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Rui Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Zhao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Causality Sum Rules in Conventional Scattering Matrices

Scattering matrices are the standard experimental and computational description of photonic and electromagnetic devices. Passivity is explicit in the conventional incoming-outgoing matrix, whereas causality sum rules are usually formulated only after transforming the response into auxiliary variables. Here we show that these rules can be written directly in the conventional scattering matrix by removing the time advance introduced by the reference domain. Using the earliest-arrival delay of each channel, we define a domain-delayed matrix that preserves real-frequency passivity while restoring the causal time origin. Under explicit analyticity, transparency, and regularity assumptions, this matrix becomes a Schur function, enabling a Cayley-Herglotz construction. The resulting projected and determinant bounds constrain coherent channel superpositions and aggregate multichannel loss. The framework recovers Rozanov's absorber limit and spherical-multipole sum rules, while extending causality bounds to measurable quantities including insertion loss, suppressed singular-value channels, and conditional lossless delay-bandwidth trade-offs. Our work directly connects fundamental causality theory with experimentally accessible scattering data. The initial theoretical route is autonomously explored by Qiushi Engine, an AI research system for open-ended scientific discovery, and subsequently verified, refined, and developed by the authors, demonstrating a hybrid AI-human discovery workflow.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2026

PHASE-Tree: Modeling Character-State Evolution in Long-Horizon Role-Playing Dialogue

Long-horizon role-playing demands that characters remain recognizable as they evolve with the narrative. Yet existing work falls short on two fronts: representations are typically static profiles that cannot be updated locally without destabilizing unchanged traits, and benchmarks mainly test persona preservation and memory recall rather than whether a model speaks from a character's currently evolved state. We address both. PHASE-Tree is a multi-timescale character-state tree with an immutable identity root and mutable persona, session, and moment layers, making each mutable field an addressable target for localized within- and cross-episode updates. It conditions generation through explicit textual provision or implicit parametric adaptation. To measure evolved-state generation, we introduce LongEvoRoleBench, which pairs four long-dialogue corpora for cross-episode evolution with four short-dialogue corpora as within-scene state-tracking checks, under a unified next-utterance protocol. On the long-dialogue core, textual PHASE-Tree ranks first in 11 of 12 dataset-metric cells against internal variants and all 12 cells against external textual baselines, improving character-level, semantic, and embedding scores by 19.7%, 12.4%, and 15.1% respectively. In a blinded 200-response study, human ratings correlate with the GPT-4.1 judge (Pearson r= 0.65); on descriptive n= 10 PT and NR prompt subsets, the Overall difference is +0.20. The long-dialogue Sem advantage persists across LLM judges and generation backbones.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

FlowInOne:Unifying Multimodal Generation as Image-in, Image-out Flow Matching

Multimodal generation has long been dominated by text-driven pipelines where language dictates vision but cannot reason or create within it. We challenge this paradigm by asking whether all modalities, including textual descriptions, spatial layouts, and editing instructions, can be unified into a single visual representation. We present FlowInOne, a framework that reformulates multimodal generation as a purely visual flow, converting all inputs into visual prompts and enabling a clean image-in, image-out pipeline governed by a single flow matching model. This vision-centric formulation naturally eliminates cross-modal alignment bottlenecks, noise scheduling, and task-specific architectural branches, unifying text-to-image generation, layout-guided editing, and visual instruction following under one coherent paradigm. To support this, we introduce VisPrompt-5M, a large-scale dataset of 5 million visual prompt pairs spanning diverse tasks including physics-aware force dynamics and trajectory prediction, alongside VP-Bench, a rigorously curated benchmark assessing instruction faithfulness, spatial precision, visual realism, and content consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowInOne achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models across all unified generation tasks while remaining competitive with leading commercial systems, thereby establishing a new foundation for fully vision-centric generative modeling, in which perception and creation coexist within a unified continuous visual space. Our code and models are released on https://csu-jpg.github.io/FlowInOne.github.io/

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

The $^{229}$Th Isomer: Nuclear Structure, Clocks, and Tests of Fundamental Physics

The $^{229}$Th nucleus possesses an isomeric state at an excitation energy of $\sim 8$ eV, the lowest known nuclear transition energy, placing its frequency in the vacuum-ultraviolet range and making it directly accessible to laser spectroscopy. In this review, we discuss the $^{229}$Th isomer from three connected perspectives: experimental spectroscopy and clock development, nuclear structure theory, and applications to precision tests of fundamental physics. We first trace the experimental progress from indirect $γ$-ray energy inference to resonant laser excitation, absolute frequency comparison with an atomic clock, and feedback-loop operation of a solid-state nuclear clock, and discuss trapped-ion, highly charged ion, and solid-state platforms together with mechanisms for nuclear-state manipulation and readout. We then review, from the nuclear-structure perspective, how the near-degeneracy of the $5/2^+[633]$ and $3/2^+[631]$ neutron Nilsson configurations, together with Coriolis mixing and octupole correlations, underlies the anomalously low transition energy and its electromagnetic properties. Comparisons among different phenomenological and microscopic models show that octupole correlations are a common structural ingredient, while magnetic moments and transition strengths remain sensitive tests of the calculated wave functions. Finally, we discuss how the near-cancellation of MeV-scale nuclear contributions into an eV-scale transition can enhance sensitivity to variations of fundamental constants, signatures of ultralight dark matter, CP-violating interactions, Lorentz-invariance violation, and possible nuclear quantum technologies.

nucl-th↗
arXiv2026

Current Injection Spiking Neural Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) integrates the complementary information of two modalities into a single image with richer scene content. While existing methods are largely built on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which densely compute over all activations, spiking neural networks (SNNs) communicate through sparse binary spikes and compute only where and when a spike occurs, offering a route to more energy-efficient fusion. However, directly applying SNNs to IVIF creates a fundamental tension: cross-modal fusion relies on fine-grained responses from both modalities, whereas binary spikes can discard complementary cues that remain below the firing threshold. The membrane potential retains these subthreshold responses before firing, letting both modalities jointly shape the output when integrated at this stage. Building on this, we propose CIS-Fuse, a spiking network that performs cross-modal fusion directly at the membrane-potential level. At its core is the current injection spiking (CIS) operator, which injects one modality as a gated auxiliary current into the driving neuron of the other, so the two integrate before spike firing, with a per-channel learnable injection strength that adaptively regulates the modulation magnitude. Building on CIS, we construct a bidirectional cross-modal fusion (BCMF) module and deploy it on a dual-branch architecture with asymmetric stacking depths, where the two branches develop a clear functional specialization. Extensive experiments on four IVIF benchmarks and on downstream detection and segmentation show that CIS-Fuse achieves fusion quality on par with state-of-the-art ANN-based methods while inheriting the energy efficiency of spike-based computation, with roughly an order of magnitude lower inference energy than the similarly-sized ANN-based DCEvo. Code will be released upon publication.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Do LLM Agents Negotiate Rationally? A Mechanism-Design Framework for Verifiable Multi-Agent Interaction over A2A/MCP

Modern LLM-agent frameworks increasingly interoperate through standards such as Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agent-to-tool access and Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol for agent delegation and negotiation. However, these protocols specify transport and discovery rather than strategic correctness and do not guarantee efficient, individually rational, or strategy-proof outcomes. We introduce a framework that (i) encodes classical negotiation mechanisms, including alternating-offers bargaining and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-style auctions, as constraints over A2A message schemas; (ii) provides a lightweight runtime verification and repair layer that checks messages against protocol invariants; and (iii) offers a benchmark of negotiation and allocation tasks with known optimal solutions for measuring deviations from game-theoretic predictions. We evaluate multiple LLM backbones using unstructured dialogue, structured protocols, and structured protocols with verification. Across negotiation trials (N=30 per condition), verification reduces outcome variance, while structured protocols achieve 100 percent success for both models. After correcting parser artifacts, audited unstructured baselines achieve approximately 97 percent and 93.3 percent success. In auction experiments (N=30 per model), both models achieve 100 percent efficient allocation but differ sharply in truthful bidding: one bids its exact valuation in every trial, whereas the other does so in only 3.3 percent of trials. Thus, mechanism-level incentive compatibility does not automatically transfer to LLM-agent behavior. A three-party fair-allocation task produced only 4.2 percent usable outcomes; we report this negative result with a diagnosis. This work bridges classical multi-agent systems theory and modern LLM-agent infrastructure and defines verifiable interaction at the A2A protocol layer.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

NEP89: Universal neuroevolution potential for inorganic and organic materials across 89 elements

While machine-learned interatomic potentials offer near-quantum-mechanical accuracy for atomistic simulations, many are material-specific or computationally intensive, limiting their broader use. Here, we introduce NEP89, a foundation model based on neuroevolution potential architecture, delivering near-empirical-potential speed and high accuracy across 89 elements. A compact yet comprehensive training dataset covering inorganic and organic materials was curated through descriptor-space subsampling and iterative refinement across multiple datasets. NEP89 achieves competitive accuracy compared to representative foundation models while being three to four orders of magnitude more computationally efficient, enabling previously impractical large-scale atomistic simulations of inorganic and organic systems. In addition to its out-of-the-box applicability to diverse scenarios, including million-atom-scale compression of compositionally complex alloys, ion diffusion in solid-state electrolytes and water, rocksalt dissolution, methane combustion, and protein-ligand dynamics, NEP89 also supports fine-tuning for rapid adaptation to user-specific applications, such as mechanical, thermal, structural, and spectral properties of two-dimensional materials, metallic glasses, and organic crystals.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Beyond the Leaderboard: A Synthesis of Tool-Use, Planning, and Reasoning Failures in Large Language Model Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts. This paper synthesizes 27 benchmark, taxonomy, and audit papers (2023-2026), spanning 19 distinct benchmarks, into a cross-cutting taxonomy of agent limitations. To our knowledge, this is the first synthesis that integrates evidence across tool use, planning, long-horizon reasoning, multi-agent coordination, safety, and measurement validity into a single, unified taxonomy of LLM agent limitations. We identify six failure clusters: (1) tool invocation and parameter-level errors, (2) planning and constraint-satisfaction failures, (3) long-horizon degradation from context accumulation, (4) multi-agent coordination failures, (5) safety and security failures under adversarial or underspecified conditions, and (6) measurement validity problems. The taxonomy was derived iteratively by grouping independently reported error categories into themes corresponding to distinct stages of the agent reasoning-to-action pipeline. Across the literature, we find that failures compound nonlinearly with task length, that strong performance on individual sub-tasks does not reliably translate into end-to-end success, and that additional scaffolding does not consistently improve reliability. At the same time, substantial progress has been demonstrated in single-turn tool use, short-horizon web navigation, and narrowly scoped coding tasks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Compress the Cache, Not the Speech Embedding: KV Compression for Efficient Speech LLMs

Speech large language models (Speech LLMs) typically encode speech into sequences far longer than text, creating a major efficiency bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. A common remedy is to compress the speech sequence at the adapter level to remove temporal redundancy before it enters the LLM; however, such early downsampling risks discarding fine-grained information that cannot be recovered. We propose SpeechKV, which applies a learned pooling to the KV cache of speech tokens inside the LLM. This design allows the LLM to fuse speech and text internally while directly accelerating decoding. Trained on 71K hours of speech data, SpeechKV compresses the speech to approximately text-level granularity yet maintains performance on par with or even slightly better than the uncompressed baseline, with relative gains of 6.6% on out-of-domain entity recognition and 2.3% on OpenASR, while delivering at least 1.49 times decoding speedup that scales with audio length.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Regulation, Power, and the Compliance 1 Paradox: A Longitudinal Study of Smart Homes

Smart home technologies are becoming increasingly embedded in domestic environments, yet their implications for power, privacy, and inequality remain insufficiently understood, particularly in non-Western contexts. This paper presents a longitudinal socio-technical study of smart home adoption in Jordan, examining how cultural norms, regulatory frameworks, and everyday technological practices shape domestic power dynamics. Building on our 2022 study, we employ a two-phase grounded theory approach comprising (1) a secondary analysis of 30 interviews and (2) 28 new interviews conducted in 2025 with returning and new participants, including household members, domestic workers, policymakers, and civil society advocates. This design provides a rare longitudinal perspective on how regulatory and technological change reshapes domestic surveillance practices. Our findings reveal a compliance paradox: although Jordan's 2023 Data Protection Law has increased privacy awareness, it also enables new forms of exploitation by leaving domestic contexts largely outside its scope. We identify three dynamics: (1) the normalization of passive surveillance through convenience and legal compliance; (2) regulatory ambiguity that shifts responsibility to households, reinforcing existing hierarchies; and (3) constrained resistance among domestic workers facing intensified monitoring. We contribute a longitudinal account of how privacy regulation is appropriated within socio-cultural systems to reproduce existing inequalities. We conclude by identifying four intervention spaces across design, policy, and advocacy, emphasizing the need for contextually grounded approaches to privacy governance in smart home ecosystems.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

One Image is All You Need: Agentic One-Shot Image Generation via Text-Based World Models for Long-Tail Spatial Perception

Reliable spatial decision automation, such as autonomous driving and maritime surveillance, critically depends on robust visual perception. However, real-world spatiotemporal data exhibits severe heterogeneity, often manifesting as extreme long-tail distributions for safety-critical scenarios. This data scarcity induces dataset shift that degrades detection performance and pose safety risks. While synthetic data generation offers a potential solution, existing generative approaches, such as diffusion models and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), often lack explicit spatial grounding and structural constraints, resulting in spatial and physical inconsistencies in generated scenes. To address these challenges, we introduce WMGen-v1, an agentic text-based world model framework for long-tail spatial data generation. WMGen-v1 employs a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to construct a structured scene representation from a single reference image, while a Large Language Model (LLM) performs guidance-based scene expansion under physical plausibility and commonsense constraints. Subsequently, conditioned on the structured semantic representations produced by this reasoning process, a diffusion model generates diverse and physically grounded long-tail training data. Experiments on internal industrial datasets, ROADWork, and LaRS benchmarks demonstrate that WMGen-v1 outperforms baseline approaches. Notably, detectors trained solely on WMGen-v1 synthetic data approach real-only performance on aggregate dataset-level metrics, highlighting its potential to alleviate long-tail data scarcity for downstream spatial perception.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

AI Supply Chain Galaxy: 3D Visual Analytics for License Compliance

The rapid proliferation of machine learning model reuse has transformed the AI ecosystem into a highly interconnected supply chain. Traditional compliance tools and static reports struggle to navigate these massive, multi-hop dependency networks. To address this, we present AI Supply Chain Galaxy (AISCG), an interactive 3D visual analytics system for model provenance and compliance auditing. AISCG maps models into a 3D spatial layout, integrating explicit structural dependencies with a rule-based compliance engine. It supports multi-scale exploration, from global community detection to localized, path-aware lineage tracing. We demonstrate its efficacy through an ecosystem-scale empirical analysis of 908,449 models from Hugging Face. Our findings reveal a concerning landscape: 55.46% of models exhibit compliance risks or metadata conflicts/omissions. We also identified distinct risk patterns, including a 56.67% license omission rate in adapter derivations and an 8.05% "license drift" rate in fine-tuning. Through a case study on the complex Llama model family, we show how AISCG empowers analysts to intuitively trace inherited restrictive terms and identify root causes across deep topological networks, significantly reducing the cognitive load of compliance auditing.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Dream.exe: Can Video Generation Models Dream Executable Robot Manipulation?

Video generation models have made impressive strides in synthesizing visually compelling content, yet their outputs remain confined to the virtual domain. A natural question follows: how well do these models reflect the physical world when their generated videos leave the screen and enter reality? We propose robotic manipulation as a concrete, measurable window onto this question: if a model has truly internalized physical laws, the motion it depicts should translate into executable robot behavior. We introduce Dream$.$exe, an evaluation framework that operationalizes this criterion through a video-to-execution pipeline. Given a scene image and a task description, Dream$.$exe synthesizes a manipulation video, converts the generated motion into robot trajectories, and executes them in a physics simulator, yielding a grounding signal that purely visual metrics cannot offer. Using this pipeline, we evaluate 8 models spanning frontier closed-source generators, open-source generators, and robot-specific models. Our benchmark covers 101 manually curated manipulation tasks at three levels of physical complexity, measured across visual quality, trajectory fidelity, and execution success. Encouragingly, several models achieve measurable execution success, suggesting that generative priors learned from internet-scale data already encode meaningful physical knowledge. Yet visual quality proves a poor predictor of executability, exposing a dimension of model capability that standard visual evaluations do not capture. Dream$.$exe will be open-sourced at https://github.com/showlab/Dream.exe.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

YouZhi: Towards High-Concurrency Financial LLMs via Adaptive GQA-to-MLA Transition

Large language models (LLMs) drive significant financial innovations, yet their high-concurrency deployment is severely bottlenecked by KV cache memory overhead, which inflates infrastructure costs and throttles scalability. To address this, we propose YouZhi-LLM, a highly efficient financial LLM empowered by a comprehensive structural transition and training pipeline natively built on the Huawei Ascend ecosystem. At its algorithmic core, YouZhi-LLM features a layer-adaptive GQA-to-MLA transition framework that dynamically assigns per-layer FreqFold sizes, maximizing KV-cache compression while minimizing perplexity degradation. To recover representation capacity and inject domain expertise, the Ascend-based training pipeline seamlessly integrates generalized knowledge distillation with financial-specific supervised fine-tuning. Evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this systematic approach, with the adaptive transition reducing perplexity degradation by up to 35% over uniform baselines. Crucially, when evaluated on Ascend NPUs via vLLM-Ascend, the massive KV-cache reduction translates directly into deployment efficiency. Compared to their respective base models, YouZhi-7B yields a 12.3% improvement in average financial benchmark score alongside a 2.69$\times$ increase in maximum concurrency; similarly, YouZhi-14B achieves a 7.0% accuracy gain and a 2.43$\times$ concurrency boost, establishing a new paradigm for cost-effective, high-throughput financial inference.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Direct 3D-Aware Object Insertion via Decomposed Visual Proxies

Object insertion aims to seamlessly composite a reference object into a specified region of a background image. Recent diffusion-based methods achieve high visual quality but formulate insertion as a simple 2D inpainting task, providing no explicit control over the object's 3D pose and limiting their practical applicability. We propose DIRECT (Decomposed Injection for Reference Composition and Target-integration), a novel framework that integrates interactive pose manipulation with high-fidelity 2D image synthesis to enable pose-controllable object insertion. Our method decomposes the insertion conditions into three complementary components: appearance guidance capturing visual details from the reference object, geometry guidance derived from the user-adjusted 3D proxy, and context guidance from the target background. By injecting them through separate pathways, DIRECT avoids feature entanglement and simultaneously preserves reference appearance, follows the user-specified pose, and adapts the object to the target scene. We also introduce an automated data construction pipeline to improve the diversity and quality of training data. Experiments show that DIRECT outperforms previous methods in both geometric controllability and visual quality.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Counterfactual Intervention Feature Transfer for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification

Graph-based models have achieved great success in person re-identification tasks recently, which compute the graph topology structure (affinities) among different people first and then pass the information across them to achieve stronger features. But we find existing graph-based methods in the visible-infrared person re-identification task (VI-ReID) suffer from bad generalization because of two issues: 1) train-test modality balance gap, which is a property of VI-ReID task. The number of two modalities data are balanced in the training stage, but extremely unbalanced in inference, causing the low generalization of graph-based VI-ReID methods. 2) sub-optimal topology structure caused by the end-to-end learning manner to the graph module. We analyze that the well-trained input features weaken the learning of graph topology, making it not generalized enough during the inference process. In this paper, we propose a Counterfactual Intervention Feature Transfer (CIFT) method to tackle these problems. Specifically, a Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Feature Transfer (H2FT) is designed to reduce the train-test modality balance gap by two independent types of well-designed graph modules and an unbalanced scenario simulation. Besides, a Counterfactual Relation Intervention (CRI) is proposed to utilize the counterfactual intervention and causal effect tools to highlight the role of topology structure in the whole training process, which makes the graph topology structure more reliable. Extensive experiments on standard VI-ReID benchmarks demonstrate that CIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under various settings.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Look on Demand: A Cognitive Scheduling Framework for Visual Evidence Acquisition in Multimodal Reasoning

Existing multimodal reasoning approaches predominantly follow two paradigms: converting visual inputs into text prior to reasoning, or performing end-to-end reasoning within a unified vision-language representation space. Despite their empirical progress, both paradigms suffer from fundamental structural limitations. The former relies on static visual-to-text conversion, which tends to compress and lose fine-grained visual details. The latter is prone to linguistic dominance induced by joint optimization and attention mechanisms, leading to systematically weakened faithfulness to visual evidence during reasoning. In this work, we argue that a central challenge is how and when visual evidence is introduced into the reasoning process. Motivated by this insight, we propose CSMR, a multimodal reasoning framework in which a language model controls the reasoning process by deciding when to invoke an independent visual perception module to acquire task-relevant visual evidence. Experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that CSMR consistently outperforms representative baseline methods in accuracy under a zero-shot setting. Further experimental analysis confirms that these advantages primarily arise from the proposed cognitive scheduling mechanism.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

VECTOR-Drive: Tightly Coupled Vision-Language and Trajectory Expert Routing for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving requires models to understand traffic scenes, infer driving intent, and generate executable motion plans. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit semantic priors from large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet still face a coupling trade-off: fully shared backbones preserve multimodal interaction but may entangle language reasoning and trajectory prediction, whereas decou pled reasoning-action pipelines reduce task conflict but weaken semantic-motion coupling. We propose VECTOR-DRIVE, a tightly coupled VLA framework built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B. VECTOR-DRIVE keeps all tokens coupled through shared self attention and routes feed-forward computation according to token semantics. Vision and language tokens are processed by a Vision-Language Expert to preserve semantic priors, while target-point, ego-state, and noisy action tokens are routed to a Trajectory Expert for motion-specific computation. On the action-token pathway, a flow-matching planner refines noisy action tokens into future waypoints and speed profiles. This design couples semantic reasoning and motion planning within a single multimodal Transformer while separating task-specific FFN computation. On Bench2Drive, VECTOR-DRIVE achieves 88.91 Driving Score and outperforms representative end-to end and VLA-based baselines. Qualitative results and ablations further validate the benefits of shared attention, semantic-aware expert routing, progressive training, and flow-based action de coding.

cs.CV↗