arXiv subjects

Xuan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xuan Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

MMEB-V3: Measuring the Performance Gaps of Omni-Modality Embedding Models

Multimodal embedding models aim to map heterogeneous inputs, such as text, images, videos, and audio, into a shared semantic space. However, existing methods and benchmarks remain largely limited to partial modality coverage, making it difficult to systematically evaluate full-modality representation learning. In this work, we take a step toward the full-modality setting. We introduce MMEB-V3, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates embeddings across text, image, video, audio, as well as agent-centric scenarios. To enable more fine-grained diagnosis, we further construct OmniSET (Omni-modality Semantic Equivalence Tuples), where semantically equivalent instances are represented across modalities, allowing us to disentangle semantic similarity from modality effects. Through experiments on MMEB-V3, we conduct a systematic analysis of full-modality embeddings and identify three key findings: (1) models often fail to retrieve the intended target modality; (2) cross-modal retrieval is highly asymmetric and dominated by query-modality bias; and (3) instruction-induced shifts are either insufficient or misaligned with the target modality, and therefore do not reliably improve retrieval. These results indicate that current multimodal embeddings are not yet capable of reliably enforcing modality constraints specified by instructions, and consequently fail to exhibit consistent modality-aware retrieval behavior. We hope MMEB-V3 provides a useful benchmark for understanding and diagnosing these limitations, and for guiding future research on full-modality embeddings.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Knowledge before Reasoning: EC-Reason-Bench, a Training-Free Diagnostic Benchmark for LLM Enzyme Classification

Enzyme function prediction is a hierarchical, knowledge-intensive form of protein function classification. Existing benchmarks expose an anomaly: general LLMs often get the coarse first level right, yet once asked for a complete EC number their accuracy at levels two through four drops to almost zero, while specialized models and tools stay usable. We propose EC-Reason-Bench, a training-free, diagnostic evaluation protocol built to answer two questions: why general LLMs score close to nothing on EC number prediction, and how much of that loss can be recovered without updating a single weight. We break enzyme classification ability into four orthogonal levers that can each be measured on their own: output structure, external knowledge, reasoning structure, and reasoning robustness. We test each lever with an inference-time method against a shared zero-shot baseline reproducing previously reported near-zero performance. Experiments with several strong reasoning LLMs yield four main findings. First, external knowledge is decisive and must precede reasoning: uniformly low closed-book performance rises sharply with open-book access, narrowing model gaps. Second, in closed-book settings, whether cascading and chain-of-thought help or hurt depends on a model's tendency to abstain. Third, once evidence is available the aggregate score of the best LLM setting is indistinguishable from simply voting the EC numbers of the nearest retrieved neighbors; that tie is an artifact of averaging, and it hides a large gain on adversarial evidence set against an equally large loss on multi-functional enzymes. Reasoning over evidence therefore acts as an arbiter of conflicting neighbors rather than as a source of knowledge, and no single-number leaderboard can see it. Fourth, accuracy obeys a law of homology availability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MPP-GNN: Subject-Adaptive Community Detection for fMRI-Based Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a widely used technique for studying the brain. Recent methods that utilize graph neural networks (GNNs) for analysis of brain functional connectivity have shown great potential for the classification of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, these methods often assume a preset number of functional modules across all subjects, which overlooks inter-subject variability. In addition, the discovered modules are rarely used to directly guide the learned connectivity patterns. Here, to address these issues, we propose a Meta Probabilistic Pooling GNN (MPP-GNN). We frame the model's task as a coupled, bilevel optimization that performs adaptive graph partitioning hierarchically to discover subject-specific modules and then uses the discovered brain modules as an explicit prior to guide edge refinement and representation learning. We validate MPP-GNN on two public datasets for AD classification, achieving the highest AUC in comparison to established baselines for both datasets. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that MPP-GNN shows significant alignment with the canonical functional-network organization defined by the Yeo brain atlas and reveals a network-level dedifferentiation pattern for AD.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Internalizing the Future: A Unified Agentic Training Paradigm for World Model Planning

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capability in sequential decision-making, yet they remains fundamentally reactive in long-horizon tasks. Unlike humans who employ "what-if" reasoning to evaluate potential plans before commitment, standard agents lack an internal world model to simulate future outcomes. Therefore, we propose to internalize future-aware planning by training a single autoregressive model to verbalize both a prospective state rollout and a plan-conditioned success estimate-a textual analogue of the Q-value. Crucially, we identify a format-capability gap: simply fine-tuning agents on look-ahead traces during post-training leads to superficial mimicry of foresight without genuine predictive grounding. To bridge this gap, we introduce a three-stage training paradigm: (i) World Model Agentic Mid-Training (WM-AMT) to inject latent predictive capabilities into the policy; (ii) Format-Eliciting SFT (FE-SFT) to structure this injected capability; and (iii) Foresight-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (FC-RL) to refine the calibration and utility of the generated simulations. Evaluated on search and mathematical reasoning tasks, our approach consistently outperforms other training baselines. Our results demonstrate that effective internal world modeling in LLM agents requires a capability-first training pipeline to achieve grounded and calibrated foresight.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SuperCarver: Texture-Consistent 3D Geometry Super-Resolution for High-Fidelity Surface Detail Generation

Conventional production workflow of high-precision mesh assets necessitates a cumbersome and laborious process of manual sculpting by specialized 3D artists/modelers. The recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in AI-empowered 3D content creation for generating plausible structures and intricate appearances from images or text prompts. However, synthesizing realistic surface details still poses great challenges, and enhancing the geometry fidelity of existing lower-quality 3D meshes (instead of image/text-to-3D generation) remains an open problem. In this paper, we introduce SuperCarver, a 3D geometry super-resolution pipeline for supplementing texture-consistent surface details onto a given coarse mesh. We start by rendering the original textured mesh into the image domain from multiple viewpoints. To achieve detail boosting, we construct a deterministic prior-guided normal diffusion model, which is fine-tuned on a carefully curated dataset of paired detail-lacking and detail-rich normal map renderings. To update mesh surfaces from potentially imperfect normal map predictions, we design a noise-resistant inverse rendering scheme through deformable distance field. Experiments demonstrate that our SuperCarver is capable of generating realistic and expressive surface details depicted by the actual texture appearance, making it a powerful tool to both upgrade historical low-quality 3D assets and reduce the workload of sculpting high-poly meshes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models

This report of world models distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost human-like cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles from human and machine cognition theory. In moving towards human-like world models we present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions (i.e., memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and metacognition) and identify gaps in existing research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and metacognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions to address these gaps informed by active inference and global workspace theory. We also introduce epistemic world models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied to video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Knowledge Index of Noah's Ark

Knowledge benchmarks for LLMs face three issues: scaling-driven designs that do not operationalize disciplinary representativeness; flat-payment annotation that permits lazy consensus; and unaudited ranking instability under bounded test budgets. We introduce KINA, an 899-item benchmark across 261 fine-grained disciplines, with two formal results. First, we cast representativeness as a coverage-style objective over expert-elicited anchors and operationalize disciplinary representativeness through a proxy, yielding a (1-1/e) greedy approximation (Proposition 1); the guarantee applies to the proxy, not to population representativeness. Second, we prove a bonus-on-bar tournament weakly FOSD-dominates flat payment in released-review quality, with incentive-compatibility threshold B > Delta C / Delta p_min (Theorem 1). Evaluating 42 models from 13 labs, the top model, Gemini-3.1-Pro-Preview, reaches 53.17%, followed by Claude-Opus-4.6 at 49.92% and GPT-5.4 at 48.55%, leaving substantial headroom below saturation. The full leaderboard shows a tiered structure rather than a smooth total order: a small frontier tier lies above 48%, a dense strong-model tier spans roughly 38-45%, and low-performing models remain only modestly above the 10% chance baseline. Tool augmentation adds up to 5.17 points across the five tool-use evaluations, with gains varying substantially across models. We report bootstrap ranking-stability statistics to make bounded-budget variance explicit and to discourage over-interpretation of adjacent ranks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Reducing the Filtering Effect in Public School Admissions: A Bias-aware Analysis for Targeted Interventions

Problem definition: Traditionally, New York City's top 8 public schools have selected candidates solely based on their scores in the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). These scores are known to be impacted by socioeconomic status of students and test preparation received in middle schools, leading to a massive filtering effect in the education pipeline. The classical mechanisms for assigning students to schools do not naturally address problems like school segregation and class diversity, which have worsened over the years. The scientific community, including policymakers, have reacted by incorporating group-specific quotas and proportionality constraints, with mixed results. The problem of finding effective and fair methods for broadening access to top-notch education is still unsolved. Methodology/results: We take an operations approach to the problem different from most established literature, with the goal of increasing opportunities for students with high economic needs. Using data from the Department of Education (DOE) in New York City, we show that there is a shift in the distribution of scores obtained by students that the DOE classifies as "disadvantaged" (following criteria mostly based on economic factors). We model this shift as a "bias" that results from an underestimation of the true potential of disadvantaged students. We analyze the impact this bias has on an assortative matching market. We show that centrally planned interventions can significantly reduce the impact of bias through scholarships or training, when they target the segment of disadvantaged students with average performance.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Prediction of SO(3)-Equivariant Hamiltonian Matrices via SO(2) Local Frames

We consider the task of predicting Hamiltonian matrices to accelerate electronic structure calculations, which plays an important role in physics, chemistry, and materials science. Motivated by the inherent relationship between the off-diagonal blocks of the Hamiltonian matrix and the SO(2) local frame, we propose a novel and efficient network, called QHNetV2, that achieves global SO(3) equivariance without the costly SO(3) Clebsch-Gordan tensor products. This is achieved by introducing a set of new efficient and powerful SO(2)-equivariant operations and performing all off-diagonal feature updates and message passing within SO(2) local frames, thereby eliminating the need of SO(3) tensor products. Moreover, a continuous SO(2) tensor product is performed within the SO(2) local frame at each node to fuse node features, mimicking the symmetric contraction operation. Extensive experiments on the large QH9 and MD17 datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance across a wide range of molecular structures and trajectories, highlighting its strong generalization capability. The proposed SO(2) operations on SO(2) local frames offer a promising direction for scalable and symmetry-aware learning of electronic structures. Our code will be released as part of the AIRS library https://github.com/divelab/AIRS.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Dr. DocBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Expert-Level and Difficult Document Parsing

Document parsing and recognition are fundamental capabilities for vision-language models (VLMs) and document processing systems. However, existing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document parsing benchmarks are increasingly limited in coverage and difficulty: many focus on common document genres or uniformly sampled pages where modern parsers already perform strongly, while offering limited annotation for expert-domain structures such as chemical formula, music notation, complex tables, and cross-page layouts. We introduce Dr. DocBench, a difficulty-aware benchmark for expert-level document parsing. Built from a large-scale multilingual book corpus, Dr. DocBench spans 52 BISAC subject domains and selects challenging documents through parser-failure-based sampling, targeting cases where multiple state-of-the-art systems struggle. It contains 4,514 annotated pages from long documents averaging around 100 pages, with 65k high-quality page- and block-level annotations for layout, reading order, hierarchical relations, and domain-specific visual contents. Evaluations of pipeline-based parsers and general-purpose VLMs show that strong performance on existing benchmarks does not transfer to our expert-level document parsing. Our analysis reveals substantial failures across subjects, content types, and structural attributes, highlighting Dr. DocBench as a comprehensive testbed for diagnosing and advancing document intelligence.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

IntentionNav: A Benchmark for Intent-Driven Object Navigation from Implicit Human Instruction

Existing object navigation benchmarks usually tell an embodied agent which object category to find, such as microwave or chair. Human-facing embodied AI is often asked something less direct: "I need something to warm this food" or "the room feels stuffy." The agent must infer the object that can satisfy the need, find a scene-grounded instance, and decide whether the goal has been reached. We study this setting as intent-driven object navigation and introduce IntentionNav, a diagnostic benchmark for active object search from implicit human instructions. Each episode provides a free-text intent, RGB-D observations, and pose, but withholds the target object name. IntentionNav contains 500 intents over 176 Isaac Sim scenes and 64 target categories. Each intent is rewritten in four controlled instruction styles and annotated with one of four intent modes, separating surface phrasing from semantic cue type under matched geometry. This paired design supports analysis of target inference, language robustness, neighborhood reachability, and terminal success rather than only aggregate success. We evaluated three VLMs using a fixed active-navigation agent. Models identify the intended target in 48.3 percent of episodes and enter its 2 m neighborhood in 68.7 percent, but terminate successfully in only 24.9 percent and achieve grounded 1 m success in 5.5 percent. Success is highest for event-script intents (28.7 percent) and lower for physical-state and affordance intents (19.2 percent and 18.5 percent), showing that indirect human intent remains a bottleneck for target selection, visual verification, and terminal localization in active embodied search.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Deep Learning-Based Automated Quantification of TIMI Myocardial Perfusion Frame Count (DL-TMPFC) from Coronary Angiography: A Novel Framework for Rapid Assessment of Microvascular Dysfunction

Aims: Coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMVD) affects approximately 40%-60% of patients with ischemia and non-obstructive coronary arteries, yet diagnosis remains challenging due to reliance on invasive functional testing or subjective Thrombolysis In Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) flow grade. The TIMI Myocardial Perfusion Frame Count (TMPFC) offers an objective, angiography-based quantitative measure of CMVD, but its clinical translation is hindered by cumbersome manual calculation and insufficient validation. This study aims to develop and validate a deep learning-powered TMPFC calculation (DL-TMPFC), enabling integration into clinical workflows. Methods and results: DL-TMPFC framework comprised two components. A stenosis detection network first excluded obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD). A territory-aware segmentation network then identified perfusion territories and TMPFC calculation module automatically determined the first and last frames from angiographic sequences. The framework was validated in a cohort of 655 patients (445 of obstructive CAD, 100 of confirmed CMVD, 110 of control group) from three independent institutions. DL-TMPFC showed excellent agreement with expert manual measurements (bias: -0.93 frames; 95% LoA: -5.33 to +3.47; r =0.98). DL-TMPFC markedly enhanced clinical feasibility by fully automating TMPFC and removing observer dependence. Clinically, DL-TMPFC accurately identified CMVD across a full spectrum of coronary pathologies and captured the continuous severity of CMVD beyond binary classification, enabling quantitative risk stratification. Conclusion: DL-TMPFC enabled automatic, standardized, and accurate quantification of CMVD directly from routine angiography. By providing an automatic and objective measure, this tool provided immediate diagnostic information for timely recognition and management of CMVD in clinical practice.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LightTransfer: Your Long-Context LLM is Secretly a Hybrid Model with Effortless Adaptation

Scaling language models to handle longer contexts introduces substantial memory challenges due to the growing cost of key-value (KV) caches. Motivated by the efficiency gains of hybrid models and the broad availability of pretrained large transformer backbones, we explore transitioning transformer models into hybrid architectures for a more efficient generation. In this work, we propose LightTransfer, a lightweight method that transforms models such as LLaMA into hybrid variants. Our approach identifies lazy layers -- those focusing on recent or initial tokens -- and replaces their full attention with streaming attention. This transformation can be performed without any training for long-context understanding tasks or with minimal fine-tuning for o1-like long reasoning generation tasks that require stronger reasoning capabilities. Experiments across diverse benchmarks and models (e.g., LLaMA, Mistral, QwQ-STILL) demonstrate that, even when half of the layers are identified as lazy, LightTransfer achieves up to 2.17$\times$ throughput improvement with minimal performance loss ($<1.5\%$ on LongBench) and achieves 53.3\% on math benchmark AIME24 of advanced o1-like long reasoning model QwQ-STILL.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Sparse-to-Dense: A Free Lunch for Lossless Acceleration of Video Understanding in LLMs

Due to the auto-regressive nature of current video large language models (Video-LLMs), the inference latency increases as the input sequence length grows, posing challenges for the efficient processing of video sequences that are usually very long. We observe that during decoding, the attention scores of most tokens in Video-LLMs tend to be sparse and concentrated, with only certain tokens requiring comprehensive full attention. Based on this insight, we introduce Sparse-to-Dense (StD), a novel decoding strategy that integrates two distinct modules: one leveraging sparse top-K attention and the other employing dense full attention. These modules collaborate to accelerate Video-LLMs without loss. The fast (sparse) model speculatively decodes multiple tokens, while the slow (dense) model verifies them in parallel. StD is a tuning-free, plug-and-play solution that achieves up to a 1.94$\times$ walltime speedup in video processing. It maintains model performance while enabling a seamless transition from a standard Video-LLM to a sparse Video-LLM with minimal code modifications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Stochastic GDA Method With Backtracking For Solving Nonconvex Concave Minimax Problems

We propose a stochastic GDA (gradient descent ascent) method with backtracking (SGDA-B) to solve nonconvex-concave (NCC) minimax problems of the form: $\min_{\mathbf{x}} \max_y \sum_{i=1}^N g_i(x_i)+f(\mathbf{x},y)-h(y)$, where $h$ and $g_i$ for $i=1,\cdots,N$ are closed, convex functions, and for some $L,μ\geq 0$, $f$ is $L$-smooth and $f(\mathbf{x},\cdot)$ is $μ$-strongly concave for all $\mathbf{x}$ in the problem domain. We consider the stochastic setting where one only has an access to an unbiased stochastic oracle of $\nabla f$ with a finite variance bound $σ^2$. While most of the existing methods assume knowledge of $L$, $μ$ and/or $σ^2$, SGDA-B is agnostic to all of these problem parameters. Moreover, SGDA-B can support random block-coordinate updates. In the deterministic setting, i.e., $σ^2=0$ and one can compute $\nabla f$ exactly, SGDA-B can compute an $ε$-stationary point within $\mathcal{O}(Lκ^2/ε^2)$ and $\mathcal{O}(L^3/ε^4)$ gradient calls when $μ>0$ and $μ=0$, respectively, where $κ\triangleq L/μ$. In the stochastic setting, i.e., $σ^2>0$, for any $p\in(0,1)$ and $ε>0$, it can compute an $ε$-stationary point with high probability, which requires $\mathcal{O}(L κ^3 ε^{-4} \log^2(1/p))$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(L^4ε^{-7}\log^2(1/p))$ stochastic oracle calls, with probability at least $1-p$, when $μ>0$ and $μ=0$, respectively. To our knowledge, SGDA-B is the first GDA-type method with backtracking to solve NCC minimax problems and achieves the best complexity among the methods that are agnostic to $L$, $μ$ and $σ^2$. We also provide numerical results for SGDA-B on a distributionally robust learning problem illustrating the potential performance gains that can be achieved by SGDA-B.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Orbital Transformers for Predicting Wavefunctions in Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory

We aim to learn wavefunctions simulated by time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), which can be efficiently represented as linear combination coefficients of atomic orbitals. In real-time TDDFT, the electronic wavefunctions of a molecule evolve over time in response to an external excitation, enabling first-principles predictions of physical properties such as optical absorption, electron dynamics, and high-order response. However, conventional real-time TDDFT relies on time-consuming propagation of all occupied states with fine time steps. In this work, we propose OrbEvo, which is based on an equivariant graph transformer architecture and learns to evolve the full electronic wavefunction coefficients across time steps. First, to account for external field, we design an equivariant conditioning to encode both strength and direction of external electric field and break the symmetry from SO(3) to SO(2). Furthermore, we design two OrbEvo models, OrbEvo-WF and OrbEvo-DM, using wavefunction pooling and density matrix as interaction method, respectively. Motivated by the central role of the density functional in TDDFT, OrbEvo-DM encodes the density matrix aggregated from all occupied electronic states into feature vectors via tensor contraction, providing a more intuitive approach to learn the time evolution operator. We adopt a training strategy specifically tailored to limit the error accumulation of time-dependent wavefunctions over autoregressive rollout. To evaluate our approach, we generate TDDFT datasets consisting of 5,000 different molecules in the QM9 dataset and 1,500 molecular configurations of the malonaldehyde molecule in the MD17 dataset. Results show that our OrbEvo model accurately captures quantum dynamics of excited states under external field, including time-dependent wavefunctions, time-dependent dipole moment, and optical absorption spectra.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

The Tsetlin Machine Goes Deep: Logical Learning and Reasoning With Graphs

Pattern recognition with concise and flat AND-rules makes the Tsetlin Machine (TM) both interpretable and efficient, while the power of Tsetlin automata enables accuracy comparable to deep learning on an increasing number of datasets. We introduce the Graph Tsetlin Machine (GraphTM) for learning interpretable deep clauses from graph-structured input. Moving beyond flat, fixed-length input, the GraphTM gets more versatile, supporting sequences, grids, relations, and multimodality. Through message passing, the GraphTM builds nested deep clauses to recognize sub-graph patterns with exponentially fewer clauses, increasing both interpretability and data utilization. For image classification, GraphTM preserves interpretability and achieves 3.86%-points higher accuracy on CIFAR-10 than a convolutional TM. For tracking action coreference, faced with increasingly challenging tasks, GraphTM outperforms other reinforcement learning methods by up to 20.6%-points. In recommendation systems, it tolerates increasing noise to a great extent, similar to a GCN. Finally, for viral genome sequence data, GraphTM is competitive with BiLSTM-CNN and GCN accuracy-wise, training ~2.5x faster than GCN. The GraphTM's application to these varied fields demonstrates how graph representation learning and deep clauses bring new possibilities for TM learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MARS-DA: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework for Risk-Aware Multi-Agent Bidding in Power Grids

The increasing penetration of renewable energy has introduced substantial volatility into wholesale electricity markets, complicating the optimal bidding strategies for power producers. Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches often struggle to balance profit maximization with risk management, frequently overfitting to specific market conditions or failing to account for the stochastic spread between Day-Ahead (DA) and Real-Time (RT) settlements. To address these challenges, this paper makes two primary contributions. First, we introduce and open-source a high-fidelity gymnasium environment for two-settlement electricity market bidding. Grounded in extensive empirical data from the PJM Interconnection, the environment explicitly models the interplay between DA commitments and RT deviations, providing a standardized testbed for general and risk-sensitive agents. Second, we propose MARS-DA (Multi-Agent Regime-Switching for Day-Ahead markets), a novel hierarchical framework that orchestrates distinct sub-policies for risk management and profit seeking. MARS-DA utilizes a top-level Meta-Controller to dynamically blend the actions of two specialized base agents: a "Safe Agent" that optimizes for reliable DA allocation and a "Speculator Agent" that targets volatile RT arbitrage opportunities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MARS-DA achieves superior risk-adjusted returns compared to state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining robust regime alignment during periods of extreme market volatility.

cs.MA↗