings align well with particle-in-cell simulations. A power-law energy spectrum with an index close to the CRs naturally emerges during FRBs expansion outward. Detecting high-energy particles possibly produced by FRBs enables deeper insights into their origins and promotes the development of multi-messenger astronomy.

astro-ph.HE↗
arXiv2026

Measurement-Based Ultra-Massive MIMO Statistical Channel Characterization and System Performance Evaluation for UMi Environments at 15 GHz FR3 Spectrum

This paper presents a detailed measurement campaign and a comprehensive analysis of 15 GHz ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) channels tailored for the urban microcell (UMi) environment. Channel sounding is performed over 14.875-15.125 GHz using a time-domain platform comprising a 128-element L-shaped transmit array and a 64-element square receive array. Four representative scenarios are investigated, namely near-field line-of-sight (LoS), near-field foliage-shaded, far-field foliage-shaded, and far-field LoS street canyon scenarios, resulting in 81 distinct transmit-receive links. Based on the measured data, conventional channel characteristics, including path loss, power delay angle profiles, delay spread, and angular spread, are characterized, while UM-MIMO-specific phenomena associated with near-field effects, spatial non-stationarity (SNS), and channel hardening (CHD) are quantitatively analyzed. Channel capacity is further evaluated to reveal the effects of different UMi propagation conditions on system performance. The reported results provide empirical support for the new mid-band spectrum (6-24 GHz, including Frequency Range 3 (FR3)) UM-MIMO channel modeling and offer practical guidance for the design and deployment of future sixth-generation (6G) microcell networks.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

TeachMaster: Generative Teaching via Code

The scalability of high-quality online education is hindered by the high costs and slow cycles of manual content creation. Despite advancements in video generation, current approaches often fail to ensure pedagogical structure and precise control due to their pixel-level, black-box nature. In this paper, we propose Generative Teaching, a novel paradigm shifting educators from manual creators to high-level directors who focus on pedagogical intents while agents handle the execution. To realize this vision, we introduce TeachMaster, a multi-agent framework that leverages code as an intermediate semantic medium. Unlike traditional video generation methods, TeachMaster orchestrates a collaborative team of agents, spanning planning, design, and rendering, to automate the production of interpretable, editable, and curriculum-ready educational videos. Experiments validate that TeachMaster significantly boosts production efficiency without compromising structural coherence or visual fidelity, slashing production costs to only 0.3% of traditional online course videos and providing a robust solution for scalable education.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

From Past To Path: Masked History Learning for Next-Item Prediction in Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation, which directly generates item identifiers, has emerged as a promising paradigm for recommendation systems. However, its potential is fundamentally constrained by the reliance on purely autoregressive training. This approach focuses solely on predicting the next item while ignoring the rich internal structure of a user's interaction history, thus failing to grasp the underlying intent. To address this limitation, we propose Masked History Learning (MHL), a novel training framework that shifts the objective from simple next-step prediction to deep comprehension of history. MHL augments the standard autoregressive objective with an auxiliary task of reconstructing masked historical items, compelling the model to understand ``why'' an item path is formed from the user's past behaviors, rather than just ``what'' item comes next. We introduce two key contributions to enhance this framework: (1) an entropy-guided masking policy that intelligently targets the most informative historical items for reconstruction, and (2) a curriculum learning scheduler that progressively transitions from history reconstruction to future prediction. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models, highlighting that a comprehensive understanding of the past is crucial for accurately predicting a user's future path.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security

The rise of AI agents introduces complex safety and security challenges arising from autonomous tool use and environmental interactions. Current guardrail models lack agentic risk awareness and transparency in risk diagnosis. To introduce an agentic guardrail that covers complex and numerous risky behaviors, we first propose a unified three-dimensional taxonomy that orthogonally categorizes agentic risks by their source (where), failure mode (how), and consequence (what). Guided by this structured and hierarchical taxonomy, we introduce a new fine-grained agentic safety benchmark (ATBench) and a Diagnostic Guardrail framework for agent safety and security (AgentDoG). AgentDoG provides fine-grained and contextual monitoring across agent trajectories. More Crucially, AgentDoG can diagnose the root causes of unsafe actions and seemingly safe but unreasonable actions, offering provenance and transparency beyond binary labels to facilitate effective agent alignment. AgentDoG variants are available in three sizes (4B, 7B, and 8B parameters) across Qwen and Llama model families. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AgentDoG achieves state-of-the-art performance in agentic safety moderation in diverse and complex interactive scenarios. All models and datasets are openly released.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Observation of quantum multi-Mpemba effect in a trapped-ion system

The quantum Mpemba effect (ME) in Markovian systems is conventionally explained by a smaller overlap between the initial state and the slowest decay mode (SDM). Such state, initially farther away from equilibrium or steady state, relaxes faster than closer ones, resulting to a crossing of their trajectories. This picture, by neglecting the transient dynamics, holds in the long-time limit. Here we experimentally observe multiple trajectory crossings (multi-ME) in the relaxation dynamics of a trapped ion. Such novel dynamics takes place in a unusual scenario where the initial state instead has a larger overlap with the SDM. We develop a theoretical framework based on relaxation speed to understand the multi-ME. We show that the initial relaxation speed is governed by the fastest decay mode, which together with the SDM overlap gives a phase diagram that reveals both the occurrence and the types of quantum ME observed in our experiment. Our study goes beyond the simple picture based on the long-time limit, tracks continuously the quantum ME dynamics, and establishes a comprehensive framework to describe the transient quantum relaxation.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

Intertwined charge density wave, tunable anti-dome superconductivity, and topological states in kagome metal VSn

These years, kagome materials with 1:1 stoichiometry have garnered increasing attention, among which FeSn, CoSn, and FeGe have been the focus of current studies. However, all of them are antiferromagnetic, thereby hindering the observation of superconductivity and other novel physical properties. Here, we predict a novel 1:1 kagome metal VSn, which is an intrinsic charge density wave (CDW) material. Interestingly, with increasing pressure or doping concentration, the CDW order is progressively suppressed, followed by the emergence of superconductivity characterized by a non-monotonic transition temperature that exhibits a rare anti-dome-shaped dependence. Above a critical threshold, a reentrance of the CDW phase occurs. The anti-dome superconductivity originates from the first hardening and then softening of phonon modes, together with band reconstruction. Crucially, VSn retains nontrivial topological properties across the entire superconducting regime, a feature of paramount importance for realizing robust topological superconductivity. These intertwined CDW, superconductivity, and topological phenomena elucidate the correlations among multiple quantum states in VSn. Therefore, this research paves the way for for designing 1:1 kagome superconducting topological metals and establishes a platform for exploring the interplay of multiple phases in kagome systems.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Two-gap to Single-gap Transition and Two-dome-like Superconductivity in Alkali-Metal Intercalated Bilayer PdTe2

PdTe2 has been synthesized with controllable thickness down to the monolayer limit. Based on first-principles calculations within the fully anisotropic Migdal-Eliashberg framework, this work reveals that alkali-metal intercalation markedly enhances the weak superconductivity of bilayer PdTe2, boosting the transition temperature from 1.4 K to 5.0 -13.5 K and yielding a two-dome-like evolution of Tc. Rubidium intercalation induces the highest Tc of 13.5 K, which can be further increased to 14.5 K under biaxial tensile strain. The strain-dependent evolution of Tc also exhibits a two-dome-like behavior, reflecting the interplay between strain-induced band structure modifications and electron-phonon coupling (EPC). Moreover, a systematic correlation is identified between interlayer interaction and superconducting gap. Lithium intercalation induces a distinct two-gap state, whereas intercalants with larger atomic radii (Na, K, Rb, and Cs) drive the system into a single-gap character. The two-gap to single-gap transition originates from the modulation of interlayer coupling through intercalation-induced interlayer expansion. In addition, pristine and Li/Na-intercalated bilayers exhibit nontrivial band topology, suggesting that layered PdTe2 provides a promising platform for realizing the coexistence of superconductivity and nontrivial topology. These results provide detailed anisotropic insights into EPC and offer viable pathways for enhancing Tc and achieving diverse properties in layered PdTe2 systems.

cond-mat.supr-con↗
arXiv2026

A Python/CuPy Software Correlator for QUEST: Real-Time Performance and Initial Imaging

We present a Python/CuPy FX software correlator for small radio interferometer arrays and evaluate it on QUEST (Qilu University Explorer Survey Telescope). The system combines multi-threaded data ingest, pinned-memory host-device transfers, GPU-accelerated correlation, Polyphase Filter Bank channelization, MAD-based RFI flagging, and delay/phase calibration in a single workflow aimed at array commissioning. On a single NVIDIA RTX 4090D GPU, the implementation reaches a peak throughput of 1.51 GB/s, which is sufficient for real-time operation in the four-antenna mode tested here. After calibration, the visibility phase across a clean 1.32-1.38 GHz band is flattened to a residual scatter of a few degrees. Using the calibrated visibilities, we form a four-antenna synthesis image of Cassiopeia A; the CLEANed image recovers a compact source at the phase center and reduces image-domain background fluctuations from order 0.1 to a few 0.01 Jy/beam. These results indicate that the software is suitable for small-array commissioning and initial synthesis imaging on QUEST. A GNSS-based beam measurement is included as a supporting commissioning check.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2026

STCast: Adaptive Boundary Alignment for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting

To gain finer regional forecasts, many works have explored the regional integration from the global atmosphere, e.g., by solving boundary equations in physics-based methods or cropping regions from global forecasts in data-driven methods. However, the effectiveness of these methods is often constrained by static and imprecise regional boundaries, resulting in poor generalization ability. To address this issue, we propose Spatial-Temporal Weather Forecasting (STCast), a novel AI-driven framework for adaptive regional boundary optimization and dynamic monthly forecast allocation. Specifically, our approach employs a Spatial-Aligned Attention (SAA) mechanism, which aligns global and regional spatial distributions to initialize boundaries and adaptively refines them based on attention-derived alignment patterns. Furthermore, we design a Temporal Mixture-of-Experts (TMoE) module, where atmospheric variables from distinct months are dynamically routed to specialized experts using a discrete Gaussian distribution, enhancing the model's ability to capture temporal patterns. Beyond global and regional forecasting, we evaluate our STCast on extreme event prediction and ensemble forecasting. Experimental results demonstrate consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods across all four tasks. Code: https://github.com/chenhao-zju/STCast

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

PestVL-Net: Enabling Multimodal Pest Learning via Fine-grained Vision-Language Interaction

Effective pest recognition and management are crucial for sustainable agricultural development. However, collecting pest data in real scenarios is often challenging. Compared to other domains, pests exhibit a wide variety of species with complex and diverse morphological characteristics. Existing techniques struggle to effectively model the key visual and high-level semantic features of pests in a fine-grained manner. These limitations hinder the practical application of such methods in real agricultural scenarios. To address these critical challenges, we present a synergistic approach that integrates PestVL-Net, a novel vision-language framework, with two multi-species pest datasets to facilitate fine-grained pest learning. The visual pathway of PestVL-Net utilizes the Recurrent Weighted Key Value (RWKV) architecture, incorporating a saliency-guided adaptive window partitioning scheme to effectively model the fine-grained visual characteristics of pests. Concurrently, the linguistic component generates precise pest semantic descriptions by leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) priors, critically informed by agricultural expert knowledge and structured via multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. The deep fusion of these complementary visual and textual representations enables fine-grained multimodal pest learning. Extensive experimental evaluations on multiple pest datasets validate the superior performance of PestVL-Net, highlighting its potential for effective real-world pest management.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Mirroring Users: Towards Building Preference-aligned User Simulator with User Feedback in Recommendation

User simulation is increasingly vital to develop and evaluate recommender systems (RSs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising avenues to simulate user behavior, they often struggle with the absence of specific task alignment required for RSs and the efficiency demands of large-scale simulation. A vast yet underutilized resource for enhancing this alignment is the extensive user feedback inherent in RSs, but leveraging it is challenging due to its ambiguity, noise and massive volume, which hinders efficient preference alignment. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce a novel data construction framework that leverages user feedback in RSs with advanced LLM capabilities to generate high-quality simulation data. Our framework unfolds in two key phases: (1) using LLMs to generate decision-making processes as explanatory rationales on simulation samples, thereby reducing ambiguity; and (2) data distillation based on uncertainty estimation and behavior sampling to efficiently filter the most informative, denoised samples. Accordingly, we fine-tune lightweight LLMs, as user simulators, using such high-quality dataset with corresponding decision-making processes. Extensive experiments confirm that our framework significantly boosts the alignment with human preferences and the in-domain reasoning capabilities of the fine-tuned LLMs, providing more insightful and interpretable signals for RS interaction. We believe our work, together with publicly available developed framework, high-quality mixed-domain dataset, and fine-tuned LLM checkpoints, will advance the RS community and offer valuable insights for broader human-centric AI research. Our code is available at https://github.com/Joinn99/UserMirrorer.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

When Search Goes Wrong: Red-Teaming Web-Augmented Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been augmented with web search to overcome the limitations of the static knowledge boundary by accessing up-to-date information from the open Internet. While this integration enhances model capability, it also introduces a distinct safety threat surface: the retrieval and citation process has the potential risk of exposing users to harmful or low-credibility web content. Existing red-teaming methods are largely designed for standalone LLMs as they primarily focus on unsafe generation, ignoring risks emerging from the complex search workflow. To address this gap, we propose CREST-Search, a pioneering red-teaming framework for LLMs with web search. The cornerstone of CREST-Search is three novel attack strategies that generate seemingly benign search queries yet induce unsafe citations. It also employs an iterative in-context refinement mechanism to strengthen adversarial effectiveness under black-box constraints. In addition, we construct a search-specific harmful dataset, WebSearch-Harm, which enables fine-tuning a specialized red-teaming model to improve query quality. Our experiments demonstrate that CREST-Search can effectively bypass safety filters and systematically expose vulnerabilities in web search-based LLM systems, underscoring the necessity of the development of robust search models.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Strix: Re-thinking NPU Reliability from a System Perspective

DNNs and LLMs increasingly rely on hardware accelerators, including in safety-critical domains, while technology scaling and growing model complexity make hardware faults more frequent. Existing system-level mechanisms typically treat the NPU as a monolithic unit, using coarse-grained replication that incurs prohibitive performance and hardware overheads, leaving a gap between reliability requirements and deployable solutions. To bridge this gap, we present Strix, a full-stack NPU reliability framework on an open-source SoC, spanning micro-architecture, ISA, and programming methods. Strix re-partitions the NPU along the system inference pipeline, identifies dominant failure modes, and attaches targeted safeguards, achieving sub-micro-second fault localisation, error detection, and correction with only 1.04$\times$ slowdown and minimal hardware overhead.

cs.AR↗