arXiv subjects

Yan Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Chen.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Graphon Particle Systems, Part II: Dynamics of Distributed Stochastic Continuum Optimization

We study the distributed optimization problem over a graphon with a continuum of nodes, which is regarded as the limit of the distributed networked optimization as the number of nodes goes to infinity. Each node has a private local cost function. The global cost function, which all nodes cooperatively minimize, is the integral of the local cost functions on the node set. We propose stochastic gradient descent and gradient tracking algorithms over the graphon. We establish a general lemma for the upper bound estimation related to a class of time-varying differential inequalities with negative linear terms, based upon which, we prove that for both kinds of algorithms, the second moments of the nodes' states are uniformly bounded. Especially, for the stochastic gradient tracking algorithm, we transform the convergence analysis into the asymptotic property of coupled nonlinear differential inequalities with time-varying coefficients and develop a decoupling method. For both kinds of algorithms, we show that by choosing the time-varying algorithm gains properly, all nodes' states achieve $\mathcal{L}^{\infty}$-consensus for a connected graphon. Furthermore, if the local cost functions are strongly convex, then all nodes' states converge to the minimizer of the global cost function and the auxiliary states in the stochastic gradient tracking algorithm converge to the gradient value of the global cost function at the minimizer uniformly in mean square.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Adoption of Generative AI in the Workplace: Increasing and Shifting the Balance of Productivity and Communication Activity

Generative AI is transforming the workplace by augmenting and automating cognitive tasks, reshaping how organizations work and innovate while raising questions about workplace inequality and the future of work. Despite rapid adoption, empirical evidence on how these tools alter work practices and generate productivity gains remains limited. We examine how AI use affects the quantity and nature of information work using digital trace data from the Microsoft M365 application suite across multiple large international companies. Specifically, we study how generative AI adoption shifts the balance between communication and productivity-oriented activities, such as content creation in Word. Difference-in-Differences analyses show that AI adoption is associated with significant increases in both productivity (21.2%) and communication (7.1%) application actions among users who used the AI system more than 100 times over a 20-week post-adoption period. Among users with 100-500 AI use instances, higher AI usage is also associated with continued increases in both types of activity. The smaller increase in communication represents an overall shift toward individual, documentation-focused work and reflects mixed changes in communication, including decreases in reading and organizing email, compared with more uniform increases in productivity actions. These findings suggest potential efficiency gains and reductions in information overload, while highlighting the need to ensure that AI adoption does not weaken interpersonal communication and the diffusion of diverse information that supports innovation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

ConRub-Med: Reinforcement Learning with Consensus Rubrics for Open-Ended Medical Question Answering

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has been especially effective in mathematics and coding, where answers can be checked automatically. Many open-ended medical questions lack comparably cheap outcome verifiers: responses may be partly correct, incomplete, or contain clinically consequential errors. Rubrics written or validated by physicians offer strong clinical grounding, but involving experts in every instance is costly. Model-generated rubrics make this supervision scalable. We introduce ConRub-Med to preserve useful distinctions as rubric feedback moves from construction to policy optimization. For each prompt, three heterogeneous language models propose atomic criteria independently; a separate model reviews them, retaining only criteria with semantic support from all three generators. Three-State scoring distinguishes correct coverage, missing information, and incorrect claims. Errors receive negative rather than zero credit. When every response in a complete Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) group receives the same final reward, a pairwise judge provides sequence advantages only if both candidate orders agree, without changing the scalar rewards. Groups without ties use vanilla GRPO. In a blinded study matched by question, two medical experts rate panels from the full pipeline as more clinically relevant than panels produced by one generator. Across the evaluated open models, ConRub-Med ranks first on six of nine benchmarks and achieves the highest medical and generalization averages. Using the resulting rubric dataset of 5,166 prompts, it scores $38.98 \pm 1.04$ (mean $\pm$ SD) on HealthBench-Hard, compared with InfiMed-ORBIT's 33.60 with 8,000 samples and 37.30 with 28,000.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MAESTRO: Adapting GUIs and Guiding Navigation with User Preferences in Conversational Agents with GUIs

Modern task-oriented chatbots present GUI elements alongside natural-language dialogue, yet the agent's role has largely been limited to interpreting natural-language input as GUI actions and following a linear workflow. In preference-driven, multi-step tasks such as booking a flight or reserving a restaurant, earlier choices constrain later options and may force users to restart from scratch. User preferences serve as the key criteria for these decisions, yet existing agents do not systematically leverage them. We present MAESTRO, which extends the agent's role from execution to decision support. MAESTRO maintains a shared preference memory that extracts hard and soft preferences from natural-language utterances and provides two mechanisms. Preference-Grounded GUI Adaptation applies in-place operators (augment, sort, filter, and highlight) to the existing GUI according to preference strength, supporting comparison among options. Preference-Guided Workflow Navigation detects conflicts between preferences and available options, proposes backtracking, and records failed paths to avoid revisiting dead ends. Through a controlled experiment (N=33), we demonstrated that MAESTRO improved decision quality in movie ticketing: final bookings left fewer hard preferences unmet, and users made fewer selections that violated their stated preferences during the process than in the baseline condition, although task success rate and completion time did not differ significantly. In addition, we showed that using MAESTRO in voice mode can increase users' active engagement as well as their mental burden, revealing the nuanced tension in agentic interaction design for conversational agents with a GUI.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

NewtonGS: Physics-Structured Object-Level Neural Newtonian Dynamics for Gaussian Scene Animation

Animating objects in a static 3D Gaussian scene requires an explicit object-level dynamic state and a controllable model of object motion. Existing dynamic Gaussian methods primarily reconstruct time-varying scenes or simulate deformation, rather than provide compact object states for direct control. To address this gap, we present NewtonGS, a physics-structured framework for object-level state rollout and Gaussian scene animation. NewtonGS represents each object with a 22-dimensional state covering pose, linear and angular velocity, anisotropic scale and its rate, mass, and contact properties. Its Gaussian Neural Newtonian Dynamics (Gaussian-NND) model combines analytic translation, quaternion kinematics, gravity, damping, and scale-restoration dynamics with learned continuous and contact residuals. A discrete event map handles floor contact. Predicted poses and scales define a shared affine transformation that updates the means and covariances of all Gaussians associated with each object. We construct two procedurally generated datasets: State-32 for state-rollout evaluation and Gaussian-32 for state-to-Gaussian transformation. On both the in-distribution and velocity-range-shift splits of State-32, NewtonGS achieves lower trajectory RMSE, final displacement error, and velocity RMSE than five analytic baselines. Experiments on Gaussian-32 further demonstrate effective conversion from predicted states to animated Gaussian objects.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

The Help Ladder: Skill-Adaptive Peer Scaffolding for Real-Time Collaborative Programming

Collaborative programming is a widely adopted classroom activity to encourage peer scaffolding, yet real-time collaboration often breaks down into parallel individual work with minimal interaction. Our formative studies reveal that even when students want to collaborate, they are held back by the effort required to understand a teammate's entire problem at once. We present Canary, a system that supports peer scaffolding by breaking down programming obstacles into smaller steps tailored to a student's skill level. Canary alerts potential helpers to specific places where they can start, using AI to turn complex problems into a step-by-step ladder that starts with easy fixes before moving toward harder logic. By providing this gradual ramp-up, Canary enables students to make quick contributions and progressively work toward solving their peers' problems. Our evaluation shows that this staged approach makes helping feel less overwhelming, leading to more frequent and effective collaboration among students.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

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

This paper presents a review of the second LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aims to advance unified image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provides a common benchmark for evaluating the restoration accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability of models across multiple degradation categories within a unified framework. The competition attracted 158 registered participants, and 20 teams were included in the final ranking after their submitted results were successfully reproduced and verified. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the submitted solutions and corresponding results, highlighting recent advances in real-world all-in-one image restoration. The summarized methods and empirical findings reveal effective design strategies and establish an updated benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Program-Synthesis-Driven Autodesign of Universal Unitary Operators

We demonstrate that AI-driven program synthesis can autonomously discover fundamental strategies for decomposing unitary matrices in photonic networks. By extending DreamCoder to complex-valued linear algebra, the system generates decomposition programs achieving the minimal $N(N-1)/2$ Mach-Zehnder interferometers, distinct from both Reck and Clements architectures. Learned programs encode dimension-agnostic invariants: strategies discovered for $5 \times 5$ matrices generalize to higher dimensions such as $64 \times 64$. The discovered programs encode interpretable, dimension-agnostic construction rules. These rules generalize across matrix sizes without retraining, demonstrating that autonomous program synthesis can serve as a scalable paradigm for algorithm discovery and the automated design of universal unitary operators. Beyond universal decompositions, the system automatically exploits matrix structure to reduce the interferometer count below the universal theoretical bound. For instance, for Householder matrices, it discovers a dimension-independent rule that requires only $2N-3$ MZIs. This achieves linear, rather than quadratic, scaling and generalizes to arbitrary $N$ without retraining. For matrices obtained from the singular value decomposition of sparse matrices, reductions generally increase with sparsity, reaching up to 38% fewer MZIs than the universal theoretical bound $N(N-1)/2$ at 95% sparsity. These MZI reductions translate directly into practical hardware benefits for scalable photonic implementations. Taken together, the system functions as a single unified engine that discovers both universal decomposition rules and matrix-specific optimizations, without being provided with the structural or analytical properties of the input matrices.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

MOSAIC: Adaptive Inter-layer Composition for Efficient Heterogeneous Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved success using homogeneous Transformers to process multimedia data. Recent studies show that heterogeneous structures interleaving efficient mechanisms, like linear attention, improve both performance and inference latency over homogeneous designs. However, these efforts rely on handcrafted static mixing patterns, which are sub-optimal and difficult to adapt to specific hardware. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Objective Search for Adaptive Inter-layer Composition (MOSAIC), a hardware-aware search method that automatically transforms homogeneous models into optimized heterogeneous architectures. MOSAIC integrates diverse efficiency mechanisms--including linear, sparse, and low-rank operators--into a unified search space. By formulating the selection as a multi-objective Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem, our method identifies optimal configurations that maximize downstream performance under strict hardware latency constraints. To mitigate performance degradation from structural transitions, we introduce a two-stage parameter recovery process: global off-policy distillation to stabilize internal representations, followed by a dual-teacher on-policy distillation leveraging a 235B oracle for knowledge expansion and the original 4B teacher for distributional stability. We validate MOSAIC through MOSAIC-4B, derived from Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct. Results demonstrate that MOSAIC-4B matches the baseline's performance across multiple benchmarks while requiring less than 2% of the original training cost. Furthermore, it substantially improves inference efficiency, achieving 1.76x prefilling and 2.54x decoding speedups.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AI-Augmented Statistical Network Estimation with Proxy Gene Embeddings

Gene--gene networks are often observed only on a restricted target set, while modern biomedical foundation models provide proxy gene embeddings over substantially larger gene universes. To leverage externally learned representations to improve latent-structure recovery in partially observed target networks, we propose \emph{Proxy-Latent Assisted Network Estimation} (PLANE), an adaptively weighted joint network--embedding latent variable model. PLANE combines the two sources of information through the common latent positions of the target network and proxy embeddings. Under mild rank conditions, the target network enables the identification of latent positions and loading of all nodes up to an orthogonal rotation. We show that zero-order optimality analyses sharply control the weighted reconstruction loss, but are insufficient to identify the optimal weighting. To understand the network and embedding information trade-off for latent-factor recovery, we analyze blockwise Gram-normalized gradient descent and prove deterministic contraction of aligned, curvature-weighted errors up to an explicit statistical tolerance. We then specialize the weighted statistical error bound to derive the target-block error bound, yielding an optimal, data-adaptive choice of the network embedding weights. Simulations and single-cell perturbation analyses show that informative proxy embeddings improve latent recovery, network reconstruction, and imputation beyond the observed target network.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

SleepBand: Single-Source Domain Generalization for Sleep Staging via Physiologically Structured Spectral Modeling

Generalizing sleep staging models to unseen datasets is challenging, and typical domain generalization (DG) methods often rely on multiple source domains or domain labels that are rarely available in practice. We tackle the stricter and more practical setting of single-source domain generalization: training on a single labeled source dataset, without domain labels or access to target data. We present SleepBand, a physiology-guided framework that embeds oscillatory priors via a learnable Morlet filter bank and a structured integration-and-recalibration pipeline. This anchors representations to domain-invariant sleep rhythms (e.g., slow waves, spindles), reducing reliance on dataset-specific artefacts. On five public datasets, SleepBand achieves state-of-the-art SDG performance and remains competitive under leave-one-domain-out (multi-source) DG. Analyses show that the learned filters align with canonical neurophysiology and that robustness stems from focusing on narrowband, physiologically meaningful cues. Our results suggest that principled, physiology-aware inductive biases are a promising path for robust single-domain sleep staging. Code is available at https://github.com/lzcn/sleep-band

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

Continuous-Time Decentralized Online Estimation With Additive Noises

We study a decentralized online estimation problem with additive communication noises over the fixed digraph. Each node has a linear measurement of an unknown parameter with random measurement matrices and runs a continuous-time online estimation algorithm. We transform the convergence analysis of the algorithm into the stability analysis of the non-autonomous linear stochastic differential equation (SDE) with random time-varying coefficients, and develop the asymptotic stability by numerical approximation theory. Based on the stability results, we show that the algorithm gains can be properly designed to ensure mean square convergence if the measurement matrices and the communication graph satisfy the stochastic spatial-temporal persistence of excitation condition. Furthermore, a special case where the measurement matrices contain a Markov chain is investigated, and the theoretical results are demonstrated by a numerical example.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Winding-Sector Transitions and Thermodynamic Incommensurability in Helical Valence Bond Phase under Tilted Boundary Conditions

We investigate the ground states of the $S = 1/2$ staircase $J$-$Q_3$ model in the maximally anisotropic limit by employing projector quantum Monte Carlo simulations. To overcome boundary-induced finite-size ambiguities inherent in the study of spatially modulated structures, we implement a $45^{\circ}$ tilted periodic boundary condition that eliminates intermediate phases and provides direct access to winding-sector transitions of the system. By defining a domain wall density to quantify the spatial modulation of the helical valence bond phase, we perform thermodynamic extrapolations and demonstrate that both the domain wall density and the characteristic wavevector evolve continuously with the coupling ratio, exhibiting no commensurate lock-in behavior. Our results establish that the helical valence bond phase is a genuine two-dimensional incommensurate phase with long-range bond-bond order in the thermodynamic limit, clarifying that winding-sector transitions are finite-size effects enforced by boundary commensurability. Furthermore, we determine the phase transition point between columnar valence bond solid phase and helical valence bond phase to be $g_c = 0.046(2)$.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Per-Request QoS: Coordinating Industrial Workflows with B5G/6G Network Capabilities

Beyond-5G (B5G) and 6G networks are expected to enable more complex industrial services, which often operate according to multi-phase workflows with phase-specific communication requirements. However, current interaction between applications and networks remains predominantly request-driven: Quality of Service (QoS) is requested at each workflow phase transition and evaluated independently, without explicit consideration of upcoming demand or network's near-term capability. This mismatch limits the ability of both sides to plan ahead, often resulting in foreseeable incompatibilities, even service disruptions. This article presents a capability-aware coordination framework for workflow-based industrial services. Within a bounded planning window, the network exposes the QoS profiles it can sustainably support, while the industrial side maps upcoming workflow phases to these disclosed capabilities and submits the resulting demand trajectory for joint assessment. The framework also supports coordinated updates when network conditions change during execution. An industrial video inspection case study on a real B5G system, complemented by large-scale simulation, illustrates that such coordination can improve service continuity, reduce disruptive rejections, and increase workflow completion under heavy load. The results suggest that future industrial networking should move beyond reactive per-request QoS handling toward forward-looking, capability-aware, workflow-level coordination.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

How to Train a Real-World Silicon Concierge? Internalizing Complex Business Workflow to Only OneModel

Traditional industrial agents rely on modular pipelines, including Router, Retriever, Planner, Executor, Responder, Reviewer, and other components. These systems often fracture into a labyrinth of ad-hoc patches, leading to cascading errors and high latency. We propose OneModel, an applicable paradigm shift from external workflows to internalized knowledge representation. Unlike modular systems that slice fluid user intents into static steps, OneModel consolidates complex business logic and SOPs directly into the model parameters. Through Continual Pre-training (CPT) and logic-compilation SFT, we transform fragmented business rules into intuitive model reasoning within a unified attention space. Deployed in our global financial service system, OneModel effectively breaks the trade-off between latency, accuracy, and complexity. Online A/B testing demonstrates an end-to-end latency reduction of more than 50 percent, from 18.7 seconds to 8.0 seconds, while the Intelligent Resolution Rate (IRR) increases from 64.3 percent to 83.3 percent. The results show that OneModel can replace brittle engineering logic with internalized cognitive intuition, offering a scalable blueprint for transitioning industrial agents from complex, error-prone workflows to unified model architectures.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Hierarchical Trion Formation and Fractionalized Solitons in One Dimension

Stabilizing commensurate $2:1$ trions in one-dimensional quantum mixtures is typically hindered by phase separation. Within the conventional density-driven framework, the asymmetric locking mechanism generically couples to a softening density mode, creating a geometric constraint that suppresses the formation of a stable trionic liquid. We demonstrate that correlated kinetics can reorganize the low-energy structure to bypass this instability. Driven by microscopic fermion pair-hopping, the fermions first form an emergent pair liquid. At a $2:1$ filling, the density of the emergent pairs exactly matches the bosons. The low-energy theory is therefore reorganized into an effective symmetric $1:1$ pair-boson mixture. This symmetry decouples the locking mechanism from the softening mode, preempting phase separation and stabilizing a trionic liquid. The reconstructed phase exhibits a correlation hierarchy where only the composite trion retains quasi-long-range order, while the gapped relative sector supports parity-constrained topological kink excitations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

LAP: An Agent-to-Instrument Protocol for Autonomous Science

Autonomous science is moving from demonstration to infrastructure. Large language model agents now plan experiments, and self-driving laboratories execute them. Yet every such system rebuilds the link between the reasoning agent and the physical instrument from scratch, against fragmented vendor SDKs and standards built for deterministic software clients rather than probabilistic, goal-directed agents. Recent agent-interoperability protocols clarify two of the three edges of an agentic ecosystem (Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes the agent-to-tool edge, and Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) the agent-to-agent edge), but neither models the agent-to-instrument edge, where operations are stateful, safety-critical, exclusively owned, physically embodied, and produce measurements with units, calibration, and uncertainty. We present the Lab Agent Protocol (LAP), a protocol design that fills this gap. LAP retains A2A's peer-to-peer, discovery-first, task-lifecycle structure and adds four physical-world primitives: (i) the InstrumentCard, a signed capability and physical-limit description; (ii) first-class reservation for exclusive instrument and sample locking; (iii) a safety-fence handshake with operator-confirmation tokens cryptographically bound to a specific task and its parameters, gating hazardous and irreversible operations; and (iv) a MeasurementResult schema that makes every result physically typed (QUDT/UCUM), calibration-anchored, uncertainty-bearing, and reproducible by construction. We specify roles, a six-layer architecture, the JSON-RPC method set, the task and safety state machines, the error model, and cross-laboratory federation, and walk a closed-loop autonomous campaign through the protocol end-to-end. LAP is transport-compatible with the A2A/MCP ecosystem and encapsulates rather than replaces existing device standards such as SiLA 2 and OPC-UA.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

On-Policy Replay for Continual Supervised Fine-Tuning

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy signals -- training on the model's own outputs -- reduce forgetting more reliably than off-policy supervision. Existing on-policy methods route this signal through a new training objective (e.g., self-distillation losses with a teacher copy), inheriting an extra forward pass, schedule sensitivity, and stylistic drift from the teacher.We instead route the on-policy signal through the training data source. Our method, On-Policy Replay (OPR), rolls out the most recent checkpoint on a small budget of historical prompts, filters the generations by a task reward, and replays the surviving (prompt, model response) pairs as ordinary SFT examples. There is no teacher, no auxiliary loss, and no on-the-fly distillation. Across three 7--8B instruction-tuned backbones (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen3-8B, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct) on the TRACE continual-learning benchmark, OPR consistently reduces forgetting; on the sharpest stress test (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Sequential SFT BWT -13.93), OPR lifts BWT to -0.65 at a 10% replay budget and to -2.29 at a 1% budget -- a 46% reduction in |BWT| over a tuned Vanilla Replay baseline, with 42--46% reductions observed across all three backbones. We give a KL-shrinkage interpretation that places OPR and prior on-policy distillation methods on a single axis, and we present a counterintuitive finding that explains why Vanilla Replay is already a strong baseline: low-score replay is uniformly worse than Vanilla Replay, demonstrating that the active ingredient in OPR is the on-policy distribution, not the response quality alone.Our code is available at https://github.com/Yancey2024/OnPolicyReplay.

cs.LG↗