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Kevin Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Kevin Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Full-Stack High-Volume Quantum Networking Architecture based on Photonic-Integrated Tin Vacancy Centers in Diamond

Solid state quantum emitters are a leading platform for photonic quantum networking with memory nodes. However, the inhomogeneous distribution of quantum emitters, as well as several environmental factors (i.e. strain and electric fields) spread the frequency spectrum of the qubits, making them distinguishable and therefore not a reliable resource for distributed quantum entanglement. In this paper, we demonstrate a full-stack approach to integrating nearly indistinguishable tin vacancy (SnV$^-$) quantum emitters on a frequency-tunable photonic interposer that overcomes the native distribution and static variation of quantum emitters for an indistinguishable photonic quantum networking platform. We demonstrate a silicon nitride-on-insulator photonic integrated circuit (PIC) with accompanying multiphysics digital twin (MPhDT) that guides discovery of SnV$^-$ strain-tuning parameters and informs construction of a multi-channel quantum repeater node. On this node, we achieve the first simultaneous demonstration of spectral tuning of the zero phonon line (ZPL) at GHz scale; coherent electron spin control with gate times of $<80$ ns; strongly- and weakly-coupled nuclear spin detection; and commercial fiber array-coupled readout of a SnV$^-$ center. Finally, we propose and simulate improvements to the architecture that achieve 99.96% connectivity of $ N \sim 1000$ emitters spanning the inhomogeneous distribution of SnV$^-$ centers in strained diamond, where distributed quantum entanglement may be realized.

quant-ph

LAWFUL: Law-Aligned Witness for Faithful Use of Latents

When a neural network predicts a physical system accurately, has it learned the governing law as formal, structured knowledge, and if so, does the network's internal computation actually use that representation throughout the law's domain of validity? We identify four interpretability gaps that limit answering these questions for {\em physics laws over continuous variables}: the absence of a coverage-aware causal-consistency measure over continuous counterfactuals; of a domain-of-validity test for the identified circuit; of a verification of the law's invariants and forbidden behaviors; and of a quantification of how a derived physical quantity flows through the circuit. We develop a foundational framework, LAWFUL, that closes the first two and lays groundwork for the remaining two, and illustrate it on the Mocap2Radar transformer, validating whether it learns and internally uses the Doppler frequency law $f(t) = \frac{2 v(t)}λ$ from motion-capture and radar data in which neither $f(t)$ nor $v(t)$ appears.

cs.LG

From Text to Discovery: How Large Language Models Are Reshaping Research Across Scientific and Humanistic Disciplines

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping academic research across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, yet the scientific community lacks a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary account of how these tools are being integrated, what they deliver, and where they fall short. This paper addresses that gap by mapping their current state and outlining an agenda for their responsible integration into scientific research. Our analysis reveals a consistent pattern: LLMs meaningfully accelerate research workflows -- from hypothesis generation and literature synthesis to data analysis and scientific writing -- while introducing serious challenges related to hallucination, reproducibility, dataset bias, and model opacity. Beyond technical limitations, we identify ten underexplored challenges, including the erosion of researcher autonomy, AI-driven confirmation bias, authorship ambiguity, and unequal access to these technologies -- systemic risks that demand interdisciplinary governance frameworks, robust validation standards, and expanded explainability research.

cs.DL

LLM Harms: A Taxonomy and Discussion

This study addresses categories of harm surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of artificial intelligence. It addresses five categories of harms addressed before, during, and after development of AI applications: pre-development, direct output, Misuse and Malicious Application, and downstream application. By underscoring the need to define risks of the current landscape to ensure accountability, transparency and navigating bias when adapting LLMs for practical applications. It proposes mitigation strategies and future directions for specific domains and a dynamic auditing system guiding responsible development and integration of LLMs in a standardized proposal.

cs.CY

LLMs and Childhood Safety: Identifying Risks and Proposing a Protection Framework for Safe Child-LLM Interaction

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in child-facing contexts such as education, companionship, creative tools, but their deployment raises safety, privacy, developmental, and security risks. We conduct a systematic literature review of child-LLM interaction risks and organize findings into a structured map that separates (i) parent-reported concerns, (ii) empirically documented harms, and (iii) gaps between perceived and observed risk. Moving beyond descriptive listing, we compare how different evidence streams in surveys, incident reports, youth interaction logs, and governance guidance operationalize "harm," where they conflict, and what mitigations they imply. Based on this synthesis, we propose a protection framework that couples child-specific content safety and developmental sensitivity with security-grade controls for adversarial misuse, including prompt injection and multimodal jailbreak pathways. The framework specifies measurable evaluation targets (e.g., harmful-content avoidance, age-calibrated readability, bias parity checks, prompt-injection robustness, and monitoring transparency) to support developers, educators, and policymakers in assessing and improving child-safe LLM deployments.

cs.CY

Safe-Child-LLM: A Developmental Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Safety in Child-LLM Interactions

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly power applications used by children and adolescents, ensuring safe and age-appropriate interactions has become an urgent ethical imperative. Despite progress in AI safety, current evaluations predominantly focus on adults, neglecting the unique vulnerabilities of minors engaging with generative AI. We introduce Safe-Child-LLM, a comprehensive benchmark and dataset for systematically assessing LLM safety across two developmental stages: children (7-12) and adolescents (13-17). Our framework includes a novel multi-part dataset of 200 adversarial prompts, curated from red-teaming corpora (e.g., SG-Bench, HarmBench), with human-annotated labels for jailbreak success and a standardized 0-5 ethical refusal scale. Evaluating leading LLMs -- including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, DeepSeek, Grok, Vicuna, and Mistral -- we uncover critical safety deficiencies in child-facing scenarios. This work highlights the need for community-driven benchmarks to protect young users in LLM interactions. To promote transparency and collaborative advancement in ethical AI development, we are publicly releasing both our benchmark datasets and evaluation codebase at https://github.com/The-Responsible-AI-Initiative/Safe_Child_LLM_Benchmark.git

cs.CY

What Physics do Data-Driven MoCap-to-Radar Models Learn?

Data-driven MoCap-to-radar models generate plausible micro-Doppler spectrograms, but do they actually learn the underlying physics? We introduce a physics-based interpretability framework to answer this question via two proposed complementary metrics: one measures alignment between model predictions and the physics-derived Doppler frequency, while the other tests whether predictions preserve the velocity-frequency relationship under velocity intervention. Both metrics require only MoCap input and model predictions, without access to measured radar data. Experiments across several model architectures reveal that low reconstruction error does not guarantee physical consistency: some, but not all, models achieve low error yet perform poorly on the two physics-based metrics. Further analysis shows that temporal attention is critical for transformer-based models to learn the underlying physics.

cs.LG

Entropy-Preserving Reinforcement Learning

Policy gradient algorithms have driven many recent advancements in language model reasoning. An appealing property is their ability to learn from exploration on their own trajectories, a process crucial for fostering diverse and creative solutions. As we show in this paper, many policy gradient algorithms naturally reduce the entropy -- and thus the diversity of explored trajectories -- as part of training, yielding a policy increasingly limited in its ability to explore. In this paper, we argue that entropy should be actively monitored and controlled throughout training. We formally analyze the contributions of leading policy gradient objectives on entropy dynamics, identify empirical factors (such as numerical precision) that significantly impact entropy behavior, and propose explicit mechanisms for entropy control. These include REPO, a family of algorithms that modify the advantage function to regulate entropy, and ADAPO, an adaptive asymmetric clipping approach. Models trained with our entropy-preserving methods maintain diversity throughout training, yielding final policies that are more performant and retain their trainability for sequential learning in new environments.

cs.LG

RAGPerf: An End-to-End Benchmarking Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

We present the design and implementation of a RAG-based AI system benchmarking (RAGPerf) framework for characterizing the system behaviors of RAG pipelines. To facilitate detailed profiling and fine-grained performance analysis, RAGPerf decouples the RAG workflow into several modular components - embedding, indexing, retrieval, reranking, and generation. RAGPerf offers the flexibility for users to configure the core parameters of each component and examine their impact on the end-to-end query performance and quality. RAGPerf has a workload generator to model real-world scenarios by supporting diverse datasets (e.g., text, pdf, code, and audio), different retrieval and update ratios, and query distributions. RAGPerf also supports different embedding models, major vector databases such as LanceDB, Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma, and Elasticsearch, as well as different LLMs for content generation. It automates the collection of performance metrics (i.e., end-to-end query throughput, host/GPU memory footprint, and CPU/GPU utilization) and accuracy metrics (i.e., context recall, query accuracy, and factual consistency). We demonstrate the capabilities of RAGPerf through a comprehensive set of experiments and open source its codebase at GitHub. Our evaluation shows that RAGPerf incurs negligible performance overhead.

cs.PF

Generative AI and LLMs in Industry: A text-mining Analysis and Critical Evaluation of Guidelines and Policy Statements Across Fourteen Industrial Sectors

The rise of Generative AI (GAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed industrial landscapes, offering unprecedented opportunities for efficiency and innovation while raising critical ethical, regulatory, and operational challenges. This study conducts a text-based analysis of 160 guidelines and policy statements across fourteen industrial sectors, utilizing systematic methods and text-mining techniques to evaluate the governance of these technologies. By examining global directives, industry practices, and sector-specific policies, the paper highlights the complexities of balancing innovation with ethical accountability and equitable access. The findings provide actionable insights and recommendations for fostering responsible, transparent, and safe integration of GAI and LLMs in diverse industry contexts.

cs.CY

Evaluating LLM Safety Across Child Development Stages: A Simulated Agent Approach

Current safety alignment for Large Language Models (LLMs) implicitly optimizes for a "modal adult user," leaving models vulnerable to distributional shifts in user cognition. We present ChildSafe, a benchmark that quantifies alignment robustness under cognitive shifts corresponding to four developmental stages. Unlike static persona-based evaluations, we introduce a parametric cognitive simulation approach, formalizing developmental stages as hyperparameter constraints (e.g., volatility, context horizon) to generate out-of-distribution interaction traces. We validate these agents against ground-truth human linguistic data (CHILDES) and deploy them across 1,200 multi-turn interactions. Our results reveal a systematic alignment generalization gap: state-of-the-art models exhibit up to 11.5% performance degradation when interacting with early-childhood agents compared to standard baselines. We provide the research community with the validated agent artifacts and evaluation protocols to facilitate robust alignment testing against non-adversarial, cognitively diverse populations.

cs.CY

MoCap2Radar: A Spatiotemporal Transformer for Synthesizing Micro-Doppler Radar Signatures from Motion Capture

We present a pure machine learning process for synthesizing radar spectrograms from Motion-Capture (MoCap) data. We formulate MoCap-to-spectrogram translation as a windowed sequence-to-sequence task using a transformer-based model that jointly captures spatial relations among MoCap markers and temporal dynamics across frames. Real-world experiments show that the proposed approach produces visually and quantitatively plausible doppler radar spectrograms and achieves good generalizability. Ablation experiments show that the learned model includes both the ability to convert multi-part motion into doppler signatures and an understanding of the spatial relations between different parts of the human body. The result is an interesting example of using transformers for time-series signal processing. It is especially applicable to edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) radars. It also suggests the ability to augment scarce radar datasets using more abundant MoCap data for training higher-level applications. Finally, it requires far less computation than physics-based methods for generating radar data.

cs.LG

ActiveGAMER: Active GAussian Mapping through Efficient Rendering

We introduce ActiveGAMER, an active mapping system that utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to achieve high-quality, real-time scene mapping and exploration. Unlike traditional NeRF-based methods, which are computationally demanding and restrict active mapping performance, our approach leverages the efficient rendering capabilities of 3DGS, allowing effective and efficient exploration in complex environments. The core of our system is a rendering-based information gain module that dynamically identifies the most informative viewpoints for next-best-view planning, enhancing both geometric and photometric reconstruction accuracy. ActiveGAMER also integrates a carefully balanced framework, combining coarse-to-fine exploration, post-refinement, and a global-local keyframe selection strategy to maximize reconstruction completeness and fidelity. Our system autonomously explores and reconstructs environments with state-of-the-art geometric and photometric accuracy and completeness, significantly surpassing existing approaches in both aspects. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets such as Replica and MP3D highlight ActiveGAMER's effectiveness in active mapping tasks.

cs.CV

Defurnishing with X-Ray Vision: Joint Removal of Furniture from Panoramas and Mesh

We present a pipeline for generating defurnished replicas of indoor spaces represented as textured meshes and corresponding multi-view panoramic images. To achieve this, we first segment and remove furniture from the mesh representation, extend planes, and fill holes, obtaining a simplified defurnished mesh (SDM). This SDM acts as an ``X-ray'' of the scene's underlying structure, guiding the defurnishing process. We extract Canny edges from depth and normal images rendered from the SDM. We then use these as a guide to remove the furniture from panorama images via ControlNet inpainting. This control signal ensures the availability of global geometric information that may be hidden from a particular panoramic view by the furniture being removed. The inpainted panoramas are used to texture the mesh. We show that our approach produces higher quality assets than methods that rely on neural radiance fields, which tend to produce blurry low-resolution images, or RGB-D inpainting, which is highly susceptible to hallucinations.

cs.CV

LLM Ethics Benchmark: A Three-Dimensional Assessment System for Evaluating Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models

This study establishes a novel framework for systematically evaluating the moral reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as they increasingly integrate into critical societal domains. Current assessment methodologies lack the precision needed to evaluate nuanced ethical decision-making in AI systems, creating significant accountability gaps. Our framework addresses this challenge by quantifying alignment with human ethical standards through three dimensions: foundational moral principles, reasoning robustness, and value consistency across diverse scenarios. This approach enables precise identification of ethical strengths and weaknesses in LLMs, facilitating targeted improvements and stronger alignment with societal values. To promote transparency and collaborative advancement in ethical AI development, we are publicly releasing both our benchmark datasets and evaluation codebase at https://github.com/ The-Responsible-AI-Initiative/LLM_Ethics_Benchmark.git.

cs.CY

The global landscape of academic guidelines for generative AI and Large Language Models

The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in academia has spurred a global discourse on their potential pedagogical benefits and ethical considerations. Positive reactions highlight some potential, such as collaborative creativity, increased access to education, and empowerment of trainers and trainees. However, negative reactions raise concerns about ethical complexities, balancing innovation and academic integrity, unequal access, and misinformation risks. Through a systematic survey and text-mining-based analysis of global and national directives, insights from independent research, and eighty university-level guidelines, this study provides a nuanced understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by GAI and LLMs in education. It emphasizes the importance of balanced approaches that harness the benefits of these technologies while addressing ethical considerations and ensuring equitable access and educational outcomes. The paper concludes with recommendations for fostering responsible innovation and ethical practices to guide the integration of GAI and LLMs in academia.

cs.CY

IGGA: A Dataset of Industrial Guidelines and Policy Statements for Generative AIs

This paper introduces IGGA, a dataset of 160 industry guidelines and policy statements for the use of Generative AIs (GAIs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in industry and workplace settings, collected from official company websites, and trustworthy news sources. The dataset contains 104,565 words and serves as a valuable resource for natural language processing tasks commonly applied in requirements engineering, such as model synthesis, abstraction identification, and document structure assessment. Additionally, IGGA can be further annotated to function as a benchmark for various tasks, including ambiguity detection, requirements categorization, and the identification of equivalent requirements. Our methodologically rigorous approach ensured a thorough examination, with a selection of reputable and influential companies that represent a diverse range of global institutions across six continents. The dataset captures perspectives from fourteen industry sectors, including technology, finance, and both public and private institutions, offering a broad spectrum of insights into the integration of GAIs and LLMs in industry.

cs.CY

AGGA: A Dataset of Academic Guidelines for Generative AI and Large Language Models

This study introduces AGGA, a dataset comprising 80 academic guidelines for the use of Generative AIs (GAIs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic settings, meticulously collected from official university websites. The dataset contains 188,674 words and serves as a valuable resource for natural language processing tasks commonly applied in requirements engineering, such as model synthesis, abstraction identification, and document structure assessment. Additionally, AGGA can be further annotated to function as a benchmark for various tasks, including ambiguity detection, requirements categorization, and the identification of equivalent requirements. Our methodologically rigorous approach ensured a thorough examination, with a selection of universities that represent a diverse range of global institutions, including top-ranked universities across six continents. The dataset captures perspectives from a variety of academic fields, including humanities, technology, and both public and private institutions, offering a broad spectrum of insights into the integration of GAIs and LLMs in academia.

cs.CL