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Xu Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Zhang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

ScaleAcross Explorer: Exploring Communication Optimization for Scale-Across AI Model Training

The rapid scaling of large language model training requires distributing GPU resources across multiple data center buildings and regions. We refer to such paradigm as "scale-across" training. As infrastructure expands, the system design space becomes increasingly intricate, encompassing new model architectures, hardware heterogeneity, and evolving communication patterns. Drawing from Meta's production experience, we highlight the complexities of deploying training jobs across a few data centers housing hundreds of thousands of GPUs. To accelerate exploration of the large design space and to enable efficient training for frontier model development, we conduct in-depth characterization of three key design dimensions: parallelism placement, parallelism scheduling, and network layer technologies. We then propose ScaleAcross Explorer, an optimizer that considers the interplay of design dimensions and holistically optimizes scale-across training. Testbed experiments and simulations demonstrate up to 64.62% training speedups over production configuration and up to 37.59% training speedups over the state-of-the-art baseline across a wide range of design points.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Frenet Immersed Finite Element Spaces on Triangular Meshes

In this paper, we develop geometry-conforming immersed finite element (IFE) spaces on triangular meshes for elliptic interface problems. The construction is built on a Frenet-Serret mapping that transforms a smooth interface curve into a straight line, so that the interface jump conditions can be imposed exactly. Extending the framework of [9] from rectangular meshes to triangular meshes, we introduce three types of high-order Frenet-IFE constructions: an initial construction using monomial bases, a general construction using orthogonal polynomials, and reconstructed IFE bases designed to improve the conditioning of the mass matrix. The approximation properties of these new IFE spaces are investigated through extensive numerical experiments. We also incorporate the new IFE spaces into interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods for solving elliptic interface problems, and demonstrate optimal convergence rates in $H^1$- and $L^2$- norms.

math.NA↗
arXiv2026

Exploiting Multicast for Accelerating Collective Communication

Reducing collective communication latency is a critical goal for large model training and inference in both academia and industry. Many-to-many communications, such as AllGather and AlltoAll (dispatch), are core components of modern parallelization strategies. State-of-the-art implementations of these communications rely on unicast-based writes and transmit duplicate copies of the same data across physical links for multiple receivers. This redundant transmission congests network bottlenecks and degrades end-to-end latency. We present MultiWrite, a novel many-to-many transmission semantic that eliminates redundant packets to directly reduce operator latency. MultiWrite adopts multicast principles while addressing critical limitations of traditional multicast for AI workloads. These limitations include heavy management plane overhead and ecosystem compatibility issues. We implement MultiWrite on Ascend NPUs. Long-term stress tests demonstrate that our MultiWrite-based operators achieve up to 33% latency reduction on commercially deployed devices.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

DUET: Unified Dual-Space Emotion Control for Diffusion and Flow-Matching Driven Text-to-Speech

Diffusion and flow-matching based text-to-speech (TTS) models excel in naturalness but often lack explicit emotion control, as emotional signals remain entangled with speaker identity. We discover that emotion embedding emerges as a linearly decodable direction of frozen hidden states, nearly orthogonal to the direction embedding speaker identity. This inspires a plug-and-play framework DUET for emotion control over pretrained diffusion and flow-matching based TTS models. During generation, DUET unifies dual-space control to achieve fine-grained emotion intervention in a single per-step update: hidden space steering shifts generation along the target emotion direction, while mel-space guidance refines spectral details through gradients backpropagated from a differentiable vocoder. We validate DUET on five architecturally diverse pretrained TTS backbones across three datasets, where it outperforms 10 supervised state-of-the-art emotional TTS baselines across paradigms and achieves the highest human-rated emotion appropriateness. To further showcase its qualitative behavior, we deploy DUET on an Ameca humanoid robot, where it produces richly expressive emotional speech on the humanoid, demonstrating the strong potential for plug-and-play affective interaction for embodied agents.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Self-Filtered Distillation with LLMs-generated Trust Indicators for Reliable Patent Classification

Organizing large-scale patent corpora according to classification schemes is a core information management task that determines the accuracy and efficiency of prior art retrieval, technology knowledge discovery, and intellectual property decision-making. Recent approaches distill natural language rationales generated by large language models (LLMs) into compact student models, yet logical errors, label mismatches, and taxonomy misalignments inherent in these rationales are indiscriminately absorbed during training, undermining classification reliability and propagating errors throughout downstream information processes. Rather than correcting such errors post-hoc, we propose Self-Filtered Distillation (SFD), which embeds quality assurance directly into the learning process by reinterpreting LLM-generated rationales as trust indicators rather than ground-truth supervision. SFD integrates three unsupervised signals into a unified trust score that dynamically modulates each training instance's contribution: Self-Consistency, which quantifies agreement among independently generated rationales; Class Entailment Alignment, which evaluates semantic coherence between a rationale and its assigned CPC class definition; and LLM Agreement Scoring, which assesses external plausibility through an independent verifier. On the USPTO-2M benchmark comprising over two million patents, SFD achieves up to 38.7\% relative improvement in Macro-F1 across four student architectures, and the strong correlation between trust scores and expert judgments ($r = 0.685$) confirms that the framework provides not only accurate predictions but also decomposable confidence semantics that enable auditable and self-documenting classification outcomes for large-scale patent knowledge organization.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

InterLight: Leveraging Intrinsic Illumination Priors for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) has long been a challenging problem in low-level vision, as insufficient illumination often leads to low contrast, detail loss, and noise. Recent studies show that deep learning-based Retinex theory can effectively decouple illumination and reflectance. However, existing methods frequently suffer from over-enhancement or color distortion, and often assume uniform noise or ideal lighting. To address these limitations, we propose InterLight, a novel framework that systematically excavates and operationalizes intrinsic illumination priors for LLIE.Our core insight is that robust enhancement requires not just estimating illumination, but constructing an illumination-aware pipeline. We first inject sensor-level illumination-response priors via physics-guided augmentation, then represent the degradation through adaptive prompts conditioned on the scene's latent illumination state. This explicit representation directly guides a luminance-gated intrinsic memory mechanism to selectively compensate for information loss, prioritizing reconstruction in dark regions while preserving fidelity in bright ones. Finally, the entire process is regularized by a self-supervised consistency objective that distills illumination-invariant features. By deeply exploiting intrinsic illumination priors, our method achieves clearer textures and more visually coherent enhancement results. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/House-yuyu/InterLight.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

A Priori Error Analysis of a High-Order Selective Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Elliptic Interface Problems

This paper develops a high-order selective discontinuous Galerkin (SDG) method for solving elliptic interface problems on interface-unfitted Cartesian meshes. This method applies the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) formulation on interface elements and the continuous Galerkin (CG) formulation elsewhere. Correspondingly, we construct a new, locally conforming, hybrid immersed finite element (HIFE) space based on the high-order Frenet IFE basis functions of [1]. Compared with the DG method, the computational cost of this SDG method is significantly reduced and remains comparable to that of the CG method. We prove that the new HIFE space achieves optimal approximation under $h$-refinement, and we establish the well-posedness of the SDG scheme. {\it A priori} error estimates are derived in the energy and $L^2$ norms. Numerical examples are provided to verify the theoretical analysis.

math.NA↗
arXiv2026

Quantum Monte Carlo fermion spectroscopy of a non-compact CP$^1$ model

We study a model describing electrons coupled to anti-ferromagnetic spin fluctuations, and consider the situation where hedgehog defects in the order parameter field are suppressed. Without hedgehogs, the bosonic sector of the theory can be taken to realize the physics of the non-compact CP$^1$ theory with a deconfined U$(1)$ gauge field. After strongly coupling the boson to fermion spins, we simulate the single-particle spectral properties of a hedgehog-suppressed electron-boson model defined on a bilayer square lattice with Quantum Monte Carlo, and interpret the results in terms of an effective theory with fractionalized spinon and chargon excitations. As one of our main results we show that the electron gap on top of the half-filled insulator with gapless photon fluctuations closely resembles the mean-field dispersion of an electron in an anti-ferromagnetic spin background, even though the system fully preserves both the translation and spin rotation symmetry. Finally, we discuss potential implications of our results for the high-temperature superconductors.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2026

UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection

Underwater salient object detection (USOD) plays a vital role in marine vision tasks but remains fundamentally challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as selective absorption and medium scattering. Conventional pipelines typically adopt a sequential "enhance-then-detect" paradigm. However, isolating low-level visual restoration from high-level semantic perception often leads to semantic inconsistency, where the restored images may not be optimal for detection and can even introduce task-irrelevant noise. To break this sequential bottleneck, we propose UniV2D, a Unified Vision-to-Detection Network that jointly optimizes visual restoration and salient object detection within a mutually beneficial framework. Unlike traditional methods that rely on disjointed pipelines or rigid physical priors, UniV2D introduces a semantic-driven learning paradigm: high-level saliency semantics actively guide the restoration process, while the restored visual cues reciprocally enhance saliency perception. Specifically, UniV2D features a hierarchical dual-branch architecture. It first employs a self-calibrated decoder to predict initial saliency masks alongside a mask-aware restoration module to reconstruct image content. Subsequently, a saliency-guided refinement module equipped with cross-level modulation is utilized to align structural fidelity with semantic consistency. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniV2D significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, establishing a new standard for joint underwater perception.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CrossGuard: Safeguarding MLLMs against Joint-Modal Implicit Malicious Attacks

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong reasoning and perception capabilities but are increasingly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. While existing work focuses on explicit attacks, where malicious content resides in a single modality, recent studies reveal implicit attacks, in which benign text and image inputs jointly express unsafe intent. Such joint-modal threats are difficult to detect and remain underexplored, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality implicit data. We propose ImpForge, an automated red-teaming pipeline that leverages reinforcement learning with tailored reward modules to generate diverse implicit samples across 14 domains. Building on this dataset, we further develop CrossGuard, an intent-aware safeguard providing robust and comprehensive defense against both explicit and implicit threats. Extensive experiments across safe and unsafe benchmarks, implicit and explicit attacks, and multiple out-of-domain settings demonstrate that CrossGuard significantly outperforms existing defenses, including advanced MLLMs and guardrails, achieving stronger security while maintaining high utility. This offers a balanced and practical solution for enhancing MLLM robustness against real-world multimodal threats. Our code is released: https://github.com/ZhangXu0963/CrossGuard.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

OmniOVCD: Streamlining Open-Vocabulary Change Detection with SAM 3

Change Detection (CD) is a fundamental task in remote sensing. It monitors the evolution of land cover over time. Based on this, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) introduces a new requirement. It aims to reduce the reliance on predefined categories. Existing training-free OVCD methods mostly use CLIP to identify categories. These methods also need extra models like DINO to extract features. However, combining different models often causes problems in matching features and makes the system unstable. Recently, the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) is introduced. It integrates segmentation and identification capabilities within one promptable model, which offers new possibilities for the OVCD task. In this paper, we propose OmniOVCD, a standalone framework designed for OVCD. By leveraging the decoupled output heads of SAM 3, we propose a Synergistic Fusion to Instance Decoupling (SFID) strategy. SFID first fuses the semantic, instance, and presence outputs of SAM 3 to construct land-cover masks, and then decomposes them into individual instance masks for change comparison. This design preserves high accuracy in category recognition and maintains instance-level consistency across images. As a result, the model can generate accurate change masks. Experiments on four public benchmarks (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, S2Looking, and SECOND) demonstrate SOTA performance, achieving IoU scores of 67.2, 66.5, 24.5, and 27.1 (class-average), respectively, surpassing all previous methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Erxucomeon/OmniOVCD.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Observation of anomalous thermal Hall effect in altermagnets

Altermagnets, recently proposed as a third category of collinear magnets, combine the features of zero net magnetization in antiferromagnets and the spin splitting in ferromagnets. While abundant spectroscopic evidence for altermagnetism has been reported, experimental observation of the anomalous Hall effect, a hallmark of ferromagnetism, remains scarce. Here, we shift the paradigm from charge to heat carriers and report the systematic study of the thermal Hall effect in two representative altermagnet candidates, MnTe and CrSb. In both materials, we observe a pronounced anomalous phonon thermal Hall signal, with no electrical counterpart observed, attributed to the coupling of this distinctive magnetic structure with phonons. Our findings establish the anomalous phonon thermal Hall effect as an intrinsic feature of altermagnets, and provide a sensitive probe to identify this new kind of quantum magnets. The anomalous phonon thermal Hall effect in altermagnets directly links the Néel vector to lattice vibrations, opening prospects for low-loss phononic devices and thermally readable memories.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Fast-then-Fine: A Two-Stage Framework with Multi-Granular Representation for Cross-Modal Retrieval in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing (RS) image-text retrieval plays a critical role in understanding massive RS imagery. However, the dense multi-object distribution and complex backgrounds in RS imagery make it difficult to simultaneously achieve fine-grained cross-modal alignment and efficient retrieval. Existing methods either rely on complex cross-modal interactions that lead to low retrieval efficiency, or depend on large-scale vision-language model pre-training, which requires massive data and computational resources. To address these issues, we propose a fast-then-fine (FTF) two-stage retrieval framework that decomposes retrieval into a text-agnostic recall stage for efficient candidate selection and a text-guided rerank stage for fine-grained alignment. Specifically, in the recall stage, text-agnostic coarse-grained representations are employed for efficient candidate selection; in the rerank stage, a parameter-free balanced text-guided interaction block enhances fine-grained alignment without introducing additional learnable parameters. Furthermore, an inter- and intra-modal loss is designed to jointly optimize cross-modal alignment across multi-granular representations. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that the FTF achieves competitive retrieval accuracy while significantly improving retrieval efficiency compared with existing methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Bridging Semantics and Geometry: A Decoupled LVLM-SAM Framework for Reasoning Segmentation in Optical Remote Sensing

Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) hold great promise for advancing optical remote sensing (RS) analysis, yet existing reasoning segmentation frameworks couple linguistic reasoning and pixel prediction through end-to-end supervised fine-tuning, leading to weak geometric grounding and limited generalization across tasks. To address this, we developed Think2Seg-RS, a decoupled framework that trains an LVLM prompter to control a frozen Segment Anything Model (SAM) via structured geometric prompts. Through a mask-only Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning objective driven strictly by final mask IoU, the LVLM learns to translate abstract semantic reasoning into spatially grounded actions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the EarthReason dataset. Notably, Think2Seg-RS outperforms leading approaches such as RemoteReasoner and SegEarth-R1 on the EarthReason dataset by reaching a test cIoU of 75.60% and gIoU of 73.36%, yielding absolute improvements of 6.47% and 2.40% over the strongest baseline, respectively. Zero-shot evaluations across three referring segmentation benchmarks reveal a fundamental distinction in task inductive bias, exposing a distinct divide between semantic-level grounding -- which aggregates all regions matching a conceptual intent -- and instance-level tasks that demand discrete object separation. We further found that compact segmenters outperform larger ones under semantic-level supervision by mitigating textural over-segmentation, and that unconstrained negative prompting is unstable in heterogeneous aerial backgrounds. Together, these findings demonstrate that optimizing LVLMs through direct segmentation feedback offers a scalable framework for complex geospatial reasoning, effectively bridging the gap between abstract language understanding and precise pixel-level execution.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LoViF 2026 Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper presents a review for the LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aimed to advance research on real-world all-in-one image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provided a unified benchmark to evaluate the robustness and generalization ability of restoration models across multiple degradation categories within a common framework. The competition attracted 124 registered participants and received 9 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of real-world all-in-one image restoration. This report provides a detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results, emphasizing recent progress in unified real-world image restoration. The analysis highlights effective approaches and establishes a benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DynaFix: Iterative Automated Program Repair Driven by Execution-Level Dynamic Information

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to automatically generate correct patches for buggy programs. Recent approaches leveraging large language models (LLMs) have shown promise but face limitations. Most rely solely on static analysis, ignoring runtime behaviors. Some attempt to incorporate dynamic signals, but these are often restricted to training or fine-tuning, or injected only once into the repair prompt, without iterative use. This fails to fully capture program execution. Current iterative repair frameworks typically rely on coarse-grained feedback, such as pass/fail results or exception types, and do not leverage fine-grained execution-level information effectively. As a result, models struggle to simulate human stepwise debugging, limiting their effectiveness in multi-step reasoning and complex bug repair. To address these challenges, we propose DynaFix, an execution-level dynamic information-driven APR method that iteratively leverages runtime information to refine the repair process. In each repair round, DynaFix captures execution-level dynamic information such as variable states, control-flow paths, and call stacks, transforming them into structured prompts to guide LLMs in generating candidate patches. If a patch fails validation, DynaFix re-executes the modified program to collect new execution information for the next attempt. This iterative loop incrementally improves patches based on updated feedback, similar to the stepwise debugging practices of human developers. We evaluate DynaFix on the Defects4J v1.2 and v2.0 benchmarks. DynaFix repairs 186 single-function bugs, a 10% improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, including 38 bugs previously unrepaired. It achieves correct patches within at most 35 attempts, reducing the patch search space by 70% compared with existing methods, thereby demonstrating both effectiveness and efficiency in repairing complex bugs.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Scores: Diagnostic LLM Evaluation via Fine-Grained Abilities

Current evaluations of large language models aggregate performance across diverse tasks into single scores. This obscures fine-grained ability variation, limiting targeted model improvement and ability-guided selection for specific tasks. Motivated by this gap, we propose a cognitive diagnostic framework that estimates model abilities across multiple fine-grained dimensions. For mathematics, we construct a 35-dimensional ability taxonomy grounded in cognitive theory and domain knowledge. The framework employs multidimensional Item Response Theory with an item-ability association matrix to estimate fine-grained ability levels, which in turn enable prediction of performance on unseen items (questions of benchmark). Evaluated on 41 models, our approach demonstrates strong criterion validity, consistent ability estimates across benchmarks, and accurate prediction of unseen items with AUC ranging from 0.80 to 0.89 within benchmarks and from 0.77 to 0.86 across benchmarks, substantially exceeding trivial baselines. The framework generalizes across scientific domains, producing consistent diagnostic performance in physics (27 dimensions), chemistry (58 dimensions), and computer science (12 dimensions). This work establishes a principled framework for fine-grained assessment of abilities, with potential applications in targeted training, ability-guided model selection, and ability-aware benchmark design.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

BiT-MCTS: A Theme-based Bidirectional MCTS Approach to Chinese Fiction Generation

Generating long-form linear fiction from open-ended themes remains a major challenge for large language models, which frequently fail to guarantee global structure and narrative diversity when using premise-based or linear outlining approaches. We present BiT-MCTS, a theme-driven framework that operationalizes a "climax-first, bidirectional expansion" strategy motivated by Freytag's Pyramid. Given a theme, our method extracts a core dramatic conflict and generates an explicit climax, then employs a bidirectional Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to expand the plot backward (rising action, exposition) and forward (falling action, resolution) to produce a structured outline. A final generation stage realizes a complete narrative from the refined outline. We construct a Chinese theme corpus for evaluation and conduct extensive experiments across three contemporary LLM backbones. Results show that BiT-MCTS improves narrative coherence, plot structure, and thematic depth relative to strong baselines, while enabling substantially longer, more coherent stories according to automatic metrics and human judgments.

cs.CL↗