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Peng Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Peng Chen.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

DataClawEval: A Benchmark for Data Engineering Agents in Real Industrial Harness

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents are increasingly being deployed to automate complex workflows, promising to revolutionize data management and processing. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on simplified Text-to-SQL translation or data analysis, leaving the critical and complex domain of end-to-end data engineering largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce DataClawEval, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically to evaluate the end-to-end task completion capabilities of autonomous agents in real-world data engineering scenarios. Built upon production-grade code authored by professional enterprise data engineers, it comprises 100 rigorous, end-to-end tasks spanning five execution engines: PySpark, MySQL, HiveSQL, PrestoSQL/Trino, and FlinkSQL. Rather than non-deterministic LLM-as-a-judge scoring, each task is executed within a case-specific, isolated sandbox and graded by deterministic, rule-based scripts. Evaluating 16 frontier agents exposes critical limitations: The strongest model attains only 74.9 overall, and no single model dominates, as each excels on a different engine, revealing strict domain specialization rather than omnipotent proficiency. Thus, autonomous data engineering remains a formidable, unresolved challenge. We release our dataset, containerized environments, and deterministic evaluation scripts at https://github.com/Dicemy/DataClawEval/tree/master

cs.AI↗

NOVA: A Verification-Aware Agent Harness for Architecture Evolution in Industrial Recommender Systems

Industrial advertising recommender systems are continually improved through architecture modifications, yet production iteration remains expert-intensive because coordinated changes to model topology, feature configuration, and interaction modules must satisfy strict interface, resource, and serving constraints. AutoML is limited to predefined search spaces, while generic coding agents verify runnability rather than recommender-specific semantic validity. Executable candidates may therefore violate architectural contracts, while the lack of structured reuse of semantic diagnostics and evaluation outcomes can lead to repeated invalid or ineffective modifications. We present NOVA, a verification-aware agent harness that organizes production architecture modification as multi-round search over concrete implementations within a fixed evaluation budget. At each round, NOVA generates multiple candidates under production constraints, rejects semantic violations, and ranks the valid survivors for local testing and offline evaluation. Across rounds, trajectory memory synthesizes semantic diagnostics, local-test outcomes, and offline metric changes into modification directions and forbidden patterns that guide subsequent search. Under the same maximum offline-evaluation budget for automated methods, NOVA achieves the highest effective pass rate, reaching 53.3% on ScaleUp and 51.7% on Literature-to-Production tasks. In a production A/B test covering 5% of traffic in an advertising system serving over one billion users, the selected Literature-to-Production candidate yields GMV gains of +1.25%, +1.70%, and +2.02% across three major pCVR objectives, with corresponding relative reductions in absolute pCVR bias of 58.8%, 66.7%, and 37.3%, respectively.

cs.IR↗

Precision limit under weak coupling with an ancillary qubit

We propose a measurement-based quantum metrology protocol in a composite model, where the probe system (a spin ensemble) is coupled to an ancillary two-level system (qubit) with a general Heisenberg XXZ interaction. With optimized probe-ancilla coupling strengths and duration of joint evolution, the two parallel evolution paths of the probe system induced by the unconditional measurement on qubit can transform an eigenstate of the collective angular momentum operator of spin ensemble into a two-component state with a large distance in eigenspace. The quantum Fisher information about the phase encoded in the probe system of polarized states or their superposition, that could be relaxed to mixed states, can therefore manifest an exact or asymptotic quadratic scaling with respect to the probe size (spin number) $N$. The quadratic scaling behavior is found to be insensitive to the imperfect encoding operator, polarized direction of probe, and coupling strength. The phase sensitivity can approach the Heisenberg limit by virtue of the parity detection on either ancillary qubit or probe system. This work justifies that the unconditional measurement on a weakly coupled qubit could be an efficient resource to replace Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-type states and squeezing Hamiltonian for exceeding the standard quantum limit in metrology precision.

quant-ph↗

Efficient Computing for Medical Image Acquisition and Reconstruction

Medical imaging systems such as CT, MRI, PET, and SPECT do not directly acquire images. Instead, they measure physical signals that encode anatomical or physiological information, and image reconstruction recovers the underlying image by solving an inverse problem. Although these imaging modalities are governed by different imaging physics, they share a common computational framework that naturally connects medical physics, linear algebra, probability, numerical optimization, and efficient computing. As medical imaging systems acquire increasingly large and higher-dimensional datasets, image reconstruction has become one of the primary computational bottlenecks in modern medical imaging. Advanced reconstruction methods, including analytical reconstruction, iterative optimization, and statistical model-based reconstruction, substantially improve image quality while reducing radiation dose or scan time, but at significantly increased computational cost. Efficient computing has therefore become essential for achieving clinically practical reconstruction times. This chapter presents a unified computational perspective on medical image acquisition and reconstruction across CT, MRI, PET, and SPECT. It first reviews the imaging physics and data acquisition process for each modality and derives a generalized mathematical framework for image reconstruction. Building on this framework, the chapter discusses analytical, iterative, and statistical reconstruction methods together with their computational characteristics. Finally, it examines efficient computing considerations, including optimization algorithms, physics-aware forward operators, memory-efficient implementations, and parallel computing strategies. Together, these topics demonstrate how the integration of imaging physics, mathematical modeling, and efficient computing enables accurate and scalable medical image reconstruction.

eess.IV↗

Tucker Tensor Train Taylor Series

Learning derivative-accurate surrogates for implicit simulators is a key challenge in scientific machine learning. High-order Taylor surrogates have long been considered intractable in high dimensions, because the derivative tensors are enormous and accessible only through probes. We make such surrogates tractable with the Tucker tensor train Taylor series (T4S), a local surrogate that represents each derivative tensor of a truncated Taylor expansion as a Tucker tensor train. T4S targets a different learning problem than global operator learning: rather than training from input-output pairs at many parameter values, it is trained from random directionally symmetric derivative probes at a single expansion point. Computing $m$ probes of the $k$th derivative requires only $O(mk)$ linearized solves sharing one operator, cheaper than the $O(m)$ nonlinear solves for function evaluations or $O(m\,2^k)$ linearized solves for asymmetric probes. We develop derivative-informed dimension reduction, Riemannian Gauss-Newton and Cauchy SGD fitting algorithms with rank continuation, requiring little hyperparameter tuning, and fast sweeping routines for the Riemannian Jacobian. We prove representational guarantees under spectral decay of the input covariance. Experiments show that our methods match quasi-optimal T3-SVD accuracy on random tensors from probes alone, up to data-limited ranks, and recover high-order Taylor structure in Poisson PDE examples.

math.NA↗

Visualizing modified spin-wave wavefronts near magnetic defects and domains using nitrogen-vacancy centers

Direct, real-space imaging of spin-wave propagation and wavefronts in magnetic materials is crucial for advancing both fundamental understanding of spin dynamics and the development of functional devices. This, however, remains a significant challenge, especially in materials with complex magnetic characteristics at the nanoscale. Here, we employ scanning nitrogen-vacancy center spectroscopy to achieve visualization of spin waves in two archetypical magnetic films: yttrium-iron-garnet and lanthanum strontium manganese oxide. We reveal a wavelength-dependent spin-wave filtering effect near point-like magnetic scatterers and a modified spin wavefront in antiferromagnetically coupled stripe domains. The spin-wave characteristics are explained using micromagnetic simulations and analytical calculations. These findings point to possible fine control of spin-wave propagation near complex magnetic structures and extend the scope of spin-wave imaging based on nitrogen-vacancy centers beyond uniform magnets.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Bridging Local Observation and Global Simulation in Closed-Loop Traffic Modeling

A local-to-global context mismatch arises when autoregressive traffic simulators trained on ego-centric driving logs are deployed in globally observable closed-loop environments. In such logs, the ego vehicle has rich local observations, while surrounding agents are only partially observed due to perception limits and occlusions. As a result, simulators may learn incomplete context--action mappings that remain hidden in log-based training but emerge during closed-loop rollouts, leading to unrealistic behaviors such as abnormal stops, unsafe interactions, and rule violations. We propose CRAFT, a Contextual pReference Alignment Framework for Traffic Simulation, to mitigate this mismatch via self-supervised failure discovery and preference-guided test-time alignment. CRAFT treats the base simulator as a globally observable sandbox, generating diverse what-if rollouts from logged initial states to expose context-induced failures. These failures are grounded with human-aligned driving priors and converted into preference supervision for training a Contextual Preference Evaluator (CPE). At inference time, CPE acts as a plug-in alignment module that scores candidate actions under complete scene context and reweights autoregressive decoding toward globally coherent behaviors. CRAFT mitigates this local-to-global contextual bias, reducing collisions by 31.2\% and traffic violations by 33.2\% without retraining the base simulator.

cs.RO↗

Criterion for qubit-assisted quantum metrology approaching Heisenberg scaling

We study in this work the metrology precision of a probe system coupled to an ancillary qubit. Restricting the probe-qubit coupling along only one or two directions is found to be a sufficient criterion for the effective dynamical generator to achieve the Heisenberg limit in precision. Under the criterion, the quantum Fisher information (QFI) about the to-be-estimated parameter becomes the expectation value of mean square of the effective generator with respect to the initial state of the composite system. Our criterion is justified in two distinct systems. For a bosonic probe, QFI about the displacement estimation is found to be proportional to the mean excitation number of probe. It renders a counterintuitive result that quantum metrology sensitivity can be enhanced by increasing the temperature of the probe system. For a spin-ensemble probe, QFI about both rotation-phase and magnetic-field estimation exhibit a quadratic dependence on the probe-spin number. It is found that even when the spin-ensemble is prepared as a finite-temperature state, faraway from the so-called resource states, e.g., the squeezed state or the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state, QFI can still manifest a Heisenberg scaling behavior.

quant-ph↗

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

cs.LG↗

Practical Anonymous Two-Party Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

Structured data is well handled by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), which are usually trained on vertically partitioned features across mutually distrustful parties. High speed and interpretability make GBDTs popular in finance and healthcare, where neural networks may fall short. Enabling secure computation for GBDTs poses unique challenges, requiring secure record alignment for comparison. Relying on private set intersection (PSI) is a de facto approach. Mistaking PSI for a safety measure actually exposes which record identifiers (IDs) are shared between the datasets. Although circuit-PSI could help, it is costly for generic uses. New ideas are needed to efficiently train in a "dark forest". Aiming to hide the IDs, we initiate the study of anonymous GBDT training on split data held by two parties. Dual circuit-PSI in our design lets the parties alternate as receiver to run pick-then-sum over local features. Via oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, we propagate circuit-PSI outputs as shared state across runs. Avoiding universal alignment, we resolve the neglected dilemma that ID hiding incurs a cost that scales with domain size. Next, we halve the cost of ciphertext packing used to convert single-instruction multiple-data homomorphic encryption from (ring) learning with errors in prior secure GBDT (Usenix Security' 23) and related secure machine-learning computations. Comparative experiments show our protocol remains competitive with leaky approaches in efficiency. Enabling ID-hiding aggregation, our techniques can extend to other vertically partitioned analytics.

cs.CR↗

RT-RkNN: Reverse k Nearest Neighbor Queries as a Graphics Ray Casting Problem

Reverse k nearest neighbor (RkNN) queries are fundamental in spatial databases, location-based analytics, and recommendation systems. Existing state-of-the-art techniques rely on spatial pruning supported by R-trees and their variants. However, their pruning effectiveness degrades significantly in challenging scenarios where the number of facilities is small, the user population is dense, or the value of k is large. To overcome these limitations, this work reformulates the RkNN query problem in two-dimensional geometric spaces as a graphics ray-casting problem, where users are modeled as rays and facilities are represented as geometric primitives. Based on this formulation, the first algorithm and implementation exploiting dedicated hardware ray-tracing cores on modern GPUs are developed. This novel approach preserves strong filtering performance even for large values of k, dense user populations, and highly sparse facility distributions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms across diverse settings, particularly in scenarios where traditional pruning strategies become inefficient.

cs.DB↗

DIG: Oracle-Guided Directed Input Generation for One-Day Vulnerabilities

One-day vulnerabilities pose significant risks due to delayed or incomplete patch adoption. Generating proof-of-concept (PoC) inputs is therefore essential for assessing real-world impact. The key challenge is identifying necessary constraints for triggering the vulnerability and solving them effectively. Existing directed fuzzing approaches prioritize inputs toward target locations, but neither explicitly identify necessary constraints nor solve them effectively, relying instead on target-distance feedback and random mutation. Agentic approaches show strong potential through code reasoning and structured input generation, but goal drift in long-horizon reasoning limits their effectiveness. DIG addresses this challenge by exploiting a key property of one-day vulnerabilities: patches often reveal necessary preconditions for triggering. DIG uses an LLM to analyze the patch and synthesize an oracle making these conditions explicit. The oracle supports effective PoC generation at two levels. At the high level, DIG performs oracle-guided generator evolution, where an agent infers and solves constraints to satisfy the oracle. At the low level, DIG instruments the oracle into the target program and uses branch-distance feedback to guide random mutation in directed fuzzing. Evaluation shows DIG outperforms 2 state-of-the-art agents and 10 fuzzers across 138 real-world CVEs. DIG triggers 80 vulnerabilities, surpassing prior results and outperforming the best baseline by 40% (57 vs. 80 CVEs). Notably, DIG exclusively triggers 9 vulnerabilities no existing technique can trigger. Compared to the average of other tools, DIG triggers vulnerabilities faster in 92.9% of cases, achieving over 100x speedup in 48.8% of cases, with a maximum speedup of 3,664x. Beyond one-day PoC generation, DIG uncovers 6 previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely deployed libraries, enabling zero-day discovery.

cs.CR↗

FalconGEMM: Surpassing Hardware Peaks with Lower-Complexity Matrix Multiplication

Peak breaking Matrix Multiplication is a promising technique to improve the performance of DL, especially in LLM training and inference. We present FalconGEMM, a cross-platform framework that automates the deployment, optimization, and selection of Lower-Complexity Matrix Multiplication Algorithms (LCMAs) across diverse hardware. There are three key innovations: (1) a Deployment Module that enables portable execution across various hardware and input configurations through code generation; (2) an Execution Module with Group-Parallel Optimizations that maximizes on-chip data reuse, utilizes parallel resources, and reduces bandwidth overhead; and (3) a Decision Module featuring a lightweight analytical performance model to select the optimal strategy based on matrix shapes and hardware profiles. Extensive evaluation is conducted on LLM workloads across GPU (H20, A100) and CPU (ARM, x86) architectures with multiple data types. FalconGEMM succeeds in delivering peak breaking performance and outperforms GEMM libraries (e.g., cuBLAS, CUTLASS, Intel MKL, etc) by 7.59%-17.85% and LCMA competitors like AlphaTensor by 12.41%-55.61%. Our framework makes the theoretical promise of LCMAs practical for production deployment across the heterogeneous landscape of modern hardware.

cs.DC↗

Towards Optimal Robustness in Learning-Augmented Paging

Learning-augmented paging has been extensively studied in recent years. A key advantage over naive ML-based approaches is \emph{bounded robustness}, which guarantees worst-case performance even when predictions are inaccurate, making these algorithms valuable for real-world systems. Prior work achieves robustness bounds of $2H_k + O(1)$ in the randomized setting, leaving a gap to the optimal competitive ratio $H_k$. In this paper, we study how to close this gap. We begin by reviewing online optimality and proving a new property of the latest $H_k$-competitive algorithm, which facilitates our analysis in the learning-augmented setting. Then, we review existing learning-augmented paging algorithms and introduce a unifying primitive, the \emph{relative prediction budget}, which captures the essence of establishing robustness and reveals that prior algorithms either overuse or underutilize predictions. Guided by the above analysis, we develop a new framework that achieves the best-possible robustness up to an additive constant for learning-augmented paging: $H_k + O(1)$. Experiments further demonstrate strong practical performance.

cs.DS↗

ProSPy: A Profiling-Driven SQL-Python Agentic Framework for Enterprise Text-to-SQL

Large language models have substantially advanced Text-to-SQL systems, yet applying them to enterprise-scale databases remains challenging. Real-world databases often contain large and heterogeneous schemas, incomplete metadata, dialect-specific SQL syntax, and complex analytical questions that are difficult to solve with a single SQL query. To address these challenges, we propose ProSPy, a Profiling-driven SQL--Python agentic framework for enterprise-scale Text-to-SQL. ProSPy structures the reasoning process into four stages: it first extracts fine-grained data evidence through automatic profiling, progressively prunes large schemas into task-relevant contexts, fetches intermediate views through a dialect-agnostic SQL interface, and finally performs flexible downstream analysis with Python. This design combines the efficiency of SQL over large databases with the flexibility of Python-based analysis, while reducing reliance on unreliable metadata and improving robustness across SQL dialects. Experiments on Spider 2.0-Lite and Spider 2.0-Snow show that ProSPy consistently outperforms strong baselines with both open-source and proprietary models, achieving execution accuracies of 60.15% and 60.51% with Claude-4.5-Opus, without majority voting. Further analysis shows that ProSPy is robust to SQL dialect variations and achieves a favorable trade-off between schema recall and precision.

cs.CL↗

ZX-Calculus:Trace-Indexed Dependent Types and Epistemic Semantics

We propose ZX-Calculus (Knowledge Evolution Calculus), a conservative extension of Martin-Lof Dependent Type Theory (MLTT) integrating trace-indexed types, presheaf non-monotone semantics, and constructive AGM belief revision. A Coq mechanisation accompanies the paper (34 complete proofs; zero admits for the two central results). (I) Trace types. FinTrace(s0,sn) is an inductive family of typed execution traces. FinTrace and Star(Step) are isomorphic as path types but not judgementally equal; TraceElim exposes the event label e:Event explicitly, giving a more ergonomic interface for event-driven induction. We prove the Trace-Reachability Correspondence, Deterministic Replay, and a canonicity framework via reducibility candidates with a Transport Lemma (RC-elim deferred; all other Core results are Coq-verified). (II) Sheaf semantics. Trace-indexed propositions are contravariant sheaves over the free trace partial-order category Tf. A Separation Theorem (explicit countermodel) distinguishes proof-theoretic monotonicity from semantic non-monotonicity. The term model is an initial CwF (syntactic universal property, not classical completeness). (III) AGM belief revision. We give an explicit constructive partial meet contraction algorithm verified against (C1)-(C4). All eight AGM postulates (R1)-(R8) are theorems. Proofs of R7 and R8 use the Disjunctive Entrenchment Lemma, given a self-contained constructive derivation. (IV) Integration. B^AGM fails the sheaf composition law BP-comp for sequential revision (explicit countermodel, Coq-verified). We introduce Single-Step Revision Systems (SSRS), prove B^AGM is a valid SSRS (Coq-verified), and show this suffices for trace morphisms, retraction characterisation, and revision witnesses. The BP-comp failure reveals a fundamental tension between path-dependent belief revision and functor consistency, not previously identified.

cs.LO↗

SparseStreet: Sparse Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Street Scene Simulation

While 3D Gaussian Splatting has shown promising results in street scene reconstruction, existing methods require massive numbers of Gaussian primitives to capture fine details, leading to prohibitive storage costs and slow rendering speeds. We observe that dynamic objects (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians) demand high-fidelity representations to maintain temporal consistency, while static background regions often contain substantial redundancy. Motivated by this, we propose SparseStreet, a general compression framework specifically designed for street scenes. First, we introduce a node-based learnable pruning strategy that systematically removes low-contributing Gaussian primitives while preserving visually critical regions. Second, after the scene representation stabilizes, we apply background compression, further reducing redundancy in static regions. Our method effectively preserves the geometry and appearance of dynamic objects while significantly reducing the total number of Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on the Waymo and nuScenes demonstrate that SparseStreet achieves up to 80% compression ratio with minimal quality degradation, enabling resource-efficient, high-fidelity dynamic scene reconstruction. Project website: https://sparsestreet.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

PATRA: Pattern-Aware Alignment and Balanced Reasoning for Time Series Question Answering

Time series reasoning demands both the perception of complex dynamics and logical depth. However, existing LLM-based approaches exhibit two limitations: they often treat time series merely as text or images, failing to capture the patterns like trends and seasonalities needed to answer specific questions; and when trained on a mix of simple and complex tasks, simpler objectives often dominate the learning process, hindering the development of deep reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose the Pattern-Aware Alignment and Balanced Reasoning model (PATRA), introducing a pattern-aware mechanism that extracts trend and seasonality patterns from time series to achieve deep alignment. Furthermore, we design a task-aware balanced reward to harmonize learning across tasks of varying difficulty, incentivizing the generation of coherent Chains of Thought. Extensive experiments show that PATRA outperforms strong baselines across diverse Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) tasks, demonstrating superior cross-modal understanding and reasoning capability.

cs.AI↗