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Tong Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Tong Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Optimal time decay of the Boltzmann equation with cutoff soft potentials in the whole space

Since Strain's work \cite{Strain-2012-KRM} on almost optimal time decay rates for the microscopic part of perturbative classical solutions to the Boltzmann system with soft potentials via the time-velocity splitting method, how to obtain the optimal decay of the microscopic part has remained unsolved. In this paper, we resolve this problem by developing a nonlinear energy estimate method different from the time-velocity splitting approach. The proof relies on a combination of a hierarchy of time-weighted energy estimates, the damping factor \(e^{-ν(v)(t-τ)}\), and a dyadic decomposition of velocity space.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

Symmetry-Preserving Local Representation for Short-Range Interaction in Complex Materials

Modeling short-range interactions in highly disordered materials remains challenging due to the immense configuration space and the disruption of local symmetry in truncated theoretical models. Here, we propose a symmetry-preserving local representation framework that strictly enforces topological continuity and translational invariance via boundary passivation. Applied to high-entropy alloys, this approach autonomously unravels the nonlinear ligand effects modulating local reactivity and accurately captures coverage-dependent many-body interactions without explicit periodic expansion. By resolving the conflict between localized chemical environments and extended periodic boundaries, this framework not only reduces computational complexity by an order of magnitude but also provides a physically transparent paradigm for deciphering short-range order in complex condensed matter systems.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗
arXiv2026

See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space

What visual representation should a navigation policy act on? Navigation policies built on vision foundation models largely leave representation design to the encoders' pretraining objectives. We present RepresentNav, a navigation foundation model built on a self-constructed representation space: a visual representation constructed by the policy's own objectives from vision foundation models. RepresentNav builds this space with Representation Residuals, a compact three-layer transformer that attends over features spanning the full depth of multiple complementary vision foundation models, so that the policy learns to see what it needs for navigation. In the same space it dreams what it wants: before every action a latent chain-of-thought predicts the representation of the scene a moment ahead. The dream is trained end-to-end with the policy as a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA), with a next-representation prediction loss and a regularizer on its targets. RepresentNav sets a new state of the art on VLNVerse, VLN-CE R2R, EVT-Bench, and two point-goal benchmarks, and its gains carry over to a physical robot amid clutter and moving people. On VLNVerse fine-grained, RepresentNav achieves 83.80% success, outperforming the previous state of the art by 20.05 percentage points, and on EVT-Bench distracted tracking it reaches 85.5% with a single camera (+10.1). With the same encoders, the self-constructed space clearly outperforms concatenating their outputs and learns to weight their layers unevenly, and a dream in it cuts collisions by a quarter. A single dreamed latent decodes into the depth, semantics, and 3D occupancy of the scene a moment ahead, more accurately than pretrained encoders applied to the real future frame, although occupancy is never supervised, and the rollout tracks the robot's own motion over the next second: the dream emerges as a compact latent world model.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Scaling-Critical Theory for the Boltzmann and Landau Equations

This paper develops a scaling-critical theory for the spatially inhomogeneous non-cutoff Boltzmann and Landau equations with very soft potentials. For sufficiently small initial perturbations in a localized, weighted, anisotropic Riesz-potential norm, we prove global well-posedness near a Maxwellian in the whole space. This critical phase-space norm captures the Boltzmann--Landau scaling, the velocity-dependent anisotropy, and the hypoelliptic transport structure. The proof combines frozen-operator estimates, a critical fixed-point argument, and weighted hypocoercive energy estimates. We also develop a short-time pointwise Green-function theory for variable-coefficient kinetic equations with a nonnegative Hölder background. We first construct the small-jump Green function by freezing coefficients along kinetic characteristics and then recover the full kernel through a convergent parametrix expansion. The resulting bounds capture the fractional Kolmogorov geometry near characteristics and rapid decay away from them. These estimates form the analytic core of the scaling-critical theory and provide a robust pointwise framework for further regularity analysis in the soft-potential regime.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

EDAR: Learning Environment-Dependent Action Representations for Robotic Manipulation

Learning effective action representations is critical for robotic manipulation, where raw control trajectories are often noisy, redundant, and difficult to model directly. Existing methods mainly encode the structure of the action stream itself, treating the role of actions in the environment as implicit. Yet manipulation is about changing the world: the same action segment can induce different outcomes under different scene contexts, making action semantics inherently environment-dependent. We propose EDAR, an Environment-Dependent Action Representation that grounds action tokens in both executable control structure and expected visual consequences. By coupling motor commands with their environment-conditioned effects, EDAR encourages the learned action space to capture interaction semantics rather than merely command-level patterns. Experiments on simulated and real-robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that EDAR improves downstream policy learning, especially in long-horizon manipulation. These results highlight the importance of grounding action representations in executable control structure and environment-conditioned visual change.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Harness-Bench: Evaluating Agent Harnesses across Models and Realistic Workflows

LLM agents are increasingly deployed as executable systems that use tools, modify workspaces, and produce concrete artifacts. In such workflows, performance depends not only on the base model, but also on the harness: the system layer that manages context, tools, state, constraints, permissions, tracing, and recovery. However, existing benchmarks typically abstract away execution, compare complete agent systems, or hold the harness fixed, making execution-layer variation difficult to study. We introduce Harness-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating configuration-level harness effects in realistic agent workflows. Harness-Bench evaluates representative harness configurations across multiple model backends under shared task environments, budgets, and evaluation protocols, while preserving each harness's native execution behavior. The benchmark contains 106 sandboxed offline tasks constructed from practical agent-use patterns and manually reviewed for realism, solvability, oracle-checkability, and integrity. Each run records final artifacts, execution traces, usage statistics, and validator outputs, enabling analysis beyond final completion. Across 5,194 execution trajectories, we observe substantial variation in completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior across model-harness pairings. These results suggest that agent capability should be reported at the model-harness configuration level rather than attributed to the base model alone. Our analysis further identifies recurring execution-alignment failures, where plausible reasoning becomes decoupled from tool feedback, workspace state, evidence, or verifiable output contracts. Harness-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for diagnosing and improving reliable, efficient, and auditable agent execution stacks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Distribution Matching: Selective Margin Preservation for Supervised Fine-Tuning

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) changes logit margins among non-target tokens at teacher-forced prefixes. Matching a local reference distribution keeps those probabilities and also penalizes margin expansions. We ask whether a soft auxiliary can preserve selected local non-target margin relations without freezing that distribution. We introduce \textbf{Selective Rank-Preserving SFT (SRP-SFT)}, a soft margin target: a hinge on reference-scaled lower bounds for pairs from the reference's top-$K$ non-target tokens, applied at fixed teacher-forced prefixes. The hinge stops once the requested bound is met. We derive the KL cost of violating a margin, characterize the feasible region and its conditional utility, and give a finite-step condition for reducing aggregate violations. In one-epoch experiments on Qwen3-4B-Base and UltraFeedback, this target raises MATH-500 and code-generation scores over CE and LP-SFT at all three training seeds. At seed 1234, MATH-500 pass@1 rises from 49.56\% to 54.56\% and the four-metric code mean rises from 65.91\% to 69.50\% relative to LP-SFT. Ranking controls, held-out cache diagnostics, sensitivity sweeps, and six additional backbones show where these score changes appear.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

ConMoE: MoE Compression as Expert Selection and Functional Assignment

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale model capacity through sparse activation, but storing their full parameters remains costly in GPU memory. Existing expert compression methods address this problem through pruning, merging, or substitution, typically coupling expert pool construction with the assignment of routed workloads. In this work, we formulate expert compression as two decisions--constructing an expert pool and assigning the original experts' workloads to that pool--and show that assignment can be optimized after the pool is fixed. Based on this formulation, we introduce ConMoE, which constructs a compact pool using Anchor Coverage and optimizes assignment through a router-conditioned functional objective derived from a layer reconstruction bound, treating parameter proximity only as a proxy. ConMoE uses unlabeled calibration inputs and keeps the router and expert weights frozen. With the pool fixed, functional assignment improves macro accuracy by 1.82 and 0.35 percentage points at 50% and 75% expert retention, respectively, and also improves pools constructed by other selectors. With task-specific calibration across three MoE architectures and six zero-shot benchmarks, ConMoE achieves the highest macro average among the compared methods at both ratios. At 50% expert retention, ConMoE reduces peak GPU memory by 29.6-48.4% relative to the uncompressed models on our generation workloads. These results establish expert assignment as an independent optimization axis for MoE compression.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Prediction Is All MoE Needs: Expert Load Distribution Goes from Fluctuating to Stabilizing

MoE facilitates the development of large models by making the computational complexity of the model no longer scale linearly with increasing parameters. The learning sparse gating network selects a set of experts for each token to be processed; however, this may lead to differences in the number of tokens processed by each expert over several successive iterations, i.e., the expert load fluctuations, which reduces computational parallelization and resource utilization. To this end, we traced and analyzed loads of each expert in the training iterations for several large language models in this work, and defined the transient state with "obvious load fluctuation" and the stable state with "temporal locality". Moreover, given the characteristics of these two states and the computational overhead, we deployed three classical prediction algorithms that achieve accurate expert load prediction results. For the GPT3 350M model, the average error rates for predicting the expert load proportion over the next 1,000 and 2,000 steps are approximately 1.3% and 1.8%, respectively. This work can provide valuable guidance for expert placement or resource allocation for MoE model training. Based on this work, we will propose an expert placement scheme for transient and stable states in our coming work.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Toward Optimal Time-Space Tradeoffs for Set Reconciliation

Set reconciliation, where two parties each holding a large set of elements aim to identify their set difference, is a fundamental task in many areas. Time (computation cost) and space (communication cost) are two important metrics in this problem, and much existing work optimizes one at the expense of the other, creating a clear trade-off. We study this trade-off through algorithmic upper bounds and matching space lower bounds. On one side, we propose XYZ-Sketch. For sufficiently large $d$, XYZ-Sketch achieves high-probability reconciliation for sets whose differing elements are uniformly random, using only $(1+\varepsilon)d$ elements for communication, while achieving $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ insertion time and expected $O(d\log V\log^{3/2}(1/\varepsilon))$ decoding time, where $d$ and $V$ denote the size of the difference between two sets and the universe size, respectively. On the other side, we establish a broad fixed-support canonical model and prove a matching space lower bound, establishing the asymptotic optimality of XYZ-Sketch. Our proof also establishes an extremality theorem resolving Walzer's conjecture. Experiments demonstrate the practical advantages of XYZ-Sketch, and the source code is available at https://github.com/djwj233/XYZ-Sketch.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2026

Crane: An Accurate and Scalable Neural Sketch for Graph Stream Summarization

Graph streams are rapidly evolving sequences of edges that convey continuously changing relationships among entities, playing a crucial role in domains such as networking, finance, and cybersecurity. Their massive scale and high dynamism make obtaining accurate statistics challenging with limited memory constraints. Traditional methods summarize graph streams through hand-crafted sketches, while recent studies have begun to replace these sketches with neural counterparts to improve adaptability and accuracy. However, this shift faces a major challenge: under limited memory, dominant frequent items tend to overshadow rare ones, hindering the neural network's ability to recover accurate statistics. To address this, we propose Crane, a hierarchical neural sketch architecture for graph stream summarization. Crane uses a hierarchical carry mechanism that automatically elevates frequent items to higher memory layers, reducing interference between frequent and infrequent items within the same layer. To better accommodate real-world deployment, Crane further adopts an adaptive memory expansion strategy that dynamically adds new layers once the occupancy of the top layer exceeds a threshold, enabling scalability across diverse data magnitudes. Experimental results show that Crane significantly reduces estimation error compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, while also offering competitive throughput.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

RPFQ-ViT: Rotated Phase-Frame Quantization for Extremely Low-Bit Weights in Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong performance on image recognition and mobile vision applications, but their high-dimensional linear projections and attention computations still impose substantial storage and inference costs. Extremely low-bit quantization is a promising solution, yet ViTs often suffer severe accuracy degradation because conventional real-valued scalar codebooks are poorly matched to the directional geometry of Transformer projections. We present RPFQ-ViT, a Rotated Phase-Frame Quantization method that quantizes paired channels in two-dimensional phase planes, enabling low-bit codes to better preserve projection directions while recovering magnitude with lightweight scaling. RPFQ-ViT serves as a drop-in QAT replacement for nn.Linear and does not modify the standard real-valued attention, normalization, or activation computation graph. On ImageNet-1K, RPFQ-ViT-B/16 reaches 79.33% Top-1 / 94.48% Top-5 under W2/A4, Swin-T reaches 79.30% Top-1 / 94.79% Top-5 under W2/A8, and DeiT-S reaches 77.41% Top-1 / 93.11% Top-5 under W2/A8. Ablations, phase-geometry analysis, and direction-preservation metrics show that channel pairing, learnable rotation, phase-anchor learning, and residual phase refinement each improve quantization quality. We further deploy RPFQ-ViT image-classification models on native iOS and Android runtime stacks; with 2-bit packed weights, model size shrinks by roughly $5.4$-$7.1\times$ relative to FP32 and end-to-end on-device latency drops by $1.4$-$1.6\times$. All ImageNet results trained in our codebase use a matched 300-epoch recipe and are reported as mean accuracies over three independent runs. These results show that RPFQ-ViT provides a favorable trade-off among accuracy, compression, and practical mobile deployment for extremely low-bit ViTs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Rephrasing: Book-Level Organization Improves Synthetic Textbook Data for Mid-Training

Synthetic textbook data has improved language model pre-training, but prior work largely treats the benefit as a property of generated content or local rewriting style. We study a different factor: whether related content is organized into coherent book-level documents. We contribute both a scalable synthesis pipeline and controlled evidence that this organization matters. The pipeline retrieves source material from a pre-training corpus, clusters it into topical units, plans hierarchical tables of contents, and assembles source-grounded sections into complete books (our Full setting), yielding 686K textbooks (32B tokens) across 15,000+ disciplines. Replacing natural books in a mid-training mix with this corpus improves downstream performance by +1.09 on average. Controlled comparisons then disentangle the relevant design factors. A content-matched Split condition holds generated text and tokens fixed but treats each section as an independent document; Full's +1.02 mean gain isolates document packaging. A length-matched RandomConcat control that joins sections from different books remains below Full, ruling out document length alone. A retrieval-pool-matched Rephrase condition independently rewrites individual retrieved documents under the same audience-by-style scheme, without clustering, TOC planning, or book assembly; Full's +1.17 gain demonstrates the value of structured synthesis. On Llama3-8B, Full likewise outperforms both RandomConcat and Natural Books, supporting book-level organization as a useful axis for synthetic pre-training data design.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

HAPMoE: Heterogeneity-Aware Automatic Parallelism Planning for Mixture-of-Experts Models Training

As model sizes continue to scale, distributed training has become inevitable. Automatic parallelization techniques can derive efficient training parallelism strategies at low cost while achieving superior performance. The difficulty of this problem is jointly determined by the complexity of the model and the underlying compute cluster. Meanwhile, mixture-of-experts (MoE) models are increasingly emerging as the dominant architecture and the rapid evolution of accelerator hardware has made cluster heterogeneity commonplace, posing substantial challenges to automatic parallelization. However, existing approaches typically target either MoE architectures or heterogeneous clusters, failing to generalize to scenarios where both challenges coexist. To this end, we present HAPMoE, a heterogeneity-aware automatic parallelism planner for MoE training. HAPMoE builds a lightweight MoE-aware cost model and efficiently searches a six-dimensional parallel space, producing parallel plans directly deployable on Megatron-LM. Experiments show that HAPMoE improves end-to-end training throughput by up to 3.2$\times$ over baselines across heterogeneous clusters. Its non-uniform pipeline partitioning yields an additional up to 78% gains, and its pruning-enhanced dynamic programming algorithm completes the search within 1 minute, demonstrating high efficiency and practical value in complex hardware environments.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

REALHOP: Rethinking Multi-Hop Reasoning Evaluation via Behavioral Auditing

Complex questions often require multi-hop reasoning that connects facts distributed across sources or distant regions of a long context through intermediate steps. Benchmarks commonly evaluate this ability with questions built around predefined reasoning chains, treating a correct answer as evidence that the intended composition was used. Yet answer correctness alone leaves open whether success depends on the evidence associated with each intended step: models may instead rely on memorized associations, shorter paths, or partial evidence. We examine this dependence using the Behavioral Necessity Rate (BNR), which measures how often targeted evidence removal prevents answer recovery on initially correct instances. Across five existing benchmarks, panel-mean BNR ranges from 16.6% to 48.9%, exposing a substantial gap between annotated structure and observed dependence. Guided by this diagnosis, we introduce REALHOP, a diagnose-construct-verify framework that rebinds entities, factorizes selected relations, adds complete competing paths, and places evidence at traceable locations. Structural and semantic checks precede freezing; behavioral interventions follow. On 790 paired MuSiQue questions, REALHOP raises panel-mean BNR from 27.4% to 94.4% while retaining high Full accuracy. It also yields high BNR on REALHOP-FRAMES and REALHOP-LONGBENCH. On 216 long-context questions, the matched multiple-choice spread across 16 models grows from 13.9 to 59.2 points and persists under repeated open-ended evaluation. Together, these results show that a conceptually coherent chain and a correct final answer do not by themselves establish multi-hop reasoning. Verifying that success depends on every intended hop is therefore as fundamental to multi-hop evaluation as measuring answer accuracy itself.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

G$^2$PTQ: Improving LLM Post-Training Quantization with Generalized Gradient Compensation

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a practical approach to reducing the memory and computational footprint of large language models (LLMs) without retraining. GPTQ-based methods have become the de facto standard, yet they suffer from two complementary limitations. Methods with local, layer-wise objectives lack global supervision; while methods with global objectives fix their Hessian estimates at the start and ignore first-order gradients, so their guidance grows stale as quantization proceeds. This paper presents G$^2$PTQ, a unified PTQ framework with Generalized Gradient Compensation that integrates both first- and second-order information under a globally supervised, block-wise optimization objective. By refreshing gradient and Hessian estimates before quantizing each Transformer block, G$^2$PTQ avoids the staleness of prior global methods. Furthermore, to stabilize the exact first-order compensation, we introduce a trust-region scaling mechanism that dynamically bounds the gradient step to prevent exploding weight updates. Finally, we derive efficient implementations for block-wise Hessian approximation and exact gradient compensation. Experimental results on various model families and bit-widths demonstrate that G$^2$PTQ enables better alignment with the full-precision model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/G2PTQ/G2PTQ.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Enabling a Unified Cross-Domain Representation for Two-Finger Gripper Manipulation via Interaction-Centric Modeling

Achieving robust cross-embodiment generalization in imitation learning demands overcoming a critical representation flaw that inextricably entangles task semantics with hardware-specific visual geometry. We propose an interaction-centric framework that leverages the shared structure of two-finger grippers via a parameterized universal gripper abstraction, yielding a canonical gripper-frame representation. Given language and RGB-D observations, a VLM infers the subtask and grounds an interaction triplet (gripper, held, target), while SAM~2.1 tracks masks to reduce VLM queries. We design concise hybrid features that combine target/collision artificial potential fields for global guidance with segmented gripper-frame point clouds for local geometry, and use a Flow-Matching Transformer to predict smooth 7-DoF action chunks. Experiments in simulation and real-world tasks demonstrate that ours is the first imitation learning approach to simultaneously achieve competitive benchmark scores and extreme cross-embodiment/cross-viewpoint zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to completely distinct, heterogeneous robot platforms.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Global forward self-similar solutions of the spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation for cutoff Maxwell molecules

For every fixed $m>1$, we construct nonzero global forward self-similar mild solutions of the three-dimensional spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation for Maxwell molecules. We assume that the angular kernel is bounded and satisfies a weighted integrability condition at the grazing and head-on angles. The initial data are homogeneous under the kinetic scaling, singular at the origin in phase space, and have infinite mass. Their size is small in a weighted norm invariant under this scaling. We first prove a bilinear estimate for the gain operator in this norm, using free-transport coordinates and the orthogonality of the collision displacements. This estimate gives a global solution of the equation without the loss term, which bounds the lower and upper approximations in the Kaniel--Shinbrot iteration. We prove that their difference tendsto zero to arbitrarily high order at the initial time on a fixed annulus in phase space. The argument uses a finite number of iterations of the collision estimate and stops characteristics when they leave a spatial annulus. Self-similarity then gives finite mass and a finite first absolute velocity moment for the difference. Comparing its mass balance with its scaling law shows that the two limits agree. The resulting solution attains its initial trace locally in $L^\infty$ away from the origin in phase space and has infinite mass at every positive time.

math.AP↗