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Tian Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Tian Gao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

DeliverBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Delivering Realistic Multi-Stage Professional Projects

LLM agents are judged by what they deliver, and in professional work what gets delivered is a project, not a task. A project pays off only if the whole package holds, and one weak part can limit the value of the rest. Yet existing benchmarks mostly test agents on one task at a time, leaving a gap between the capability we measure and the outcome that makes agents useful. To address this gap, we introduce DeliverBench, which tests whether agents can carry a project from brief to final delivery. Its 11 projects, spanning financial due diligence, legal contract drafting, and drug safety reporting, are reconstructed with 13 domain experts from real materials and chain 150 subtasks through 2-15 rounds of new materials and client feedback. Because no reference outputs are injected, agents inherit their own errors from one task to the next. Expert rubrics then score every checkpoint as well as the final package. Across seven model-harness systems, even the best system scores only 65.0 out of 100 on final delivery and passes 50.0% of subtasks at a 90-point threshold. The failures are often failures of carrying work forward: in one audit project, all seven systems addressed the review findings, but only one preserved traceability. Together, these results suggest that task-level capability does not simply compose into delivery, which also depends on keeping the work coherent as it evolves.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

TellOnce: Correcting Coding Agents Once, Improving Their Future Actions

Interactive LLM agents increasingly work with users across tasks, yet remembering a previous correction does not ensure that the agent changes its behavior in the future. In a diagnostic constructed from anonymized real-world agent interactions, agents using Mem0 still violate 57.5% of applicable preference checks. We introduce TellOnce, a drop-in personalization layer that turns conversational corrections into persistent, scoped, and revisable behavioral rules without updating the underlying agent model. TellOnce identifies which requirements should persist, determines when they apply, reconciles subsequent feedback with existing rules, and prepares reusable checks when reliable verification is possible. We evaluate whether learned corrections improve future behavior by freezing the learned state and testing on subsequent tasks without additional user corrections. Across three models on ClawArena and MemoryArena, TellOnce achieves the lowest preference violation rate in all six settings, reducing violations relative to PGMem by 19.3-42.3 percentage points on ClawArena and 3.0-22.9 points on MemoryArena, while maintaining broadly comparable task performance. On SWE-Together, TellOnce further improves task quality on new coding tasks by learning from feedback received during earlier tasks. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TellOnce_exp, and the deployable skill at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

AlphaCast: A Human Wisdom-LLM Intelligence Co-Reasoning Framework for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is typically treated as a single-pass numerical prediction task based on historical observations. However, real-world forecasting often requires expert-like reasoning, where temporal patterns, contextual cues, case-based references, and domain knowledge are jointly considered and iteratively revised. Existing statistical, deep learning, foundation, and LLM-based forecasting models mainly rely on pattern fitting, direct prompting, or static context augmentation, leaving interactive and reflective forecasting insufficiently explored. In this work, we propose AlphaCast, a human wisdom-LLM intelligence co-reasoning framework for interactive time series forecasting. AlphaCast does not require real-time human intervention; instead, it operationalizes human wisdom as structured forecasting support, including time-series features, contextual cues, case-based references, and domain knowledge. Built upon an expert-like think-forecast-reflect workflow, AlphaCast comprises three agents: an Investigator that constructs forecasting context from available evidence, a Generator that produces context-grounded forecasts, and a Reflector that evaluates plausibility and provides feedback for refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlphaCast improves forecasting accuracy and produces interpretable forecast explanations, offering a promising step toward interactive and context-aware time series forecasting.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Tensor valuations on Sobolev spaces

A complete classification is established for continuous, SL($n$) contravariant, and translation invariant tensor valuations defined on the Sobolev space $W^{1,p}(\mathbb R^n)$. When these valuations are further assumed to be homogeneous, the classification reveals that they are precisely the Fisher information tensors, which constitute a higher-order generalization of the Fisher information matrix.

math.MG↗
arXiv2026

Learning 1-Bit LiDAR-based Localization with Auxiliary Objective

6-DoF LiDAR-based localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems operating in large-scale outdoor environments. Many deep-learning-based localization methods have achieved promising performance so far. However, as one of the always-on modules competing for limited on-board computational resources, the localization module is expected to consume only a small portion of the overall compute budget. Most existing learning-based methods are still too heavy for this purpose. In contrast, binary neural networks (BNNs) offer an appealing solution, but the 1-bit compression causes severe information loss and performance drop. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Binarized LiDAR-based Localization (BiLoc), the first binary neural network framework for 6-DoF LiDAR localization. Specifically, we reinterpret the training of BNNs from the perspective of the information-bottleneck principle, aiming at retaining minimal yet sufficient representations for pose estimation while suppressing redundant variations. And we introduce an auxiliary objective that adaptively regulates information retention in the binary encoder, effectively mitigating the information loss caused by binarization. This auxiliary objective provides additional optimization signals that compensate for the limited representational capacity and the gradient mismatch inherent in BNNs. Extensive experiments on large-scale outdoor LiDAR datasets demonstrate that BiLoc establishes a new state of the art for LiDAR localization with BNNs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Bait-and-Recover: Poisoning Internal Refusal Signals to Defend LLMs against White-Box Editing Jailbreaks

Open-weight large language models face a low-cost white-box threat from representation engineering attacks. Attackers can estimate refusal directions and search for projection-matrix edits that suppress safety alignment while preserving general capabilities, within minutes on a single GPU and without gradient-based training. We propose Bait-and-Recover, a weight-level defense that places a bait adapter where attackers read activations and a paired recovery adapter at the subsequent layer. Trained via gradient routing, this decouples the observation path from the behavior path. By actively poisoning the residual signal used for measurement, Bait-and-Recover disrupts the attacker's edit search, while the recovery layer restores clean downstream computation. Across four open-weight models, our defense raises the minimum refusal rate against white-box edit searches from 16.25% to 71.75% under a strict behavior-preservation budget (KL <= 0.10), with negligible impact on general benchmarks. By invalidating the core measurement assumption of these attacks, observation-path poisoning offers a practical complement to behavior-level safety training.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Speech: Dual-Domain SSL Fusion for Unified All-Type Audio Deepfake Detection

Unified all-type audio deepfake detection aims to determine whether an input clip is real or fake when its audio type may be speech, environmental sound, singing voice, or music. Existing speech-centric or type-dependent solutions are insufficient for this setting because the test-time audio type is unknown, while the required output is still a single binary decision. To address these issues, this paper proposes a dual-domain SSL fusion method that maps heterogeneous audio into a shared binary authenticity space. EAT-large and wav2vec 2.0 XLS-R-300M are used as complementary SSL feature sources, providing broad acoustic and event-level representations as well as waveform-level, vocal, and speech-sensitive representations. Layer-wise weighted fusion integrates multi-level artifacts from different transformer depths, while token-level fusion forms a unified feature pool without enforcing frame-level alignment between the two SSL streams. The fused tokens are summarized by multi-head attentive statistics pooling and classified with a binary MLP head. With conservative speech refinement applied on top of this unified core detector, the submitted system achieves 95.58% Macro-F1 on the AT-ADD Track 2 evaluation set and ranks second in the challenge.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

EXPO-FT: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Finetuning for Vision-Language-Action Models

The ability to efficiently and reliably learn new tasks has been a foundational challenge in robotics. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse manipulation tasks, yet pretrained policies consistently fall short of the reliability required for real-world deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning offers a promising path to bridge this gap, but existing approaches either train from scratch without fully leveraging pretrained priors, or fine-tune VLAs without achieving the sample efficiency and success rates that practical deployment demands. We present EXPO-FT, a system for stable, sample-efficient RL finetuning of pretrained VLA policies that closes this gap. Our system solves a suite of challenging manipulation tasks, including routing string lights and inserting the plug to light it up, striking a pool ball into a pocket, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle, each requiring combinations of high precision, dynamic actions, and robustness to varied initial states. Our system achieves perfect task performance (30/30 successes) across all evaluated tasks within an average of 19.1 minutes of online robot data, outperforming both prior RL-from-scratch and VLA finetuning approaches. We release an open-source codebase with the aim of facilitating broader adoption of RL finetuning of VLA models in robotics.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

CastFSR: A Fast--Slow--Reflect Agentic Reasoning Framework for Context-Aware Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is fundamental to decision-making in complex systems, where future dynamics are influenced not only by historical observations but also by evolving contextual features. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have extended forecasting beyond numerical extrapolation toward context-aware reasoning. However, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to identify relevant contexts, reason about their impacts, and validate forecasts against temporal and domain constraints. In this work, we propose CastFSR, an agentic framework that formulates context-aware forecasting as a Fast--Slow--Reflect workflow. In fast thinking, CastFSR profiles observations and selects lightweight forecasters to construct a data-driven forecast prior. In slow deliberation, it retrieves contextual evidence, adaptively determines informative look-back windows, and reasons about how contexts reshape future dynamics. In reflection, it iteratively refines forecasts to ensure temporal, contextual, and domain consistency. CastFSR supports both training-free inference with off-the-shelf LLMs and efficient deployment through a two-stage SFT and reinforcement learning strategy that transfers its orchestration capability to compact LLMs. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that CastFSR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/CastFSR.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

EdgeBench: Unveiling Scaling Laws of Learning from Real-World Environments

Pretraining scaling laws reveal that model capability improves predictably with data and compute. But learning from real world environments after deployment remains far less understood. Analyzing roughly 38,000 hours of agent interaction with the environment across 134 real world tasks, we find, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence that overall performance during environment learning follows a log-sigmoid scaling law with remarkably high precision, reaching R^2 = 0.998. Across model generations, we also find that agent learning speed roughly doubles every three months. This discovery stems from EdgeBench, a suite of 134 real world tasks with ultra-long horizons, spanning scientific discovery, software engineering, combinatorial optimization, professional knowledge work, formal mathematics, and interactive games. Each task sustains at least 12 hours of continuous agent operation under rich, multilevel feedback, and is built through substantial expert effort. We publicly release 51 tasks and our full evaluation framework to accelerate the study of how agents learn from real world experience.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CHORUS: Decentralized Multi-Embodiment Collaboration with One VLA Policy

Multi-robot collaboration allows robots to efficiently take on a wide range of tasks, from moving a couch through a doorway to assembling structures on a construction site. However, achieving such coordination in mobile multi-robot settings remains challenging: centralized methods conditioned on the combined observations of a team scale poorly with team size, and decentralized methods that train one policy per robot often require explicit alignment procedures or information sharing at inference time to overcome partial observability. Our key insight is that the visuomotor priors of pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models should enable reactive, decentralized collaboration from each robot's local observations alone, without these inference-time assumptions. We propose CHORUS, a framework that adapts a single VLA backbone to control diverse, multi-robot teams. At inference time, each robot runs an independent copy of CHORUS, conditioned only on its own observations and a robot-identifying prompt. In real-world experiments including mobile tape measurement, library book handovers, and laundry basket lifting, CHORUS achieves a 64% point improvement over decentralized, from-scratch models, improves reactivity to teammate behavior by 40% points, and outperforms centralized baselines. Together, these results show that a shared VLA backbone is capable of achieving decentralized multi-robot collaboration, without per-robot policies or inter-robot communication at inference.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

AnomaMind: Agentic Time Series Anomaly Detection with Tool-Augmented Reasoning

Time series anomaly detection is critical in many real-world applications, where effective solutions must localize anomalous regions and support reliable decision-making under complex settings. However, most existing methods frame anomaly detection as a purely discriminative prediction task with fixed feature representations, rather than an evidence-driven diagnostic process. As a result, they often struggle when anomalies exhibit strong context dependence, diverse patterns, or domain shifts across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose AnomaMind, an agentic time series anomaly detection framework that reformulates anomaly detection as a sequential decision-making process. AnomaMind operates through a coarse-to-fine workflow that first localizes suspicious intervals, then constructs diagnostic evidence through tool interaction, and finally refines anomaly decisions through self-reflection. The workflow is supported by a toolkit box that combines knowledge memory and numerical diagnostics: visual anomaly patterns mined from training data and domain knowledge provide contextual guidance, while statistical, value-based, change-based, and region-level operators provide measurable evidence for verification. AnomaMind further adopts a hybrid inference mechanism in which general-purpose models handle flexible reasoning, tool invocation, and refinement, while a detection-specific policy is optimized with rule-based rewards for parsable outputs, F1-score alignment, and false-positive control. Extensive experiments under both in-domain and cross-domain settings demonstrate that AnomaMind consistently improves anomaly detection performance and enhances generalization across heterogeneous anomaly patterns, validating the effectiveness of tool-augmented reasoning for anomaly detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/AnomaMind-TS.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Alignment Risks from Capability-Seeking RL Training

While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk arises from capability-seeking RL training in vulnerable environments. We investigate whether language models, when trained with reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with implicit loopholes, can learn to exploit these flaws to maximize reward, even without being explicitly instructed to do so. To test this, we design a suite of four diverse "vulnerability games," each presenting a structural vulnerability related to context-conditional compliance, proxy metrics, reward tampering, and self-evaluation. Our experiments show that models often learn to exploit these vulnerabilities, discovering opportunistic strategies that increase reward while sometimes preserving or even improving standard task-performance metrics. More critically, we find that these exploitative strategies are not always narrow "tricks": they can transfer in structured but limited ways, propagate from a capable teacher model to other student models through SFT, and in several cases remain more persistent when learned through RL than when distilled through SFT. Our findings show that alignment risks from capability-seeking RL training can be difficult to detect with standard performance monitoring, suggesting that future AI safety work should extend beyond content moderation to auditing and securing training environments, reward mechanisms, and evaluation channels. Code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/Capability-seeking-RL-risk.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Resting Neurons, Active Insights: Robustifying Activation Sparsity in LLMs via Spontaneity

Activation sparsity offers a compelling route to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by selectively suppressing hidden activations, yet existing approaches exhibit severe accuracy degradation at high sparsity. We show that this failure stems from representational instability: *activation sparsity disrupts input-dependent activation learned during pretraining, inducing distribution shifts in hidden states.* We address this issue by reframing activation sparsity as a representational alignment problem and introducing **Spontaneous Neurons (SPON)**, a lightweight mechanism inspired by spontaneous neural activity in biological systems. SPON injects a small set of learnable, input-independent activation vectors that act as persistent representational anchors for sparse computation. These vectors are trained via distribution matching to the dense model and can be absorbed into bias terms after training, incurring negligible inference overhead. Across multiple LLM backbones, SPON consistently restores performance, stabilizes latent representations, and preserves generalization. Our results establish SPON as an effective and principled solution for reliable activation-sparse inference, and offer new insights into knowledge retention in LLMs.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping the private and professional lives of users, with numerous applications in business, education, finance, healthcare, law, and science. With this rise in global influence comes greater urgency to build, evaluate, and deploy these systems in a manner that prioritizes not only technical capabilities but also human priorities. This work presents a framework for developing Human-Centered Large Language Models (HCLLMs), which integrates perspectives from Natural Language Processing (NLP), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and responsible AI. Considering the ethics, economics, and technical objectives of language modeling, we argue that model developers need to address human concerns, preferences, values, and goals, not only during a cursory post-training stage, but rather with rigor and care at every stage of the pipeline. This paper offers human-centered insights and recommendations for developers at each stage, from system design to data sourcing, model training, evaluation, and responsible deployment. Then we conclude with a case study, applying these insights to understand the future of work with HCLLMs.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

SteerVLA: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models in Long-Tail Driving Scenarios

A fundamental challenge in autonomous driving is the integration of high-level, semantic reasoning for long-tail events with low-level, reactive control for robust driving. While large vision-language models (VLMs) trained on web-scale data offer powerful common-sense reasoning, they lack the grounded experience necessary for safe vehicle control. We posit that an effective autonomous agent should leverage the world knowledge of VLMs to guide a steerable driving policy toward robust control in driving scenarios. To this end, we propose SteerVLA, which leverages the reasoning capabilities of VLMs to produce fine-grained language instructions that steer a vision-language-action (VLA) driving policy. Key to our method is this rich language interface between the high-level VLM and low-level VLA, which allows the high-level policy to more effectively ground its reasoning in the control outputs of the low-level policy. To provide fine-grained language supervision aligned with vehicle control, we leverage a VLM to augment existing driving data with detailed language annotations, which we find to be essential for effective reasoning and steerability. We evaluate SteerVLA on a challenging closed-loop benchmark, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 4.77 points in overall driving score and by 8.04 points on a long-tail subset. The project website is available at: https://steervla.github.io/.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

LabSafety Bench: Benchmarking LLMs on Safety Issues in Scientific Labs

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing scientific research, yet its growing integration into laboratory environments presents critical safety challenges. Large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) now assist in experiment design and procedural guidance, yet their "illusion of understanding" may lead researchers to overtrust unsafe outputs. Here we show that current models remain far from meeting the reliability needed for safe laboratory operation. We introduce LabSafety Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates models on hazard identification, risk assessment, and consequence prediction across 765 multiple-choice questions and 404 realistic lab scenarios, encompassing 3,128 open-ended tasks. Evaluations on 19 advanced LLMs and VLMs show that no model evaluated on hazard identification surpasses 70% accuracy. While proprietary models perform well on structured assessments, they do not show a clear advantage in open-ended reasoning. These results underscore the urgent need for specialized safety evaluation frameworks before deploying AI systems in real laboratory settings.

cs.CL↗