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Xiang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xiang Chen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Mind the Execution Gap: Action-Semantic Mismatch in World-Model Control

World-model controllers rely on action-conditioned dynamics for prediction and planning, yet real control systems often execute commands asynchronously due to communication delay, packet loss, reordering, and actuator buffering. We study how asynchronous execution changes the action semantics assumed within world-model controllers, rather than treating it only as an external control disturbance. Through controlled interventions, we identify two architecture-dependent failure modes: planning-based controllers such as TD-MPC2 suffer from a future-action timeline mismatch between imagined and executed action sequences, while recurrent world models such as DreamerV3 can attribute observed transitions to commands that were not actually applied. Our analysis shows that TD-MPC2 requires the correct future action sequence during latent dynamics rollout, whereas DreamerV3 requires timely attribution of each transition to the action that generated it. Based on these findings, we introduce two lightweight execution-consistent interfaces, Future-Sequence for TD-MPC2 and Applied-Action Feedback for DreamerV3, that correct these mismatches without modifying the pretrained world models. Experiments across delays, packet loss, reordering, multiple control domains, measured network traces, and a process-separated asynchronous stack consistently support both diagnoses and the corresponding architecture-specific corrections.

cs.AI↗

DyQ-VLA: Temporal-Dynamic-Aware Quantization for Embodied Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve favorable task performance, yet runtime errors in closed-loop execution evolve with alternating updates of actions and observations. Existing VLA quantization methods mainly trade off inference speed and model performance while rarely investigating how quantization alters runtime errors. By comparing error distributions between full-precision and quantized models, we identify distinct evolutionary patterns for the two types of errors: quantization enlarges the variance of translation error distributions and increases their dispersion, whereas the distribution center of rotation errors gradually shifts across execution steps, demonstrating cumulative drift. Motivated by this observation, we rethink the optimal quantization strategy for VLA models and propose \textit{DyQ-VLA}, a runtime-error-aware quantization framework, which dynamically selects activation precision according to execution steps and tracks as well as compensates rotation errors via accumulated quantization residuals. Corresponding operators and runtime adaptation strategies are devised within the framework to enable dynamic-precision execution. Experiments show that \textit{DyQ-VLA} achieves a 1.88 to 1.93 inference speedups while maintaining comparable or higher average task success rates. Moreover, it reduces mean execution steps by 17.7% to 19.8%. Our code is here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DyQ-VLA-7F51/.

cs.LG↗

BigMoMo: Efficient Inference of Large-Scale MoE with Speculative Decoding on Mobile Devices

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models expand language model capacity on smartphones, but expert offloading remains constrained by limited DRAM capacity and costly data movement. Sequential token routing couples expert execution to fragmented flash reads and multistage NPU preparation, leaving sparse computation stalled on weight transfers. Each transfer serves few tokens before execution moves on. We exploit the multi-token verification window of speculative decoding to decouple expert movement from single-token execution, enabling weight reuse, contiguous flash reads, and load-compute overlap. We present \textsc{BigMoMo}, a mobile MoE runtime that exploits this window across the memory hierarchy. It prunes speculative branches and expert activations using acceptance rates, routing impact, and movement cost; reorganizes on-flash experts according to runtime co-loading patterns; and batches ready experts to overlap NPU computation with pending transfers. Across four MoE models and five benchmarks on two mobile platforms, \textsc{BigMoMo} achieves mean decoding speedups of $4.83\times$ over on-demand autoregressive offloading and $1.82\times$ over the best speculative MoE baseline, supporting MoE models up to 80B parameter.

cs.AR↗

Spend Teacher Tokens Where They Matter: Success-Referenced On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) combines student-generated rollouts with dense token-level supervision from a teacher, but providing such supervision for every rollout requires substantial teacher computation. We introduce Success-Referenced On-Policy Distillation (SR-OPD), which reduces this cost by selecting which prompts and rollouts receive teacher supervision. When the student produces both successful and failed rollouts for the same prompt, a successful rollout can serve as a natural reference for selecting failed rollouts. SR-OPD therefore focuses on such prompts and prioritizes failed rollouts whose hidden-state trajectories show sustained divergence from a successful reference, while accounting for estimated teacher-input cost. Across three teacher-student pairs and six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, SR-OPD uses only 3.46-5.02% of the teacher-input tokens required by Vanilla OPD in the one-pass setting while maintaining comparable reasoning performance. Under a controlled setting matched to 5% of Vanilla OPD's teacher-input budget, further experiments support both key design choices: focusing supervision on prompts with both successful and failed rollouts, and using successful rollouts to guide failure selection. These results indicate that a student's own successful behavior can serve as a useful reference for allocating teacher supervision under a fixed teacher-input budget.

cs.AI↗

Learning Robust Personalized Prompts for LLM-Driven Sequential Recommendation

LLM-driven sequential recommendation formulates next-item prediction as autoregressive generation conditioned on natural-language prompts. However, minor wording changes in semantically equivalent prompts can cause substantial performance fluctuations, undermining robustness and requiring costly manual prompt engineering. Continuous prompt learning reduces template dependence but faces two interacting challenges: shared task-level instructions lack user-specific reasoning guidance, while gradient updates can push continuous prompts outside the LLM's effective semantic space. Injecting personalized signals can further amplify this semantic drift. To address these challenges, we propose LRPRec, a learnable prompting framework that initializes continuous instruction prompts from discrete templates and introduces two complementary mechanisms. Personalized prompt injection encodes user behavior into a preference embedding and additively injects it into shared prompts, enabling parameter-efficient user-level adaptation. A semantic drift constraint regularizes the shared prompts within a trust region around their initialization anchors to preserve semantic validity during optimization. By constraining the shared component while allowing additive personalization, LRPRec decouples stability from expressiveness. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines while eliminating the need for manual tuning of background and task inference templates.

cs.IR↗

Feynman Integrals Meet Second-Order Partial Differential Equations

We propose a second-order partial differential equation method to solve multi-loop Feynman integrals as an equilibrium problem. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we perform a Galerkin discretization of the corresponding variational form and employ the finite element method to compute two-loop four-point Feynman integrals. This method can solve the integral over a broad region of multi-dimensional phase space once and for all. This work establishes a new connection between perturbative quantum field theory and modern partial differential equation methods, with the potential to streamline a wide range of phenomenological applications.

hep-ph↗

$\mathcal F$-Transitivity of Backward Shifts on Lattice Graphs

We study $\mathcal F$-transitivity of backward shifts on finite- and infinite-width directed lattice graphs. For the unilateral and bilateral finite-width lattices on weighted $\ell^p$- or $c_0$-spaces, we obtain exact weight characterizations of $\mathcal F$- and $\widetilde{\mathcal F}$-transitivity for an arbitrary Furstenberg family $\mathcal F$. If $\mathcal F$ is finitely invariant, these conditions also characterize topological $\mathcal F$-recurrence. For the infinite quadrant lattice with radial weights on weighted $\ell^2$-spaces, a finite-dimensional reduction and sharp smallest-singular-value estimates for Pascal-type transfer matrices yield equivalent characterizations of $\mathcal F$-transitivity, hypercyclicity and mixing. This provides a partial answer, in the radial $\ell^2$-setting, to the open problem posed by Baranov, Lishanskii and Papathanasiou concerning hypercyclicity on the infinite lattice graph. Examples at the critical exponential growth rate illustrate the finer dynamical information provided by our criteria.

math.FA↗

Before the Token Commits: Trajectory-Level Benchmarking of Visual Hallucinations in Diffusion VLMs

Multimodal diffusion language models generate responses by iteratively unmasking tokens, making each answer the endpoint of a multi-step trajectory rather than an immediate commitment. Hallucination benchmarks built for autoregressive models evaluate only the final output, and therefore cannot determine whether an unsupported claim in diffusion VLMs appears late or has already stabilized before any answer token is revealed. We introduce DynaHall, a trajectory-level benchmark of annotation-backed binary visual propositions covering object existence, counting, attributes, and relations, with controlled hard negatives graded by visual prior. DynaHall is paired with a commitment-aware protocol that records the intermediate answer tendency at every unmasking step alongside the committed output. Across five diffusion VLMs from three architecture families, visual hallucination is settled before commitment: an unsupported answer is already the preferred state while the answer position is still masked, and later unmasking steps rarely reverse it, so the failure is not introduced at the write step. This holds across decoding schedules, answer formats, and open-ended generation. DynaHall also exposes failures hidden by final-output metrics, including counting and relation collapse, prior-driven false positives, and attribute errors whose direction changes by type. Guided by this diagnosis, PGS (Pre-commitment Gradient Steering) edits still-masked answer states to reduce false positives, bringing the affirmation rate close to balance, and transfers to another architecture without degrading general ability. DynaHall and PGS suggest that hallucination should be measured and mitigated along the generation trajectory of diffusion VLMs, not only at the final answer.

cs.AI↗

TTRSD: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distillation for Vision-Language Models

Test-time reinforcement learning enables vision-language models (VLMs) to adapt using unlabeled inputs. However, repeated sampling under fixed visual conditions can reinforce shared perceptual errors, while sequence-level rewards fail to isolate visual perception the foundational bottleneck that anchors multimodal reasoning risking the degradation of pre-trained reasoning capabilities. We propose TTRSD, a test-time reinforcement learning framework combining multi-view answer-level self-distillation with visual contrastive token selection. A shared policy aggregates teacher predictions across original, cropped, and downsampled views into an answer distribution. Student trajectories generated from the original image receive rewards based on the support for their final answers in this distribution. To allocate this feedback precisely toward perceptual bottlenecks, we compare the log-probabilities of the same sampled tokens under original and visually ablated inputs while holding their textual prefixes fixed, selecting visually sensitive positions for policy-gradient updates. TTRSD separates update direction, determined by group-relative advantages, from update position, determined by visual sensitivity, without requiring ground-truth labels, external verifiers, or a separate teacher. With only 20 unlabeled adaptation samples, TTRSD improves performance across seven benchmarks and three VLMs, raising InternVL3-2B's MMMU accuracy from 35.79% to 49.32%(+13.53%), demonstrating cross-dataset generalization while preserving inherent reasoning integrity.

cs.CV↗

FluidRain: Incompressible Rain Flow as an Attention Bias for Loop-in-Loop Video Deraining

Existing video deraining methods typically exploit neighboring frames through either explicit alignment or implicit spatiotemporal aggregation. Explicit alignment relies on accurate motion estimation, which can become unreliable under dense rain, while implicit aggregation avoids alignment but lacks explicit guidance on the directional and temporally coherent structure of rain. This leaves a gap between reliable temporal aggregation and explicit modeling of rain motion. To address these limitations, we propose FluidRain, a lightweight video derainer that uses divergence-free rain flow to guide Loop-in-Loop attention across scales and neighboring frames. Motivated by fluid mechanics, we model rain motion as a divergence-free image-space flow and use it to organize multi-scale and temporal aggregation. Specifically, FluidRain first estimates a rain-flow field for each frame and projects it onto the divergence-free subspace. The resulting flow steers window attention along rain streaks, enabling neighboring frames to be aggregated without explicit alignment. Since rain-flow structure is preserved across scales and nearby frames, Loop-in-Loop reuses the same attention operator across both dimensions, resulting in a three-frame model with only 0.80M parameters. Experiments on four benchmarks show that FluidRain remains competitive with substantially larger restoration models. We further examine how temporal evidence scales with different input views. To evaluate whether the model remains reliable when rain motion changes across frames, we introduce RainSyn-Gust, which injects controlled changes in rain-streak direction into existing benchmarks. We also develop a physics-based no-reference metric that evaluates real-rain removal without requiring clean targets.

cs.CV↗

Decoupling Disease, Covariates, and Individual Variability: A Unified Disentanglement Framework for Medical Image Classification

Accurately isolating disease-related features from confounding covariates (e.g., age, gender, site) and individual variations remains a fundamental challenge in medical image classification. Traditional regression-based approaches may ignore non-linear relations between image features and true covariates. To overcome this issue, we present a generalized Medical Imaging Disentanglement Learning (MedIDL) framework. MedIDL maps image features into three mutually orthogonal latent spaces through specialized disentanglement heads: a disease classification head guided by a supervised loss, a covariate-alignment head constrained by cross-subject similarity matching, and a Gaussian head absorbing individual variations. We evaluated our framework across 7 datasets encompassing diverse imaging modalities. MedIDL outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised classification methods in accuracy across all datasets. Association analyses demonstrate that MedIDL successfully isolates target-specific latent representations. Gradient-based interpretability mappings localize pathognomonic patterns aligning with established clinical literature.

cs.CV↗

Scaling Articulated Rationales for MLLM-based Recommendation

We presented SARA, an industrial framework that transforms sparse articulated user rationales into scalable recommendation signals. Its data engine curates questionnaire responses into SARA-HQ, providing explicit preference supervision for aligning SARA-7B through SFT and Quality-Refining DPO. This alignment extends rationale generation from $86{,}564$ questionnaire-covered authors to the full $10$M-author space. SARA-Ranker translates the generated positive and negative rationales into features for user--author interaction modeling and negative-feedback history modeling, connecting articulated reasons to production ranking. Evaluation on unseen authors demonstrates that SARA-7B generates more specific, relevant, and grounded rationales than the evaluated general-purpose MLLMs. On top of a strong industrial ranking baseline with multimodal features, separate online A/B tests show that positive-rationale integration increases watch time by $0.99\%$, while negative-rationale integration reduces Hate feedback by $8.16\%$. Daily refresh and more than $30$ days of production deployment further demonstrate the operational feasibility of the approach. These findings establish articulated rationales as a useful complement to behavioral and content signals, and demonstrate a practical role for MLLMs in scaling sparse human explanations into preference information that improves industrial recommendation.

cs.IR↗

Quality over Quantity: Diversity-Aware Data Selection for Efficient Verilog Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in Verilog code generation, yet existing datasets contain con siderable noise and redundancy. Prior data selection methods address only isolated quality aspects, neglect the global diversity of the training set, and cannot capture Verilog-specific structural semantics. To bridge this gap, we propose VeriSelector, the first data selection framework for Verilog code generation that jointly optimizes quality and diversity. We formulate the selec tion problem as a constrained bi-objective subset selection problem and solve it via a three-stage approximation. For quality, a multi-granularity pipeline first verifies functional correctness through testbench simulation and then filters misaligned samples via Instruction-Following Difficulty (IFD) scoring. For diversity, 109-dimensional Verilog-specific structural features (AST, CFG, and Netlist) are fused with textual embeddings for clustering-based diversity modeling. A proportional adaptive sampling strat egy then allocates per-cluster quotas guided by IFD ranks, with a provable distribution preservation guarantee. Experiments on three LLMs and three benchmarks show that VeriSelector outperforms full-dataset training and state-of-the-art baselines us ing only 20%-25% of the data, achieving Performance Retention Rates above 118% and reducing training time by over 80%. Notably, VeriSelector improves average Pass@1 by 18.49%-29.43% over full-dataset training and by 1.36%-7.95% over the best-performing baseline across all evaluated models.

cs.AR↗

Dynamics of Weighted Backward Shifts on Cesàro Spaces of Rooted Trees

We study the dynamics of weighted backward shifts on Ces`aro spaces associated with leafless locally finite rooted trees. We first characterize their boundedness in terms of adjacent level cardinalities and edge weights. We then characterize their $\mathcal{F}$-transitivity by a growth condition involving level cardinalities, products of weights along paths, and a level-dependent Ces`aro factor. As consequences, we obtain criteria for hypercyclicity, weak mixing, topological ergodicity, and topological mixing. We also characterize the existence of nonzero orbit limit points and chaotic weighted shifts, the latter in terms of normalized fixed points and unit flows satisfying an explicit summability condition. Examples show that $\mathcal{F}_{\underline{d}>0}$-transitivity need not imply frequent hypercyclicity, that a nonhypercyclic weighted shift may nevertheless have a nonzero orbit limit point, and that topological mixing need not imply chaos.

math.DS↗

SoK: Intent-Oriented Systematization of Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreaks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive settings, where user intent commonly unfolds through multi-turn dialogue. Multi-turn jailbreaks exploit this pattern by advancing a harmful intent across turns, so that no single message exposes the full objective. However, existing work treats these attacks as a loose collection of prompt patterns and does not analyze how the adversary organizes and advances harmful intent across an interaction. We develop a four-part, intent-oriented taxonomy that organizes multi-turn jailbreaks by adversarial intent structure. Through controlled ablations, we find that effectiveness is driven by how deliberately intent is organized across turns rather than by context length or query count. We further show that the way intent is organized determines the level at which it becomes detectable, pushing the required detection surface outward from the turn level to the session level to the cross-session level. These findings indicate that turn-local safety mechanisms are structurally insufficient and that single-point evaluation overlooks how intent is organized, motivating evaluation protocols aligned to the level at which harmful intent becomes observable. The code is available at: https://github.com/SiyuanLi00/INTACT.

cs.CR↗

Benchmarking Optimizers to Solve Inverse Problems with Differentiable Physics Simulators

Solving inverse problems with differentiable physics simulators holds the potential to revolutionize scientific discovery and engineering design, as it enjoys both the strict physical correctness from rigorous numerical physics simulators, and the high efficiency and effectiveness from automatic differentiation and gradient-based optimization. However, currently, this paradigm faces performance issues in optimization. In this work, we target benchmarking the performance of different optimizers to solve various inverse problems. We construct 12 differentiable physics simulators spanning physics domains including discrete mechanics, continuous mechanics, atomistic simulations, rendering, and semi-empirical physics models. Based on these simulators, we design corresponding inverse problems that can be categorized into parameter identification, inverse design, and optimal control. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of different optimizers, including regular first-order methods, approximate second-order methods, as well as global optimizers, on these inverse problems, and analyze the results to provide insights on how to choose and design optimizers for differentiable programming. We hope such benchmarks can inspire the development of more effective optimizers, and further promote the applications of differentiable programming in various scientific and engineering domains.

cs.LG↗

High-Temperature ferromagnetism from site-selective filling in (Fe,Ni)$_{6-δ}$GeTe$_2$

The discovery of high-temperature ferromagnetism in the metallic van der Waals (vdW) system Fe$_N$GeTe$_2$ has brought two-dimensional (2D) magnets into technologically relevant temperature scales. Specifically at N = 5, dilution of magnetic moments by nickel substitution counterintuitively achieves a record high Curie temperature of 478~K. Unraveling the origin of this nickel-substitution-induced enhancement is complicated by the compound's structural complexity, coexistent itinerant and local magnetic contributions, and mesoscopic compositional domains. Through coordinated structural and electronic characterization, we identify that the high-T$_C$ magnetic phase arises from a strain-stabilized Fe$_6$GeTe$_2$ nano-precipitate. Combining first-principles calculations and spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), we uncover a site-specific electronic landscape in which interior iron atoms primarily host localized moments while the outer iron atoms neighboring the tellurium layers produce spin-polarized itinerant carriers that cross the vdW gap. The large energy cost associated with homogeneous nickel substitution is found to favor the spontaneous precipitation of the crystallographically and electronically ``clean'' high-T$_C$ phase. Finally, we compare metal-rich vdW magnets with binary magnetic alloys, and discuss the unifying roles of nano-precipitates in stabilizing otherwise unattainable bulk phases. Our work provides mechanistic insights into the record-high T$_C$ ferromagnetism in (Fe,Ni)$_{5+δ}$GeTe$_2$, establishing a rigorous foundation for the atomic engineering of vdW magnetic metals informed by direct electronic signatures.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Take What You Need: Flexible Multi-Task Semantic Communications with Channel Adaptation

The growing demand for efficient semantic communication systems capable of managing diverse tasks and adapting to fluctuating channel conditions has driven the development of robust, resource-efficient frameworks. This article introduces a novel channel-adaptive and multi-task-aware semantic communication framework based on a masked auto-encoder architecture. Our framework optimizes the transmission of meaningful information by incorporating a multi-task-aware scoring mechanism that identifies and prioritizes semantically significant data across multiple concurrent tasks. A channel-aware extractor is employed to dynamically select relevant information in response to real-time channel conditions. By jointly optimizing semantic relevance and transmission efficiency, the framework ensures minimal performance degradation under resource constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our framework compared to conventional methods in tasks such as image reconstruction and object detection. These results underscore the framework's adaptability to heterogeneous channel environments and its scalability for multi-task applications, positioning it as a promising solution for next-generation semantic communication networks.

cs.CV↗