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Yang Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Liu.

At least 469 records · Page 26Linked to original sources

ProActor: Timing-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Task Scheduling Agents

Proactive task-oriented agents must autonomously anticipate user needs, identify actionable opportunities, and trigger software actions at appropriate moments - fundamentally shifting from reactive systems that await explicit instructions. However, existing approaches lack generalizable end-to-end solutions for measuring and optimizing such anticipatory behaviors. This paper introduces ProActor, a unified framework for conversational task scheduling that integrates: (1) a domain-agnostic automated annotation methodology that enables scalable proactiveness reinforcement learning (RL) by generating full opportunity time windows instead of rigid point labels, (2) systematic proactiveness metrics capturing both timing quality and reference action alignment, and (3) RL optimization using GRPO with various reward designs. Our insight is that RULER-based rewards with proactiveness rubrics are crucial for improving timing quality, and that proactiveness optimization enabled by stage-aware composite rewards is key to balancing timing quality and reference action alignment. Timing-aware RL requires extensive exploration, demanding efficient infrastructure. We develop ART-F, an adaptive framework combining request-adaptive inference clusters with DDP-based training on single-node multi-GPU systems, enabling LoRA training of 4-bit Qwen2.5-14B-ProActor-Q4 with 4-8x speedups. Experiments on two newly auto-annotated datasets demonstrate significant improvements in proactive timing while maintaining action consistency comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. Ablations validate the effectiveness of distinct composite reward variations.

cs.AI↗

STREAM: A Data-Centric Framework for Mining High-Value Task-Oriented Dialogues from Streaming Media

Large language models for vertical domains are bottlenecked by the scarcity of complex, domain-specific task-oriented dialogues. Existing data acquisition pipelines face a persistent trilemma: expert annotation is expensive, real-world service conversations are constrained by privacy and commercial restrictions, and static corpora quickly become temporally stale. We propose Stream, a data-centric framework that leverages publicly available streaming media (live streams and short videos) to synthesize high-value service dialogues at scale. Stream mines authentic interaction signals from noisy streams and synthesizes conversations by integrating role-grounded persona construction with Conversational Blueprint construction; it further adopts retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to support knowledge-aware responses. Based on Stream, we release StreamDial, a large-scale multi-domain dataset covering Automotive, Restaurant, and Hotel. StreamDial contains 87,498 dialogue sessions and 1,497,320 turns in total, with an average of 17.11 turns per session and a comparable scale across domains. Each session is organized as a structured quadruplet $\langle P_u, P_a, B, H \rangle$ that pairs dialogue history with explicit user/agent personas and a Conversational Blueprint, capturing realistic service behaviors such as requirement mining, constraint conflicts, negotiation, and recovery. Evaluations with automatic judges and downstream tasks show that StreamDial improves intrinsic dialogue quality over strong baselines, and models trained with StreamDial improve Dialogue State Tracking across backbones; we further report a completed human-evaluation set and encouraging multilingual transfer on Qwen3-8B under a controlled training budget. The data is released in https://github.com/hitxueliang/DialogDataSetBySTREAM.

cs.CL↗

Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation of Medical Foundation Models for Segmentation

The advent of large-scale self-supervised learning (SSL) has produced a vast zoo of medical foundation models. However, selecting optimal medical foundation models for specific segmentation tasks remains a computational bottleneck. Existing Transferability Estimation (TE) metrics, primarily designed for classification, rely on global statistical assumptions and fail to capture the topological complexity essential for dense prediction. We propose a novel Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation framework that evaluates manifold tractability rather than statistical overlap. Our approach introduces three components: (1) Global Representation Topology Divergence (GRTD), utilizing Minimum Spanning Trees to quantify feature-label structural isomorphism; (2) Local Boundary-Aware Topological Consistency (LBTC), which assesses manifold separability specifically at critical anatomical boundaries; and (3) Task-Adaptive Fusion, which dynamically integrates global and local metrics based on the semantic cardinality of the target task. Validated on the large-scale OpenMind benchmark across diverse anatomical targets and SSL foundation models, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by around 31% relative improvement in the weighted Kendall metric, providing a robust, training-free proxy for efficient model selection without the cost of fine-tuning. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

Reasoning as an Attack Surface: Adaptive Evolutionary CoT Jailbreaks for LLMs

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, their explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism introduces new security risks, making them particularly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing approaches often rely on static CoT templates to elicit harmful outputs, but such fixed designs suffer from limited diversity, adaptability, and effectiveness. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive evolutionary CoT jailbreak framework, called AE-CoT. Specifically, the method first rewrites harmful goals into mild prompts with teacher role-play and decomposes them into semantically coherent reasoning fragments to construct a pool of CoT jailbreak candidates. Then, within a structured representation space, we perform multi-generation evolutionary search, where candidate diversity is expanded through fragment-level crossover and a mutation strategy with an adaptive mutation-rate control mechanism. An independent scoring model provides graded harmfulness evaluations, and high-scoring candidates are further enhanced with a harmful CoT template to induce more destructive generations. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AE-CoT, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art jailbreak methods.

cs.AI↗

Proton-electron coupled catalyst for ionomer-free electrochemical energy conversion

Efficient electrochemical energy devices are vital to renewable energy technology, yet coordinating the effective flow of electrons, ions, and chemical species continues to be a major challenge. In conventional proton-exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) catalyst layers, proton and electron transport are supplied separately through percolating carbon networks and ionomer binders, rendering the catalyst largely passive and imposing fundamental trade-offs between reactant accessibility, ionic conductivity, and catalyst activity. Here, we introduce a one-dimensional proton-electron coupled catalyst (PECC) design, a transport-integrated electrocatalyst architecture in which the catalyst itself simultaneously supplies electronic and protonic transport to catalyst active sites. Using this PECC, PEMFCs can have an ionomer-free cathode catalyst layer (CCL), resulting in a dramatic 95% reduction in non-Fickian oxygen transport and boosting power density by 34% and 85% compared to traditional CCLs, with cathode Pt loadings of approximately 0.090 mg/cm^2 and 0.037 mg/cm^2, respectively. Meanwhile, PECC retains 65% of its mass activity and exhibits 32% higher power density than its ionomer-based CCL counterpart after 30k accelerated stressed test. Similar mass transport improvements have been observed in the electrochemical hydrogen pump (EHP) using PECC in the catalyst layers. Molecular dynamics simulations show the PECC's proton conductivity is 249% higher than Nafion. This PECC catalyst structure addresses core transport problems in PEMFCs, leading to almost 20% improvement in fuel efficiency and opens up new possibilities for designing high-performance, cost-effective electrochemical devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

A Universal Framework for Horizon-Scale Tests of Gravity with Black Hole Shadows

In this Letter, we have developed a numerically efficient framework for evaluating parameters in metric theories of gravity, and applied it to constrain the horizon-scale magnetic field in the Kerr-Bertotti-Robinson (Kerr-BR) spacetime using the latest EHT observations. The method's adaptive ray-tracing strategy achieves near-linear computational efficiency without loss of numerical accuracy. Owing to this efficiency, the framework enables high precision shadow modeling at minimal computational cost and, for the first time, supports statistically robust inference of black hole parameters from horizon-scale observations for arbitrary stationary black holes. The above framework is applied to the recently obtained Kerr-BR black hole, an exact magnetized and rotating solution to the Einstein field equations. We have evaluated the horizon-scale magnetic fields of M87* and Sgr A*, with the latter showing a field strength of $93.3^{+14.7}_{-23.8}G$, consistent with the equipartition estimate of $71G$ from polarized ALMA observations, thereby supporting Einstein's gravity.

gr-qc↗

Parallel Sparse and Data-Sparse Factorization-based Linear Solvers

Efficient solutions of large-scale, ill-conditioned and indefinite algebraic equations are ubiquitously needed in numerous computational fields, including multiphysics simulations, machine learning, and data science. Because of their robustness and accuracy, direct solvers are crucial components in building a scalable solver toolchain. In this chapter, we will review recent advances of sparse direct solvers along two axes: 1) reducing communication and latency costs in both task- and data-parallel settings, and 2) reducing computational complexity via low-rank and other compression techniques such as hierarchical matrix algebra. In addition to algorithmic principles, we also illustrate the key parallelization challenges and best practices to deliver high speed and reliability on modern heterogeneous parallel machines.

cs.MS↗

Do Fine-Tuned LLMs Understand Vulnerabilities? An Investigation into the Semantic Trap

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in software vulnerability detection, particularly after domain-specific Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely internalize vulnerability root causes or merely exploit surface-level functional patterns. While prior work documented related failures on pre-trained or zero-shot models, the SFT process itself, and how explicit reasoning supervision modulates it, remains under-explored. We study fine-tuned decoder-only LLMs under vanilla SFT and SFT with reasoning supervision, identifying a failure mode we term the Semantic Trap, characterized by three symptoms: pairing-sensitive performance, gap-dictated decisions, and fragility to semantic-preserving changes. To probe this, we propose TrapEval, an evaluation framework comprising two real-world datasets, V2P (vulnerable paired with patched code) and V2N (vulnerable paired with unrelated normal code), alongside semantic perturbations, CodeBLEU-based gap analysis, and an LLM-assisted reasoning failure taxonomy. Evaluating five representative LLMs fine-tuned with and without explicit reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), our results show vanilla SFT yields deceptively high scores on unpaired data (V2N) while failing all three symptoms. Models suffer high false-positive rates on V2P, degrade under perturbations, and exhibit a systematic dependency on the textual gap between vulnerable and patched code. Finetuning with explicit reasoning reduces these symptoms but costs recall; its lack of measurable gap-dependency partly reflects a floor effect rather than escaping the trap. Furthermore, our taxonomy reveals these models still misinterpret control flow and hallucinate API behavior, indicating current fine-tuning mitigates but does not eliminate reliance on surface features.

cs.CR↗

Exploring Code Analysis: Zero-Shot Insights on Syntax and Semantics with LLMs

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are effective but limited by language specificity and weak cross-language generalization. Large language models (LLMs) are promising for code tasks, yet their capabilities for fundamental code analysis remain underexplored. We structure our study around three aspects aligned with human practices: syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. We evaluate 21 state-of-the-art LLMs across nine tasks in four languages (C, Java, Python, Solidity), including AST generation, CFG construction, data dependency, taint analysis, and flaky test reasoning. We apply a three-layer evaluation protocol (automated metrics, expert adjudication, consistency validation) to 3,124 code samples, achieving high inter-rater reliability (Cohen's kappa = 0.844-0.936) and strong human-machine agreement (Gwet's AC1 = 0.500-0.727, F1 = 0.791-0.882). While the best LLMs excel in syntax parsing (AST 90%+, expression matching 84-100%) and show promise in static analysis, their dynamic reasoning remains limited (<70%) with high data-shift sensitivity (per-project F1 varying 0-1.0). This hierarchy holds across model families and scales, suggesting fundamental rather than transient limitations. These findings show how LLMs complement traditional analyzers: they offer cross-language generalization but non-deterministic outputs needing validation, while traditional tools give deterministic guarantees but need language-specific configuration. We contribute a validated evaluation framework with comparison against traditional analyzers (Tree-sitter, Soot, Joern) and task-specific applicability tiers. Benchmark: https://github.com/mathieu0905/llm_code_analysis.git

cs.SE↗

InteractScience: Programmatic and Visually-Grounded Evaluation of Interactive Scientific Demonstration Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of generating complete applications from natural language instructions, creating new opportunities in science and education. In these domains, interactive scientific demonstrations are particularly valuable for explaining concepts, supporting new teaching methods, and presenting research findings. Generating such demonstrations requires models to combine accurate scientific knowledge with the ability to implement interactive front-end code that behaves correctly and responds to user actions. This capability goes beyond the scope of existing benchmarks, which typically evaluate either knowledge question answering without grounding in code or static web code generation without scientific interactivity. To evaluate this integrated ability, we design a hybrid framework that combines programmatic functional testing to rigorously verify interaction logic with visually-grounded qualitative testing to assess rendered outputs against reference snapshots. Building on this framework, we present InteractScience, a benchmark consisting of a substantial set of carefully designed questions across five scientific domains, each paired with unit tests, reference snapshots, and checklists. We evaluate 30 leading open- and closed-source LLMs and report results that highlight ongoing weaknesses in integrating domain knowledge with interactive front-end coding. Our work positions InteractScience as the first benchmark to automatically measure this combined capability with realistic interactive operations, providing a foundation for advancing reliable and educationally useful scientific demonstration code generation. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/open-compass/InteractScience.

cs.SE↗

JanusCoder: Towards a Foundational Visual-Programmatic Interface for Code Intelligence

The scope of neural code intelligence is rapidly expanding beyond text-based source code to encompass the rich visual outputs that programs generate. This visual dimension is critical for advanced applications like flexible content generation and precise, program-driven editing of visualizations. However, progress has been impeded by the scarcity of high-quality multimodal code data, a bottleneck stemming from challenges in synthesis and quality assessment. To address these challenges, we make contributions from both a data and modeling perspective. We first introduce a complete synthesis toolkit that leverages reciprocal synergies between data modalities to efficiently produce a large-scale, high-quality corpus spanning from standard charts to complex interactive web UIs and code-driven animations. Leveraging this toolkit, we construct JanusCode-800K, the largest multimodal code corpus to date. This powers the training of our models, JanusCoder and JanusCoderV, which establish a visual-programmatic interface for generating code from textual instructions, visual inputs, or a combination of both. Our unified model is a departure from existing approaches that build specialized models for isolated tasks. Extensive experiments on both text-centric and vision-centric coding tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the JanusCoder series, with our 7B to 14B scale models approaching or even exceeding the performance of commercial models. Furthermore, extensive analysis provides key insights into harmonizing programmatic logic with its visual expression. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/InternLM/JanusCoder.

cs.AI↗

MASFactory: A Graph-centric Framework for Orchestrating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems with Vibe Graphing

Large language model-based (LLM-based) multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used to extend agentic problem solving via role specialization and collaboration. MAS workflows can be naturally modeled as directed computation graphs, where nodes execute agents or sub-workflows and edges encode dependencies and message passing. However, implementing complex graph workflows in current frameworks still requires substantial manual effort, offers limited reuse, and makes it difficult to integrate heterogeneous external context sources. To overcome these limitations, we present MASFactory, a graph-centric framework for orchestrating LLM-based MAS. It introduces Vibe Graphing, a human-in-the-loop approach that compiles natural-language intent into an editable workflow specification and then into an executable graph. In addition, the framework provides reusable components, skill support, multimodal message handling, and pluggable context integration, as well as a visualizer for topology preview, runtime tracing, and human-in-the-loop interaction. We evaluate MASFactory on seven public benchmarks, validating both reproduction consistency for representative MAS methods and the effectiveness of Vibe Graphing. Our code (https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/MASFactory, licensed under Apache-2.0) and video demonstration (https://youtu.be/ANynzVfY32k) are publicly available.

cs.CL↗

Revisiting a Pain in the Neck: A Semantic Reasoning Benchmark for Language Models

We present SemanticQA, an evaluation suite designed to assess language models (LMs) in semantic phrase processing tasks. The benchmark consolidates existing multiword expression (MwE) resources and reorganizes them into a unified testbed. It covers both general lexical phenomena, such as lexical collocations, and three fine-grained categories: idiomatic expressions, noun compounds, and verbal constructions. Through SemanticQA, we assess LMs of diverse architectures and scales in extraction, classification, and interpretation tasks, as well as sequential task compositions. We reveal substantial performance variation, particularly on tasks requiring semantic reasoning, highlighting differences in reasoning efficacy and semantic understanding of LMs, providing insights for pushing LMs with stronger comprehension on non-trivial semantic phrases. The evaluation harness and data of SemanticQA are available at https://github.com/jacklanda/SemanticQA.

cs.CL↗

NEWTON: Agentic Planning for Physically Grounded Video Generation

Video generation models produce visually compelling results but systematically violate physical commonsense -- on VideoPhy-2, the best model achieves only 32.6% joint accuracy. We identify a specification bottleneck: text prompts are lossy compression of the physical world, omitting the parameters that fully determine dynamics, and no amount of model scaling can recover what was never specified. From this diagnosis we derive three properties that physics conditioning must satisfy -- sufficiency, dynamism, and verifiability -- and show that no existing approach satisfies all three. We present NEWTON, in which video generation is demoted from the system output to one action inside an agent's toolbox: a learned planner orchestrates physics-aware tools (keyframe generation, scientific computation, prompt refinement) to construct rich conditioning, and a verifier closes the loop for iterative re-planning. The planner is the sole trainable component, optimized on-policy via Flow-GRPO inside the live multi-turn loop. On VideoPhy-2, NEWTON improves joint accuracy from 21.4% to 29.7% on LTX-Video and from 30.7% to 37.4% on Veo-3.1, without modifying either generator. Our project page: https://Newton026.github.io/newton

cs.CV↗

RoVLA: Multi-Consistency Constraints for Robust Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance on embodied manipulation, yet they remain brittle under visual observation changes, paraphrased language instructions, and compounded perturbations. This limitation suggests that existing methods still rely heavily on shallow correlations in the training distribution, rather than learning stable couplings among task semantics, environment states, and action generation. Although recent efforts improve robustness through larger-scale training, post-training adaptation, or enhanced predictive modeling, they rarely enforce invariance-oriented consistency within the end-to-end policy itself. To address this issue, we propose RoVLA, a robust vision-language-action framework with multi-consistency constraints. RoVLA enforces consistency under three complementary transformations: instruction semantics, trajectory evolution, and observation perturbation. Specifically, Instructional Consistency (IC) promotes stable grounding under semantically equivalent instruction rewrites, Evolutionary Consistency (EC) preserves coherent action intent throughout the generation process, and Observational Consistency (OC) improves robustness to visual and proprioceptive perturbations by enforcing consistent predictions before and after targeted disturbances. By explicitly modeling these invariances during training, RoVLA reduces reliance on superficial correlations and improves robustness and generalization. Experiments on LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world manipulation tasks show that RoVLA consistently outperforms strong baseline methods and exhibits superior robustness under diverse task and observation shifts. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-consistency learning for robust embodied control. Codes will be available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/RoVLA.

cs.RO↗

STELLAR: Scaling 3D Perception Large Models for Autonomous Driving

Model scaling has demonstrated remarkable success through large-scale training on diverse datasets. It remains an open question whether the same paradigm would apply to autonomous driving perception systems due to unique challenges, such as fusing heterogeneous sensor data and the need for sophisticated 3D spatial understanding. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study on systematically analyzing the impact of scale on these systems. We develop our STELLAR model based on Sparse Window Transformer, by extending the input modalities to include LiDAR, radar, camera, and map prior. We train the model on a large-scale dataset of 50 million driving examples with up to 500 million parameters. Our large-scale experiments reveal empirical scaling trends that connect model performance to model size, data, and compute. The resulting model establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Waymo Open Dataset challenge, outperforming prior arts by a large margin. Our work demonstrates that large-scale training is a highly promising path for advancing the capabilities of perception models for autonomous driving.

cs.CV↗

Calculating Domain of Attraction Boundary of Power Systems Based on the Gentlest Ascent Dynamics

The power system, a fundamental public utility, is increasingly important due to growing global electricity demand. Recent large-scale blackouts (e.g., Iberian Peninsula, UK) have raised concerns about transient stability under impact faults. Transient stability is determined by post-disturbance synchronizing capability of synchronous generators, formulated as identifying the domain of attraction (DOA) boundary of the asymptotically stable equilibrium. Using a benchmark model of synchronous-generator-dominated power systems, this report employs a gentlest ascent dynamics (GAD) method for 1-saddle points, an adjoint operator method for periodic orbits, and stable manifold algorithms to compute the DOA boundary. These algorithms transform DOA boundary determination into constructing unstable critical elements (saddle points and periodic orbits) and their stable manifolds. Theoretically, under certain assumptions we prove that the DOA boundary is the closure of the union of stable manifolds of index-1 critical elements, and establish a stability theory for a perturbed GAD system. Numerical experiments on two-machine and three-machine systems (with only saddle points or with periodic orbits) validate the effectiveness and accuracy. Results show the algorithms accurately capture the geometric structure of the DOA boundary, providing a new numerical tool for transient stability analysis.

math.DS↗

Babel: Jailbreaking Safety Attention via Obfuscation Distribution Optimized Sampling

Despite rigorous safety alignment, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing black-box methods often rely on heuristic templates or exhaustive trials, lacking mechanistic interpretability and query efficiency. In this study, we investigate an intrinsic vulnerability in the safety mechanisms of LLMs, where safety alignment relies on a small set of sparsely distributed attention heads, leaving much of the representational space weakly monitored. We formalize this phenomenon with a mathematical jailbreaking model that characterizes the delicate boundary of effective text obfuscation and analytically explains observed jailbreak behaviors. Guided by this model, we propose Babel, an efficient black-box attack framework that exploits the identified safety gap through systematic obfuscation sampling with iterative, feedback-driven distribution refinement, enabling reliable and high-success jailbreak attacks without access to model internals. Comprehensive evaluations on frontier commercial models demonstrate that Babel achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates and superior query efficiency. Specifically, compared to state-of-the-art methods, Babel increases the attack success rate on GPT-4o from 41.33% to 82.67% and on Claude-3-5-haiku from 38.33% to 78.33% within an average of 40 queries, providing a robust red-teaming methodology for LLMs safety research.

cs.CR↗